"As a novelist, I have a somewhat higher soapbox to stand on than most people do when it comes to talking back to the merchants of fear." -- L. Neil Smith
L. Neil Smith (full name Lester Neil Smith III), also known to readers and fans as El Neil, is a Libertarian science fiction author and political activist. He was born on May 12, 1946 in Denver. His father was an Air Force officer, so he grew up all over North America in places like Waco, McQueenie, and Laporte, Texas; Salina, Kansas; Sacramento, California; and Gifford, Illinois ... all before he was in 5th grade ... and then St. John’s, Newfoundland and Ft. Walton Beach, Florida where he graduated from high school.
His works include the trilogy of Lando Calrissian novels: Lando Calrissian and the Mindharp of Sharu (1983), Lando Calrissian and the Flamewind of Oseon (1983), Lando Calrissian and the Starcave of ThonBoka (1983), and the Omnibus edition The Lando Calrissian Adventures. He also wrote the novels Pallas, The Forge of the Elders, and The Probability Broach, each of which won the Libertarian Futurist Society's annual Prometheus Award for best libertarian science fiction novel.
"A libertarian presidential candidate isn't going to win anyway, so he can afford to say that all taxation is theft, and it isn't the job of a libertarian presidential candidate to cook up new ways to commit theft.""As to the media, they are protected by the First Amendment, as they should be.""Beloved friends and comrades... the national Libertarian Party is dead.""City governments ought to be abolished, if only as a public health measure.""Collective states are constitutionally incapable of reliably producing anything but corpses.""Government is waging war against the people.""I propose a Constitutional Amendment providing that, if any public official, elected or appointed, at any level of government, is caught lying to any member of the public for any reason, the punishment shall be death by public hanging.""I'll remind you all, however, that for government, existence is a privilege, not a right.""I'm as radical as libertarians come.""I'm tired of being considered property.""I'm tired of being considered some kind of criminal or dangerous throwback for no other reason than that I value, exercise, and defend my rights under the first ten Amendments to the United States Constitution.""I'm tired of being lied to by government, by the media, and by every corporation I have anything to do with.""I'm tired of living in a police state.""It is individuals who must be encouraged to undertake the unprecedented - and unprecedentedly profitable - effort to prevent the annihilation of the human race.""It's often been observed that the first casualty of war is the truth. But that's a lie, too, in its way. The reality is that, for most wars to begin, the truth has to have been sacrificed a long time in advance.""Lincoln emancipated nobody. The man freed not a single slave.""People in the mass media tend more and more every day to look and act like elected and appointed officials.""Poverty is a solved problem - all they have to do is abolish taxes and regulations which cripple those intelligent, capable, and responsible men and women and destroy their productive capacity, then stand back and watch the economy boom.""The claim that the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were attacked because fundamentalists hate our prosperity and freedom is a ridiculous lie.""The fact is that surveys which media people openly admit to show that fewer than twelve percent of their customers believe they're doing a good job, while the average profit margin in television is in the neighborhood of eighty percent.""The first thing you need to know, in order to establish some perspective and avoid panic, is that the violent government excesses we're seeing today are far from unprecedented.""The main problem is that for a boycott to be effective, you must first persuade thousands - maybe even millions of others - to go along, which is a lot of work and usually not successful.""The War on Drugs employs millions - politicians, bureaucrats, policemen, and now the military - that probably couldn't find a place for their dubious talents in a free market, unless they were to sell pencils from a tin cup on street corners.""This planet is 15 million years overdue for an asteroid strike like the one that killed the dinosaurs.""Today, human civilization is drowning in a sea of lies.""Violent crime is a solved problem - all they have to do is repeal the laws that keep those intelligent, capable, and responsible men and women from arming themselves, and violent crime evaporates like dry ice on a hot summer day.""We are expected to believe that anyone who objects to the Department of Homeland Security or the USA Patriot Act is a terrorist, and that the only way to preserve our freedom is to hand it over to the government for safekeeping.""We must oppose programs that would take food from the mouths of younger generations to buy prescription drugs for old people, and we must do it... for the children.""What happened in America in the 1860s was a war of secession, a war of independence, no different in principle from what happened in America in the 1770s and 1780s."
L. Neil Smith should not be confused with J. Neil Schulman, another Libertarian science fiction writer. Smith is aware of this occasional confusion, once humorously signing a letter to Samuel Edward Konkin III as "Neil (L., not J.)"
Several of his works constitute the North American Confederacy series:
The Probability Broach (1980) is an alternate history novel in which history has taken a different turn because a single word in the Declaration of Independence was changed. The United States has become replaced by a minarchist/libertarian society, the North American Confederacy, in this parallel universe, also known to science fiction fans as the Gallatin Universe because of the pivotal role of Albert Gallatin in the point of divergence. The antagonists of the series are styled Federalists, or sometimes "Hamiltonians", after the historical political party of George Washington and Alexander Hamilton. In 2004, a graphic novel version was released, illustrated by Scott Bieser.
The Venus Belt (1980) takes place in outer space and discusses other settlements in the Gallatin Universe solar system. The Federalists are attempting to base a new civilization in interstellar space, kidnapping and enslaving a quarter of a million women as breeding stock from the anti-libertarian timeline from which the viewpoint character of The Probability Broach had escaped, with a plan to someday return in force to take over both of the alternate versions of Earth discovered by way of the P'wheet/Thorens probability broach.
Their Majesties' Bucketeers (1981) is a pastiche of the Sherlock Holmes tales by Arthur Conan Doyle, introducing the Lamviin, a trilaterally symmetrical race of aliens native to the arid planet of Sodde Lydfe. Their Majesties' Bucketeers introduces characters who later interact with others in the Gallatin Universe.
