# Cowboy Anarchism **URL:** **By** Victoria Varga **Published:** April 2, 1980 --- “L. Neil Smith’s libertarian, Heinleinian, science-fiction detective thriller will keep you up until four in the morning.” _The Probability Broach_, by L. Neil Smith, Ballantine Books, 273 pp., $1.95. L. Neil Smith’s libertarian, Heinleinian, science-fiction detective thriller will keep you up until four in the morning. A playful, if rather superficial glimpse of an anarchist America, it shoots down (literally) several sacred dogmas concerning the viability of a society without government. Its hero, Edward (Win) Bear, is a Lieutenant in the City of Denver’s homicide department, and though 1987 is not a pleasant time to be a cop—desperate food and energy shortages, debilitating pollution, sinister Big Brotherism, and general hopelessness have pushed the crime rate up until it matches the rate of inflation (Lt. Bear, too, is hopeless) —where else would he go? When a physics professor named Vaughn Meiss and an old police buddy are killed by the same hit-squad, Win Bear makes the case his own. His investigations take him to the offices of a small sect of crazies called Propertarians (where, incidentally, he is given a copy of _Toward a New Liberty_ by one Mary Ross-Byrd) and finally to Vaughn Meiss’s laboratory. As he is searching for clues among some very intricate pieces of machinery, he is attacked by the blazing guns of the killer squad, and the battle sets off an explosion. He awakes in another world, a world with the same geography as the one he left, but with a divergent history after July 2, 1776. This society, anarchist from the time of the Whiskey Rebellion, has formed a loose confederacy of independent non-states, including Canada and Mexico, and has advanced far beyond the US in every field of science and technology except for atomic weaponry. In 1970, for example, scientists at a company called Paratronics Ltd., while searching for an alternative to ion-drive spaceships, discovered what they called a Probability Broach, which they optimistically hoped would allow nearly instantaneous space travel. But when they first peeked through their “window in time,” they saw, not a new view of Alpha Centauri, but a sign that said “NO PARK-ING.” After some confused investigation, the preliminary report was chilling: “. . . an unknown, exclusively human, English-speaking people wearing uniformly drab, tubular clothing, riding in poisonously primitive vehicles. A culture inexplicably bleak and impoverished.” The new world was definitely earth; it was even Colorado. The scientists reached through the window and carefully collected information—“buying” an almanac and other materials and leaving half-ounce silver coins in trade. They learned a great deal, none of it encouraging: the Revolution; the Whiskey Rebellion; a War of 1812? Mexico; and, horror or horrors, a civil war—three quarters of a million dead. Financial crisis alternated with war, and no one seemed to notice the pattern. World War II and the atomic bomb; Korea; Vietnam. And towering above it all, power politics; a State growing larger, more demanding every year, swallowing lives, fortunes, destroying sacred honor, screaming in its bloatedness for more, capable of any deed—no matter how corrupt and repulsive, swollen, crazed—staggering toward extinction. And yet this catalog of horror admitted one tiny spark of light and hope: eleven minor but distinct references to a group whose values and goals might gratify any decent being in the North American Confederacy —the Propertarian Party. Vaughn Meiss, both a Propertarian and a scientist, had of course been the first person the Confederates had contacted, and it was his duplicate of their machine that had exploded, blowing Win into the alternate universe. After a period of dazed recuperation, Win learns from the Confederates that the killers he was after are a coalition of US Security Police (SecPol) and a Confederate group called the Hamiltonians who hope to bring back the state and secure power for themselves by pulling atomic weapons through the Broach and taking over. The Confederate scientists and security agents, which include a dolphin philosopher and a chimpanzee cop, must help Win, his anarchist counterpart (also Edward Bear), a 136-year-old, gun-toting wild-woman, and the standard beautiful “girl” (there’s even sex in this book, folks), defeat the combined forces of evil and statism. Which they do. But not before the Continental Congress is convened for the first time in thirty years and Win goes through many cultureshocks: working with gorillas, chimpanzees and dolphins who communicate through voice converters and are full citizens; using the many competing phone systems that actually fall all over themselves trying to be helpful; riding a mile-long blimp (the luxury liner of the age) and an express rocket-shuttle that shoots urgently needed persons and materials through a thousand mile tunnel; and seeing the beautiful Confederate version of Colorado—with clean air and exquisite parks covering underground, non-polluting industries. There is one thing that really bothers Win Bear — and this reader—about this anarchist society. Every man, woman, and child of all the intelligent species carries a weapon. In an emotional (and guilt-ridden) moment, Win yells the following to his friends: “Everybody in this safe, stable, oh-so-humane society carries a handgun, prepared to kill at the drop of a hat! What the hell are you all afraid of? How come such well-adjusted people cling so hysterically to their perverted phallic symbols?” And in a passionate answer, his lady-love counters: “Armed people are free. No state can control those who have the machinery and the will to resist, no mob can take their liberty and property. And no 220-pound thug can threaten the well-being or dignity of a 110-pound woman who has two pounds of iron to even things out. “People who object to weapons aren’t abolishing violence, they’re begging for rule by brute force, when the biggest, strongest animals among men were always automatically ‘right.’ Guns ended that, and social democracy is a hollow farce without an armed populace to make it work.” But one wonders. Is the gunslinger scenario the only alternative to the police-state? Is a world without government “protection” necessarily a jungle? Does freedom make handguns a necessity? In fiction, at least, those who pack guns end up using them. The book answers one question very nicely: How does an anarchist society survive attacks by other, less free, societies? The Hamiltonians and SecPol are foiled by a combination of brains, bravery, and sheer good luck. But what if the luck had gone to the other side? Win Bear has a theory: “I think now that they would have lost anyway. Most Confederates would have taken to the hills, fought for centuries if necessary, rather than surrender to tyranny. And no one in this crazy-quilt of a country has the authority to surrender. Nobody.” Victoria Varga is Production Manager of LR.