It was originally published in 1980, then again by Tor in 1996 and once again by Orb in 2001. I couldn’t find any clear information about the 1980 printing. It did win a Prometheus Award in 1982 for best libertarian science fiction, but Smith himself created the Prometheus Award previously, so who knows if there was any inside baseball in there.
In any case, this book stands in stark contrast with practically any famous science fiction you’ve read, and that’s notable at the very least.
Spoiler-Free Synopsis
The Probability Broach is the story of a police detective named Edward W. “Win” Bear, who lives and works in the Denver of a rather pessimistically authoritarian version of 1987. Energy is being rationed in a very nepotistic way, gun control is extremely strict, gold and silver are illegal, and the United States that Win lives in are generally dirty and depressing.It’s good fodder for a dystopian novel, but we don’t actually spend a lot of time here.
See, Win gets involved in the investigation of a murder. A man named Vaughn Meiss was killed, and as Win follows the clues they lead him to the titular Probability Broach and he’s thrown into a different universe, one where practically all government authority has withered away. This murder case spirals outward, getting larger and larger, and Win has to solve the case and get the culprits before something terrible happens.
As a little bit of a side plot, the question of what exactly diverged between these two universes is another question of interest.
Style and Critique
Smith’s prose is decent but nothing special. He starts out doing a passable hard-boiled detective story, though not as eloquent as a Raymond Chandler nor emotionally gripping as a Lawrence Block. Then, by the time you get to the latter half of the story, he’s moved to a pulpy action-adventure style with a very fast pace. The pace changes can be a little abrupt, and I found myself more than once flipping back a few pages because my leisurely reading speed was good enough for the slow parts but when the story shifted to faster parts I missed some details.One of the disappointing aspects of the book was the elaboration of the initial “mystery.” Without spoiling anything, what could have been an interesting and layered mystery is sadly weakened by a dearth of confounding elements like multiple suspects, conflicting evidence, red herrings, false leads, etc. What could have been a satisfying mystery taking up 150 pages of the book was solved fairly easily in much less.
He manages to mostly avoid being preachy, but there is a lot to cover. It’s a pretty common idea: the fish out of water needs to know what happens, so the reader is along for the ride. But the sheer amount of things that seem counterintuitive to someone not already familiar with libertarian philosophy means that we get a lot of “This is how we do it here,” and bits like that. Fortunately, Smith does manage to split these moments all up and put some bits of humor and plot or character development in between them.
Some of the humor is very good, and there is more than a little tongue-in-cheek ribbing of libertarian organization, as well.
Smith also has a good pen for describing different weapons. There are a variety of different guns and hypothetical guns in the story, and the details on those are usually believable.
One other fun thing for people conversant in libertarian philosophy is the near-constant name dropping. We get references to H.L. Mencken, Lysander Spooner, Albert Nock, Robert LeFevre, Robert A. Heinlein, Ayn Rand, Piotr Kropotkin, and probably more. Aside from the straight name drops, we get Ludwig von Mises turned into Vaughn Meiss, probably because he’s important to the plot, and Murray Rothbard turned into Mary Ross-Byrd, probably because he was still alive when the book was written.
We even get a reference to E.E. “Doc” Smith, the author of the Skylark and Lensman series, which I’ve reviewed in the past.
From a science fiction perspective, we get a good variety at the buffet. Not only does Smith come up with a bunch of incremental ideas about medicine, automobiles, and other generic technology, he also hits on quite a few things which are bold and interesting. For instance, in the Gallatin universe, blimps are more common than jets because governments artificially put extra funding into jets for war. Any creature with enough intelligence to learn a few hundred words or more and stick to the contracts and agreements he makes has the opportunity to be treated essentially as a human. Gorillas, chimpanzees, and dolphins all have the same legal protections as humans in the Gallatin universe. The dolphins are, I think, a Douglas Adams reference, because one point made is that the dolphins were much more advanced philosophically than humans, and were waiting for us to catch up to them.
Conclusion
For the general sci-fi or speculative fiction reader, whether you’re sympathetic to Smith’s ideology or not, this makes The Probability Broach worth a look. However, if you’re unsympathetic, you may need to bring along a hefty helping of suspension of disbelief. But still, this book presents a unique conception of how the world could be, which is one of the fundamental elements of these genres, and therefore should be of interest to anyone who reads them.As for me, I found this book to be entertaining and enjoyable, but I admit I had some positive bias going in. It’s not the most eloquent thing in the world, but Smith tells a decent story. The one big disappointment I have is the simplistic handling of the main mystery. But I guess Smith decided to shift to a swashbuckling adventure instead.
As always, for more spoilers, check out the section from 14:36 through 31:31. If you prefer to avoid spoilers, skip that part of the video.
If this sounds good to you, you can grab a copy here.
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