The Nagasaki Vector (1983) is written from the perspective of a time traveler who is shifted from yet another alternative probability line into the Gallatin Universe by the nuclear explosion over Nagasaki (on August 9, 1945) during World War II.
In Tom Paine Maru (1984), entrepreneurs of the Confederacy travel from world to world, exploring the various kinds of messes made by the Federalists who had been shifted back in time and scattered at random over the universe at the conclusion of The Venus Belt. The Federalists had created dozens of colonies, all of which had suffered disaster and retrogression under Federalist rule. Smith uses this device to criticize non-libertarian forms of government.
In The Gallatin Divergence (1985), a time-traveling Federalist woman wants to change history but is opposed by the protagonists of The Probability Broach. As these two forces clash, history is once again altered and yet another timeline is created.
The American Zone (2001), the most recent entry in the series, is a direct sequel to The Probability Broach concerned with the refugees from various anti-libertarian versions of the United States who take up residence in the Confederacy, and the response of the Confederacy to terrorist violence.
Three novels constitute the Lando Calrissian (Star Wars) series:
Lando Calrissian and the Mindharp of Sharu (1983), the first novel in the series, was set in the Star Wars expanded universe, between the events of the Star Wars films Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope, and concerned character Lando Calrissian. When Lando heard that the planets of the Rafa System were practically buried in ancient alien treasure, he hopped aboard the Millennium Falcon, never stopping to think that someone might be conning the con man.
Lando Calrissian and the Flamewind of Oseon (1983), the second novel in the series, is a direct sequel to Lando Calrissian and the Mindharp of Sharu concerned with The Oseon, a solar system of luxury hotels catering to the underemployed filthy rich...every gambler's dream come true. And so it was for Lando and his robot companion Vuffi Raa until Lando broke the gambler's cardinal rule: never beat a cop at high-stakes games of chance.
Lando Calrissian and the Starcave of ThonBoka (1983), the most recent novel in the series, is a direct sequel to Lando Calrissian and the Flamewind of Oseon concerned with how, for a year, Lando and Vuffi Raa, his robot astrogator, had roamed space. But then Lando had gone out on a limb to help a race of persecuted aliens, and now he and Vuffi were up against several sets of their own enemies.
These three novels were collected as The Lando Calrissian Adventures Omnibus Edition (1994).
Other works:
Pallas is the first installment of what Smith has called "The Ngu Family Saga", a planned four-volume series. Pallas is the story of Emerson Ngu, a boy who lives in a dystopian socialist commune in a crater on the asteroid Pallas. Emerson secretly builds a crystal radio and is astonished to learn of the world outside the commune. Escaping, he discovers that the rest of Pallas is a libertarian utopia. Unable to forget his semi-enslaved family...whose "workers' paradise" is starving to death...he designs a cheap but durable gun (because the libertarians on Pallas, to their shame, did not have a domestic firearms industry), and sets about liberating his former commune. At the same time, he must learn the skills necessary for life in the outside world. The novel thus functions both as a bildungsroman and a story of political revolution.
Ceres is the second work in "The Ngu Family Saga," completed on December 25, 2004, planned to be followed by Ares, both set in the Pallas universe and being funded by private investors. The Ceres Project was organized by Alan R. Weiss, a friend of Neil's. After efforts to find a publisher for Ceres proved fruitless, on March 23, 2009, Smith decided to begin publishing the novel online, one chapter being added each week.
The Mitzvah, a novel about a Catholic priest who is a pacifist and influenced by socialist values of the 1960s. His entire world is shattered when he learned the German immigrant parents he grew up with adopted him, and that his true parents were a Jewish couple who were murdered in the Holocaust.
In 1999, Smith announced that he would run for President in 2000 as an independent if his supporters would gather 1,000,000 online petition signatures asking him to run. After failing to achieve even 1,500 signatures, his independent campaign quietly died. He next tried an abortive run for the Libertarian Party nomination, which ended almost as quickly when, in the California primary, Harry Browne overwhelmingly defeated him, 71% to 9%.
However, Smith did appear as the Libertarian Party candidate for President on the Arizona ballot in 2000, although Browne was chosen by the party's national convention, due to a dispute between the Libertarian Party's national organization and their Arizona affiliate. He and running mate Vin Suprynowicz received 5,775 votes. Shortly thereafter, Smith's supporters announced a new 1,000,000-signature petition drive; however, in late 2003, with the new drive once again failing to achieve even a small fraction of that total, Smith announced that he would not pursue another political office.
Smith is no newcomer to the Libertarian Party: he joined in 1972 (just after its beginnings in 1971), in 1977 and 1979 served on the Platform Committee, and in 1978 ran for state legislature in Colorado (winning 15% of the vote with a total expenditure of forty-four dollars). His influence and that of the "Ad Hoc Conspiracy to Draft L. Neil Smith" (which had hundreds of informal members) helped influence the 2004 Libertarian Party selection of Michael Badnarik for President (although third-place candidate Gary Nolan's endorsement of Badnarik also had an effect). Badnarik was profoundly influenced by Hope, a novel written by L. Neil Smith and Aaron Zelman (founder and Executive Director of Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership). Smith endorsed the Free State Project in 2004, and endorsed Badnarik's campaign for President in 2004.
Smith is the founder of, and regularly contributes essays to The Libertarian Enterprise, an influential anarcho-capitalist and paleolibertarian journal, and he claims that his most influential essay is Why Did it Have to be ... Guns?.
