You are here: Webley Page > Lever Action > Ouvre"... A Nice Summary of his Ouvre ..." by L. Neil Smith
lneil@lneilsmith.orgL. Neil Smith is a Libertarian science fiction author and gun rights activist. He is editor of LEVER ACTION BBS [now defunct], founder and International Coordinator of the Libertarian Second Amendment Caucus, Secretary and Legislative Director of the Weld County Fish & Wildlife Association and an NRA Life Member.
Smith is the author of many science fiction novels. In responding to a charge of racism, he posted a nice summary of his ouvre to Libernet, excerpted below.
The hero of my first novel, The Probability Broach, and my second, The Venus Belt, is a full-blooded Ute Indian whose wife is a freckled strawberry blonde and whose best friend is the 137-year-old Mexican widow of a Russian prince. These are the books that also introduced sapient chimpanzees, gorillas, porpoises and killer whales to science fiction, all inhabitants of the "North American Confederacy", an amalgamation of the United States, Mexico, and Canada.
The brave protagonist of my third novel, Their Majesties' Bucketeers, is a meter-high, hairy, nine-legged, crab-like firefighting detective whose species has three genders.
The viewpoint character of my fourth novel, The Nagasaki Vector, is Jewish, although he doesn't keep kosher as far as I know (I never asked him) and he speaks with a decidedly West Texican accent. He's followed constantly by three tiny aliens who think he's God, and his flying saucer has fallen in love with him.
YD-038, the hero of my fifth novel, Tom Paine Maru, is an escapee from the kind of world that liberals have spent the last 60 years trying to build for us.
With The Gallatin Divergence, my sixth novel, we're back to the Ute Indian again, who gets time-traveled to the 18th century by a physicist who also happens to be a Tursiops truncatus -- a porpoise.
Somewhere in there, I also wrote three books -- recently combined and reprinted as The Lando Calrissian Adventures -- about the guy in Star Wars who owned the Millenium Falcon before Han Solo did.
Now in my tenth novel, The Wardove, we have a rock band in the distant future, one of whose girl singers is having an affair with an alien who looks like a cross between a helium balloon and an umbrella.
The hero of The Crystal Empire, my eleventh novel, is a white guy, I confess, and he's even an unabashed sort of Nordicoid semi-Viking, make what you will of that. The three loves of his life are a voluptuous blonde, a beautiful Indian, and finally a Moslem princess (it's a long book) who helps him battle an alliance of Renaissance Aztecs and Ming-plus Dynasty Chinese.
I never did decide what race the hero of my twelfth novel, Brightsuit Macbear was, although he's the great-grandson of that Ute who started the whole thing, way back when. His best friend is one of those nine-legged crabs.
Lucky thirteen, Taflak Lysandra, concerns a young lady of Australian Aboriginal extraction and her father, the American coyote with a cybernetically augmented brain who adopted her. She starts off being unhappy (like many adolescents are) because she doesn't have blue eyes, freckles, or a turned-up nose, but learns to be happy with her looks because, as she discovers in the end, compared to the kind of person she is inside, they're basically unimportant.
Except for an occasional alien, everyone in my fourteenth novel, Henry Martyn, is white. They're descended (900 years removed) from the last remaining guilt-ridden middle-class liberals in the Solar System, who were exiled to a faraway star cluster when everybody else finally got thoroughly fed up with them.
Otherhandwise, in numbers fifteen, sixteen, and seventeen -- Contact and Commune, Converse and Conflict, and Concert and Cosmos, respectively -- hardly anybody's white, because of an especially nasty kind of "affirmative action" carried out by the American Soviet Socialist Republic. I do have talking molluscs, though. These books, by the way, collectively known (by their proud author) as the "Forge of the Elders Trilogy", proved so politically incorrect that the publisher canceled the third volume!
Which brings us to my eighteenth novel, Pallas -- available now on fine paperback racks everywhere -- in which a little half-Cambodian, half-Vietnamese boy refugees out of a UN agricultural commune. Over the course of his long, productive life, he loves three white women (one, for complicated reasons, with a Sikh surname) while battling a White American Male former US Senator you may even recognize, although the resemblance is purely coincidental.
The hero of Lever Action, my nineteenth book, is me (it's a collection of two decades' worth of essays and speeches).
Finally, my twentieth novel, Bretta Martyn, will take us back to the strange universe of Throwaway White Liberals I mentioned earlier.
You are here: Webley Page > Lever Action > Ouvre