. Neil Smith's new book represents one of those rare literary occurrences: an author revisiting the milieu of his first novel for a sequel after the passage of two decades. The original book was The Probability Broach (1980), now reissued by Tor in paperback to accompany this newcomer.
Broach introduced us to "Win" Bear, an Amerindian detective in a dystopic 1987 Denver. Tracking down an errant professor, Bear finds himself precipitated sidewise in time into an alternate Colorado city named LaPorte. This city is part of the North American Confederacy, a loosely run polity that sprawls across our Canada, America and Mexico. The turning point in history that skewed this world differently from ours was the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794. Put down in our world, the Rebellion succeeded here, ending any federal government and triggering a libertarian-style revolution that eventually spread across the Western Hemisphere and most of the world. As a consequence, the world Bear finds himself in functions under a kind of benign, self-responsible anarchy maintained by heavily armed citizens.
Bear quickly meets his doppelganger, along with two other main personages: an elderly but feisty neighbor named Lucy Kropotkin and a nurse named Clarissa, who soon becomes his lover and eventual wife. After getting his bearings, Bear is swept up into the attempt to frustrate a plot by the Hamiltonians to reinstate the dreaded "big government."
Opening nine years after the events of Broach, Zone finds Bear established as a private detective in the Confederacy, with Clarissa Bear still practicing her own trade. Lucy, having married the native Bear and gone asteroid mining at the end of the first book, has returned alone to Earth, allowing her to participate in the action to come. Bear takes on an assignment from two Hollywood stars—the still-living Clark Gable and Carole Lombard—who are troubled by the flood of alternate versions of their films which interdimensional access has allowed. But two large terrorist acts—the destruction of a skyscraper and a high-speed train—draw Bear into a larger investigation helmed by his neighbor, Will Sanders, head of the LaPorte militia.
Their trolling for answers—under deadly assassination attempts—brings them to a number of individuals who would like to see the Confederacy's anarchy replaced by welfare, totalitarianism or worse. Some of these individuals are native-born, while others are immigrants from other timelines. Some are simply wacky and misguided, while others are actively unscrupulous and malign. Eliminating their likelihood of guilt one by one, Bear, Sanders, Clarissa and Lucy eventually confront the actual villain in a climactic shootout.
Lengthy libertarian lectures
L. Neil Smith is noted for his adherence to libertarian principles and his insertion of same into his books, having won several awards for just such a blending. But this kind of polemical methodology and all-encompassing ideology can produce either gripping, controversial, engaged works such as The Probability Broach or didactic, strident, formless monsters such as The American Zone.
In Broach, Smith managed to cloak his platform in a truly interesting and fast-paced tale. The imagined 1987 Denver where Bear started out was a truly lousy place, a world ripe for fleeing, where all the worst trends of Big Government and Social Irresponsibility and Victimology had been maximized. Then came Smith's well-developed portrait of the Confederacy, a world built on libertarian practices. How refreshing was this Utopic impulse! So many SF authors are good at building dystopias, yet utterly unequipped to sketch out worlds where things approach their notion of perfection. Smith built a world and history from the ground up that was truly believable. His Heinleinian characters (in the Confederacy, Heinlein was a revered admiral) conducted naturalistic conversations, with smallish lectures allowable in deference to Bear's newbie status. And the plot moved convincingly across many interesting venues.
Contrast all these virtues with what we find in the sequel.
First, Smith has chosen to abandon his original dystopic 1987 origins for Bear and instead assert that he somehow comes from our contemporary world. This tactic insures that Bear can comment on hundreds of rabble-rousing icons and events, from the Waco Davidian massacre to the personal looks of Hillary Clinton. And comment he does. Despite nine years of living in the Confederacy, Bear, Smith's first-person mouthpiece, cannot forget his hatred of our Earth. More time is spent castigating what he left behind than extolling what he has adopted. In fact, his peers even mention as much at one point, unfortunately failing to shut Bear up. He's a one-man culture warrior, determined to bury all his goody-goody liberal bleeding-heart opponents under a truckload of verbiage. Consequently, 90 percent of Zone is socioeconomic political punditry. The venues of the action are limited and uninteresting, and Smith throws away such interesting sidelights from the first book as the presence of intelligent simians and settlements on Mars.
What happens to crusty old Lucy—Smith's transgendered combination of Jubal Harshaw and Lazarus Long—illustrates the book's whole derailment. At the end of the first book, Lucy was supposed to be rejuvenated to a beautiful young woman. But this would have disallowed her functioning as a wise old bat, so she's been kept elderly and crotchety against her own character development. And the quotes from her memoirs which head each chapter eventually start to comment vehemently on things she's never seen, institutions and trends from our Earth that would mean nothing to her. When Smith starts to repeat himself in this fashion, it's time to bail.
A few good touches remain. Once the Confederacy elected "None of the Above" as president, and now this nonentity has a baseball stadium named after him, where hot crawdads are served instead of hotdogs. But such minor touches cannot redeem the larger self-indulgences on display here.
