Joan Slonczewski's marvelously conceived A Door Into Ocean is in some ways similar to The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin. Like the Le Guin novel, Door shows the conflict between the people of two worlds, one world the moon of the other. In both stories the moon is populated with anarchists, while the planet is infested by government. But it should be much easier for LFS Members to see A Door Into Ocean as a libertarian novel. [See Joseph Martino's discussion of The Dispossessed, and my reply, in this issue.

First, in Door there is a real heroine, Berenice, on the archist planet Valedon. A wealthy woman who spent much of her childhood on Shora (the moon), she fervently believes in the free trade she and her family started between the two worlds. At the book's beginning she is not completely disenchanted with government yet, but she is soon radicalized by events. Second, Shoran anarchism is ancient, not a set of new clothes they are trying to fit over statist-bred psychologies as in The Dispossessed.

Shora is all ocean, its people live on sea-plant rafts, and their civilization looks deceptively primitive. In fact, the inhabitants are the descendants of an old and sophisticated culture. Their very advanced bio-technology, which uses organic lab "equipment" is effectively invisible to the Valedon expropriators (government officials) because it doesn't look like they expect it to. The Valedon government, and the galactic empire that controls it, were willing to ignore Shora as long as they considered it primitive and economically useless. As soon as traders discover unbelievably effective medicines on Shora, however, Valedon officials decide control is a necessity.

But Shora cannot be controlled. The Shorans are astonished when faced with threats and attempted domination, but they are not about to capitulate. Their anarchism, ingrained over millennia, makes it impossible for them to be conquered en masse—just as the anarchist society in Eric Frank Russell's The Great Explosion is impossible to take over. Since no one can speak or act for anyone else, no one can surrender for another. The officer sent to subdue the primitive "fish people" finds he must put every one of them in jail to take the planet.

So far so good, but there are many aspects of Door that might put off some LFS Members. First of all, the Shorans call themselves "Sharers" and they don't have a money economy. (I hope I can trust you not to shudder as you read that line.) They have to be taught that "trading" is like sharing—only the reciprocity is usually reciprocal rather than extended over time. They don't understand supply and demand and the fluctuation of prices. They expect traders to be scrupulous, honest, and fair; Many of them are not.

Nevertheless (and I mean this somewhat humorously) their libertarianism is genuine. Their society is based on voluntarism; coercion is unknown. Some readers may have trouble with the "Stonesick" Sharer, Rilwen, possibly finding a slap at capitalism in the other Sharers' appalled reactions to her obsession with Valedon "energy stones". But isn't obsession with any sort of wealth a sickness? Money is a tool: would one admire a carpenter who hoarded and loved, to the exclusion of all else, a great pile of hammers? As balance, Slonczewski makes it clear that the Sharers' prejudice against the stones is understandable given their culture and the fact that some of their people, like skid-row alcoholics, abandon everything else in order to have them. There is absolutely no attempt to forbid stone hoarding, nor do they have "drunk tanks" for the stone-sick ones.

In the Sharers, Slonczewski has created believable anarchists. She asks some very interesting questions about the nature of society, and answers some of them. It is clear to me that it is possible to have a free (if less efficient) society without a money economy, but I wouldn't want to try it on a highly-populated and industrial world. I'd love to see what the author would do with another setting.