Libertarians in Space

By Jeremy Adam Smith, Dollars and Sense. Posted May 20, 2002.

During my junior year of high school, I was a libertarian.

My primary influence was not Ayn Rand -- the philosopher whose books have shaped generations of libertarian thinkers and activists -- but science-fiction writers like Robert Heinlein. My copy of Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress – in which a lunar colony secedes from earth to establish an anarcho-capitalist society – was marked by folded corners, underlined passages, and marginalia. Like most teenagers, I felt trapped by the institutions in which I lived most of my life. Heinlein’s philosophy of individual freedom and self-reliance seemed to point to a way out.

Shaped by sentimental memories of the American frontier, libertarianism is a quintessentially American political philosophy that first found literary expression in tales of the Wild West. The classic Western looked back romantically to a time when rugged individualists roped steers, women tended the hearth, the only good Indian was a dead one, and swamps were there to be drained, not protected, dammit. When the two-fisted horse opera exhausted itself – there were only so many Indians to kill – it moved on to the "new frontier" of outer space.

Science-fiction writers extended Manifest Destiny into futures where eccentric professors invented antigravity in their basements and sent their beautiful daughters into space with the college football captain and his best friend. There the kids encountered tentacled aliens whom they slaughtered by the thousands with Daddy’s death ray. (For a discussion of a competing tendency in sci-fi, technocratic utopianism, see "A World, Not a Nation," D&S, September/October 2001.)

When it became obvious in the mid-20th century that real space exploration involved thousands of scientists and engineers working at great expense on small technical problems within a vast bureaucracy, space lost some of its romance. The best sci-fi writers – such as Ursula K. Le Guin, Samuel Delaney, and Kurt Vonnegut – turned inward to speculate about the ways that humanity could survive progress. Spurred on by the social movements of the 1960s, most science fiction outgrew its adolescence and entered young adulthood.

Not everyone went forward. In the 1970s, a proudly retrograde cabal kept the space opera alive. Writers such as Poul Anderson, Jerry Pournelle, Gregory Benford, and Robert Heinlein gradually adopted libertarianism as their official ideology, which included a dash of militarism (apparently, libertarians in space still need government to defend the property stolen from the natives). Championed by these award-winning authors, libertarian science fiction grew into a sub-subculture, with its own organizations, conferences, anthologies, and award, the Prometheus.

Meanwhile, in what we call the real world, Ronald Reagan took office with the support and influence of libertarians and their think tanks. Former Ayn Rand protege Alan Greenspan went on to chair the Federal Reserve. Today George W. cuts taxes with abandon while leading a cavalry to save corporate homesteads on the Middle Eastern frontier.

As the right has advanced, left-wing utopias and the hopes they represent have receded. Conversely, libertarian novelists have turned to imagining what writer Ken MacLeod has called "libertarias," utopias that allow individuals to freely pursue their self-interest without the interference of a state. Unlike most classic utopias – from Plato’s Atlantis to Ursula K. Le Guin's Anarres – libertarias seek Darwinian competition instead of peace and harmony. The result may not be a "good" society in the conventional sense, but it is one that allows "man to be true to his nature as a predator," as one writer puts it.

L. Neil Smith’s 1993 novel Pallas, for example, is set on a colony established by billionaire industrialist "Wild Bill" Curringer, based on the philosophy of Mirelle Stein (who is obviously a stand-in for Ayn Rand). Smith’s Pallas is an asteroid encased in an atmosphere-holding envelope, with no laws or government. On their sprawling homesteads and in their citified saloons, each well-armed Pallatian cultivates a folksy accent and tinkers with quaintly Victorian machinery. The only "worm in the apple" of Pallas is the Greeley Memorial Utopian Project, a Stalinist commune governed by the villainous Gibson Altman.

Filled with unintentionally amusing scenarios and chapter-long rants against vegetarianism, agriculture, and public transportation, Pallas tells the rough-and-tumble tale of Emerson Ngu, who escapes the Greeley Project to become the wealthy and sharp-shooting hero of Pallas. The novel’s explicit nostalgia for the Wild West would be kitschy fun if it weren’t so rigidly ideological.

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