- Paperback: 352 pages
- Publisher: St Martin's Press; New edition edition (21 Nov 2002)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0312875266
- ISBN-13: 978-0312875268
- Product Dimensions: 23.6 x 16 x 2.5 cm
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,866,524 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
Review
“L. Neil Smith’s "Probability Broach." . . contained ideas I wish could be shouted to the world, ideas that come from the American heritage of freedom and which could bring still greater individual liberty, greater technical progress.”—Vernor Vinge, author of "A Fire upon the Deep"
"There's something tremendously attractive about the idea of a world where what you do is nobody's business but your own, and that's the kind of world that L. Neil Smith, award winning libertarian author and spokesperson, created in "The Probability Broach" and returns us to in "The American Zone"."—Ernest Lilley" SFRevu"
"The most freewheeling of the new libertarians."--"Reason Magazine"
""The Probability Broach" is a brilliant, subversive novel."—"Prometheus"
"There's something tremendously attractive about the idea of a world where what you do is nobody's business but your own, and that's the kind of world that L. Neil Smith, award winning libertarian author and spokesperson, created in "The Probability Broach" and returns us to in "The American Zone"."—Ernest Lilley" SFRevu"
"The most freewheeling of the new libertarians."--"Reason Magazine"
""The Probability Broach" is a brilliant, subversive novel."—"Prometheus"
Product Description
THE AMERICAN ZONE is the story of Win Bear, a detective who discovers a portal - the probability broach - to alternate worlds. Win has settled in the North American Confederacy on an alternate world where George Washington was shot, sending history in a very different turn. Someone is bombing buildings, many people are being killed, and the libertarian paradise of the Confederacy is threatened. It's up to Win to find those behind the violence and stop them before more people die. He'll find adventure, excitement and danger aplenty before he brings the guilty to justice and restores peace and tranquility to his adopted world.
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Whoooooosh ... bang! The pop-bottle rocket, fired past me from across the street, damn near singed my eyebrows. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
Whoooooosh ... bang! The pop-bottle rocket, fired past me from across the street, damn near singed my eyebrows. Read the first page
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
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19 reviews
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful
A Smith fan says -- Buy any other work of his first ...
2 Mar 2003
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
If you want to enjoy Smith's work, please buy ANY other book of his before this one. Especially the new edition of "The Probability Broach," the essays in "Lever Action," or his richly told "Forge of the Elders" saga.
~ Two massive terrorist acts have the detective protagonist, Win Bear, and his circle showing very little emotional reaction to them, beyond initial revulsion and bone-weariness. This rings false. Thousands have died instantly, and in a culture that is wholly unaccustomed to it. Win's lack of feeling undercuts one basic point Smith has made: that such mutual support flourishes, rather than wilts, in an individualistic and non-political culture.
~ The "stranger in a strange land" focus is weakened by a lack of vivid hints of the statist America(s) from which those in the "Zone" have escaped. Smith's stellar "Pallas" is clearly set in an alternate universe where that fact is never brought up, and his "Broach" makes this escape into one of high contrast -- and both novels are far stronger in that respect. This one is in a mushy middle ground.
~ Too many allusions are made to current American pop culture. These wrench us back too quickly to a dreary this-world present -- and we don't see how they're transmitted, nor from which alternate America.
~ The statist villains here are caricatures, introduced too quickly and pulled off stage too abruptly. Compare this to the luxurious portrait of John Jay Madison in "Broach," where you want to know him better, even while you mentally hiss him as in an old-time melodrama.
~ Names are too often tortured concoctions and are pulled too closely from "real" figures, without the intended satiric effect. "Bennett Williams" is made into a simpleton of an ideologue. William Bennett is not like this, despite his massive faults, and the point is lost.
~ Details of gunsmithery get in the way. In "Broach," they furthered the story without bogging down in a collector's zest for minutiae. Here, they end up diluting the vital point about weapons of self-defense adding to human dignity.
~ The main characters are undercut by our knowing that they show up in a half-dozen Confederacy novels set after this one. It's like knowing Anakin Skywalker is never in mortal danger in "Star Wars" II, when we realize he already was in IV through VI. (This is more distracting, though, for long-time Smith fans.)
~ The copyeditor and proofreader were out to lunch on this one. Misspellings, mispunctuation, shifts of tense, and over-repeated character backgrounds are constant and distracting.
Neither author nor reader deserves to have this highly flawed book discourage newcomers from sampling Neil Smith's talent and enjoying his utter passion for human liberty.
18 of 21 people found the following review helpful
WIN BEAR IS BACK AT LAST!!!!
3 Dec 2001
Format:Hardcover
A new North American Confederacy novel at last. After a hiatus following THE GALLATIN DIVERGENCE, L. Neil Smith has finally returned to his most popular creation, the alternate world first visited over twenty years ago in his classic novel THE PROBABILITY BROACH. As fate would have it, THE AMERICAN ZONE deals specifically with how a truly free society would handle a spate of terrorist attacks. In the wake on 9-11, the issues LNS deals with are incredibly relevant for Americans today. All our favorite characters return, including Lucy Kropotkin and Will Sanders, plus numerous figures from our own world (or similiar realities) appear under different names. Half the fun is realizing which real-world public figure LNS is skewering under another name. As always, there's plenty of action, lots of laughs, and a fine mystery along with the libertarian philosophy. If you can stand to take your freedoms straight, with no chaser, this is the novel for you! Read and enjoy.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Not as good as the first book...
8 April 2003
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
In The Probability Broach we have a really good mystery set in the background of a world where libertarian ideas flourished. The book set up a foundation for future stories.
Yet in The American Zone we have a badly designed plot thrust into the background while the libertarian ideas are pushed to the foreground. What I would of enjoyed is less of Lucy jabbering, and pissing off people, and more of a real plot set in new areas of the Confederacy or other parts of the alternate world. Surely Europe and Asia have developed their own forms of libertarian governments based on their own ideas, culture and history?
I'm sorry but some of the chapters could of been removed from the book without hurting the plot at all, a sure sign of a book that was written for something else BESIDES the story.
Come on, your preaching to the chorus! Turn around and talk to the rest, deliver the ideas of freedom and liberty WITHOUT scaring the day-lights out of them.
Lets face it, Lucy is slightly forward, if not sometimes rude towards everybody and anything she does not like or believe in. I love her, but many people, even from the same political parties, sometimes don't see eye to eye, this is not the best way to present a Libertarian, even if she is a person of fiction.
I would suggest you start out with other books by L. Neil Smith.
Yet in The American Zone we have a badly designed plot thrust into the background while the libertarian ideas are pushed to the foreground. What I would of enjoyed is less of Lucy jabbering, and pissing off people, and more of a real plot set in new areas of the Confederacy or other parts of the alternate world. Surely Europe and Asia have developed their own forms of libertarian governments based on their own ideas, culture and history?
I'm sorry but some of the chapters could of been removed from the book without hurting the plot at all, a sure sign of a book that was written for something else BESIDES the story.
Come on, your preaching to the chorus! Turn around and talk to the rest, deliver the ideas of freedom and liberty WITHOUT scaring the day-lights out of them.
Lets face it, Lucy is slightly forward, if not sometimes rude towards everybody and anything she does not like or believe in. I love her, but many people, even from the same political parties, sometimes don't see eye to eye, this is not the best way to present a Libertarian, even if she is a person of fiction.
I would suggest you start out with other books by L. Neil Smith.
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