Guest Blogger L. Neil Smith Shares His Works of the Past and Down With Power

You can never tell about these things. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wanted to be remembered for a work of historic fiction about knights in shining armor he called The White Company, and hated having to write the Sherlock Holmes stories that we love. Dame Agatha Christie came to despise Mr. Hercule Poirot, and killed him off before she died.

I can’t say that I dislike any of the books I’ve written. Each of my characters become very important to me — much more important, say, and somehow more real than any President who ever lived — and when I’ve conceived but not yet written them, it seems as if they scream inside my brain to be born and let loose in the pages of my books. I also believe it’s easier to convey in fiction — and in a way that sticks with the reader better and longer — certain important truths.

When I decided, in the 1970s, to write books for a living, I started two, one fiction — science fiction, in fact, the genre in which I felt most comfortable — and one non-fiction, deciding to let the market decide for me which kind of books I should concentrate on after that. Whichever of the two sold first would determine the path I took.

The novel was originally called The Constitution Conspiracy, although before I completed it, I had changed the name to The Probability Broach. It was purchased by the first publisher who read it. Many of you will be aware that it went on to win two Prometheus Awards, has remained in print as a text novel for over thirty years so far, has more recently seen another incarnation as a full-color graphic novel, and is generally regarded as the “definitive” novel of the freedom movement in much the same way Uncle Tom’s Cabin was for abolitionism.

The non-fiction book I’d planned was never completed, although parts of it eventually appeared in the collection of essays called Lever Action. It had been my intention to title it Down With Power, and it was meant to be a sort of primer — like John Hospers’ Libertarianism or Murray Rothbard’s For a New Liberty — for new libertarians.

For years, the concept of this book lay fallow in my mind as I wrote one novel after another with the idea, not so much of pissing people off about the increasingly dictatorial society we were all living in, or warning them of the horrors that were about come next, or instructing them on how to mount a revolution, but of demonstrating to them how civilizations based on individual liberty might look and work.

I did this several times with different kinds of cultures. The North American Confederacy of the Win Bear stories was first. Then there was the wild and wooly “west” of the terraformed asteroid Pallas (followed by Ceres and the forthcoming Ares), and the strange milieu of Forge of the Elders, in which giant molluscs who made all the mistakes that we have, hundreds of millions of years ago, finally decided upon a totally free market and complete individual liberty.

I’ve lately begun a webcomic series (the first story is called ”TimePeeper”) in which a Constitutional amendment has been passed – the Moratorium — under which no new laws (except for bills of repeal) may be passed for a hundred years. And my novel Sweeter Than Wine, about how even a vampire can learn to live ethically, will be out July 13th.

And yet, Down With Power has remained on my mind all these years, and the Libertarian party’s foolish and embarrassing nomination of former congressman Bob Barr for President was the last straw. Barr is the exact diametric opposite of everything we call libertarian, a leazy politician who has championed the War on Drugs and almost every other violation of the unalienable individual, civil, Constitutional, and human rights of every man, woman, and child in this poor, battered country.

Now Down With Power would have more than one purpose. It would still explain to new libertarians what the movement — and all of the exciting concepts behind it — were actually all about, helping them to avoid the watered-down mush that political libertarianism has become.

It would also be a campaign manual for libertarian political candidates, partly because there’s nothing else like it in the movement (it’s not exhaustive of every issue, but it’s as close to that as I was able to make it; I intend for future editions to be even more complete), but also because the media are going to be aware of it, and call on those candidates to account for every “crazy” idea it contains.

Trust me, it will be the making of them.

As for those who have soiled the name of the Libertarian Party by nominating Bob Barr (I think of them as “bobarrians”, and the next generation is going to be even worse), it is my fondest hope that the forthrightness of Down With Power will embarrass them out of the party, perhaps out of the movement itself. I have called, for example, for the elimination of all taxation, which they will certainly find embarrassing, and may prove a little shocking to the average voter – although no more so than the abolition of chattel slavery when it was first proposed — by Queen Isabella of Spain — five hundred years ago.

Let Libertarian Party candidates adopt that idea as their very own – or publicly denounce one of the most libertarian books ever written.

I have requested that my publisher give my book a distinct, bright colored cover — what I’d like to have had was gold-colored foil, but it looks like that’s out for economic reasons — so that, wherever you go, in libertarian circles, at least, and much like Chairman Mao’s

“Little Red Book” in the 1960s, you’ll see folks carrying my “Little Gold Book” around with them. My fondest wish is that when politicians – Democrats, Republicans, or LINOs (“Libertarians In Name Only”) – take the podium in a hotel conference room, what they’ll see when they look out at their audience is half of them holding my “Little Gold Book”.

Perhaps they’ll finally understand that the time for freedom is now.

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L. Neil Smith has been a libertarian for 49 years, since he was 16. He is writing his 33rd and 34th books as you read this. He has been called one the world’s foremost experts on the ethics of self-defense.