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?

Read more ➤

L. Neil Smith’s 2016’s Blade of p’Na is the next Prometheus Award finalist selected for review by my complex sorting algorithm (I threw dice).

Four hundred million years of civilization is long enough for a race like the Elders to have developed some very odd hobbies. Among the avocations the nautiloid Elders dabbled in was Appropriating doomed or interesting beings from neighbouring universes. This did not end so well for the Elders in question (who committed suicide once they noticed the inherent contradiction between their ethic of ​‘freedom for all!’ and ​‘kidnapping’ [1]) but it has worked out pretty well for the Appropriated and their descendants.

Take Eichra Oren, for example.

Read more ➤

1981’s The Venus Belt came out the year after The Probability Broach. The astute reader can tell that Smith is now more comfortable thinking of himself as an author of overtly ideological fiction¹. The lectures on libertarian right-thinkery are more frequent and more heavy-handed², and the plot more perfunctory. The villains, on the other hand, are very villainous. Plausibility was never a goal but the result in this case is not all that interesting. 

Read more ➤

1980’s The Probability Broach launched Smith into what turned into a twenty-one-year-long career with such major publishers as Del Rey, Baen, and Tor¹. It was the second novel to win the Prometheus Award, which Smith himself founded. He was a frequent nominee for that award and pretty much only that award. Smith would go on to win the Prometheus three more times². The Probability Broach is the book that began it all. Follow me into a land of commodity-based currency, talking gorillas, and grade-schoolers with guns as big as they are!

Read more ➤