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"Probability Broach"
Tom Brosz — (archived)

Smith is a lot more anarchist than I am. Check out the Atlanta Declaration. Yipes. Hate to be around while evolution sorted THAT society out, although in about thirty years it might be a pretty good place to live. You are right in that he has an anti-statist axe to grind that would give Paul Bunyan a hernia, but then so did Ayn Rand. Neither made a secret of it.

The society works in Smith's novels largely because the people in it have been steeped in individualist principles since the Revolutionary War. I honestly don't think you could transplant most modern Americans wholesale into such an environment.

Still, "Probability Broach" is a great read, as are the other novels. They're kind of written along the lines of Heinlein juveniles, and anybody who gratuitously injects talking primates into a novel can't be all bad.

Re-read "Atlas Shrugged" a while back. Written in the 1950s, yet she predicted pretty much the whole of modern leftism with uncanny accuracy, clean down to the philosophy. One trend she missed in the novel: radical environmentalism.

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