James Nicoll Reviews

L. Neil Smith’s 2001 The American Zone is the fifth and final book in Smith’s North American Confederacy series, which is set in a libertarian utopia.

About ten years after the events of The Probability Broach, PI Win Bear, political refugee from a statist timeline, is distracted from a potentially vexing case¹ by the bombing of the Old Endicott building.

This will not be the last terrorist outrage². News pundit Jerry Rivers blames exochronic refugees (like Bear) for the crime. Has nativism come to the North American Confederacy?

In short order, a second, much larger attack follows. A train moving at 18,000 miles an hour (not a typo) hits an obstruction. The train and all on it are vaporized. So is the evidence of how this was accomplished. Since terrorism is otherwise utterly unknown in the Confederacy, it seems likely that these two incidents are somehow connected.

While of course no statist police like the NTSB or FBI exist (they would attack essential freedoms merely by existing), a private citizen like Bear is free to intervene. While there are one or two issues with Bear’s investigatory methods — specifically that he is prone to multipage pontifications about the virtue of libertarian thought until those around him remind him that he is working on a case — Bear manages to alarm someone enough that they make an astonishing number of unsuccessful assassination attempts.

Although the NAC eschews privacy violations like fingerprint records, a very few people’s prints are on the public record. One such print turns on in the course of the investigation. It belongs to Bennet Williams, brother of noted pundit Buckley F. Williams. Bennet denies any connection to the outrages, but he does assert that the attacks show the need for a proper government.

While the NAC Bennet might be innocent, despite being pretty clearly the sort of evil statist who would scheme to impose a government, there appear to be multiple Bennets intent on killing Bear. The NAC knows of 11,000 alternate timelines, so the potential supply of Bennets is large.

Is the NAC Bennet innocent? Who is importing Bennets from other timelines? Why? Too busy lecturing people about economics to detect effectively, Bear seems unlikely to solve the case.

Good thing that one conspirator is willing to tell all.

But will Bear and company be able to act in time?

~oOo~

The American Zone is a very bad novel. The protagonists are paper-thin; the antagonists are one-dimensional parodies of real-world people Smith dislikes. Characters deliver lengthy political lectures when they are not reveling in gun porn. That said, there was an established market for this sort of thing, because all of Smith’s books can be described that way. By 2001, he’d had a twenty-one-year career with major publishers such as Del Rey and Tor.

The American Zone appears to have killed Smith’s Big Five career. Or at least it coincided with the end of it. After The American Zone appeared in 2001, there’s a long silence (at least as far as SF is concerned³), after which Smith’s books come out from the much smaller publisher Phoenix Pick (and affiliated imprints). 

[This is where a pretty graphic was going to go. Unfortunately it could either be about three pages wide or too small to read]

If, as I claim, Smith’s books were generally dreadful, why was this book in particular the one that spiked his career?

Bookscan says that it sold under 400 copies, which is not a good sales record. Granted that there are many reasons someone’s career might come to an abrupt halt, many of which have nothing to do with the author or their books, in this case it seems at least possible that the issue was indeed The American Zone. Allow me to explain.

When I was reviewing for the SFBC, they assigned me The Probability Broach (1979) and The American Zone (2001) for back-to-back reviews, which meant that I could compare and contrast the two works. I could not avoid doing so. The biggest difference between the two books is that somewhere between TPB and TAZ, Smith forgot some basic things about storytelling.

For example, an author’s characters, even ones written to be mouthpieces for the author’s views, probably won’t have exactly the same concerns as the author⁴. Bear, who comes from a universe that radically diverged from ours, is weirdly well informed and critical of current events in the author’s timeline (which, even if it is one of the timelines of which the NAC is aware, is only one out of 11,000).

Also, Smith struggles and often fails to get from one end of a sentence to the other without veering off into a political rant. This impressed me as less due to heartfelt conviction and more to a cognitive deficit, some sort of political Tourette’s.

Most damningly, Bear seems to have a very hard time remembering that he is investigating an outrage. He seems to be more interested in lecturing people on the benefits of libertarianism or agreeing with them about the benefits of libertarianism. I still have my notes from my first reading of the MS, filled with observations like ​“about ten pages on the wonders of anarcho-capitalism,” and ​“after about fourteen pages of political discussion, they get around to asking Slaughterbush⁵ if he knows anyone who might be involved in the terrorism (…)”. In The Probability Broach, Bear could solve crimes. In The American Zone, Bear must rely on the bad guys to solve the crime for him.

It would not have been that hard to salvage The American Zone. Trim some of the superfluous subplots, ditch the more egregious swerves into ranting, and above all, have Bear follow the crumbs all the way to Goldilocks. For some reason, no such editorial intervention happened.

If The American Zone were a parody of a libertarian utopian thriller, it would be a mean-spirited one. As it is, it’s just a mess.

The American Zone is available here (Amazon US), here (Amazon Canada), here (Amazon UK), here (Barnes & Noble), and here (Kobo). Not found at Apple, Chapters, or Words Worth Books.

1: This universe’s well-preserved Carol Lombard and Clark Gable are alarmed because movies featuring alternate versions of them are being imported from other universes, impacting their marketability. This is almost certainly legal, as are most things in libertopian North America.

2: This book was written before 9/11 (which was also in 2001).

3: In this 2019 interview, Smith claims to have published thirty-seven books, many more books than I could verify. I don’t know why there is a discrepancy. Maybe Smith had written a number of non-SF works that were overlooked by the ISFDB. If Smith had been writing in other genres, perhaps that could explain the long gap between 2001’s The American Zone and 2008’s Roswell, Texas.

Something that surprised me about his career: Smith published just one book with Baen, Forge of the Elders (which seems to have been reworked from an unfinished trilogy Smith did for Questar). Smith and Baen don’t seem like a terrible mismatch. For some reason, though, it doesn’t seem to have been pursued past this one book.

4: This tendency of Smith to cram in references to our timeline does show that he was deep into AIDS denial. I don’t know why that’s a thing for libertarians, but it is.

The novel also has sneering references to global warming, acid rain, and ozone depletion. Presumably, all of those are problems that cannot be real because the cure is collective action and (egad) regulation.

I didn’t see any references to Antarctica being ice-free 15,000 years ago, something that Smith mentioned several times in the 2016 Prometheus finalist Blade of n’Pa. Perhaps Smith had not yet embraced that belief. I have no idea why he did, but I have a suspicion it has something to do with climate change denial.

There’s a very odd subplot about a perfidious fake libertarian named Baje Wooley, whose Freedom-Loving Party turned out to be a scam. The subplot doesn’t really go anywhere. It feels like it is there so Smith can take a potshot at someone in the American libertarian community who had not lived up to Smith’s standards.

5: Your life will be no better if I explain who Slaughterbush is.