WEBVTT NOTE Libertarian Science Fiction 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:09.880 The Ludwig von Mises Institute presents The Libertarian Tradition, an audio series with 2 00:00:09.880 --> 00:00:13.240 Jeff Rigenbach. 3 00:00:13.240 --> 00:00:19.180 One day in the late spring of 1951, something rather astonishing happened in an otherwise 4 00:00:19.180 --> 00:00:25.820 nondescript shopping district in a medium-sized city somewhere in the American Midwest. 5 00:00:25.820 --> 00:00:31.100 Right there, smack in the middle of the block, where Aunt Sally's lunch and Patterson-Taylor's 6 00:00:31.100 --> 00:00:36.780 had long stood, there suddenly appeared what a later newspaper account could only describe 7 00:00:36.780 --> 00:00:41.700 as a strange building, apparently a kind of gun shop. 8 00:00:41.700 --> 00:00:46.940 The front of this building sported a large, brightly shining sign, which read, 9 00:00:46.940 --> 00:00:48.180 Fine weapons. 10 00:00:48.180 --> 00:00:51.940 The right to buy weapons is the right to be free. 11 00:00:51.940 --> 00:00:57.540 The window display was made up of an assortment of rather curiously shaped guns, rifles as 12 00:00:57.540 --> 00:01:03.420 well as small arms, and a glowing sign in the window stated, The Finest Energy Weapons 13 00:01:03.420 --> 00:01:05.300 in the Known Universe. 14 00:01:05.300 --> 00:01:10.260 A local police officer attempted to enter the shop, according to the newspaper account, 15 00:01:10.260 --> 00:01:11.980 but found the door locked. 16 00:01:11.980 --> 00:01:18.860 Then, a few moments later, C.J. Chris McAllister, reporter of the Gazette Bulletin, tried the 17 00:01:18.860 --> 00:01:21.800 door, found that it opened, and entered. 18 00:01:21.800 --> 00:01:27.200 But when the local cop tried to follow the local reporter into the shop, the door slammed 19 00:01:27.200 --> 00:01:31.680 shut in his face and appeared to be locked once again. 20 00:01:31.680 --> 00:01:36.860 The entire building vanished a short time later, and Aunt Sally's lunch and Patterson 21 00:01:36.860 --> 00:01:40.240 Taylor's were found to be just where they had long been. 22 00:01:40.240 --> 00:01:45.500 The employees who had been inside these establishments during the time the mysterious apparition 23 00:01:45.500 --> 00:01:51.600 had startled those outside on the street seemed to have suffered no ill effects from the visitation 24 00:01:51.600 --> 00:01:55.520 and reported later that they had noticed nothing unusual. 25 00:01:55.520 --> 00:02:01.840 As for the newspaper reporter, McAllister, he was never seen again, at least not by anybody 26 00:02:01.840 --> 00:02:07.720 in that time and place, for when he talked with the people he met inside the gun shop 27 00:02:07.720 --> 00:02:15.360 he had entered, he learned that he had somehow traveled 7,000 years into the future. 28 00:02:15.360 --> 00:02:20.700 The story I've just told you, the fragment of a story really, is the opening of a science 29 00:02:20.700 --> 00:02:27.100 This fiction novel called The Weapon Shops of Isher first published in 1951 and written 30 00:02:27.100 --> 00:02:31.740 by an expatriate Canadian named A. E. van Vogt. 31 00:02:31.740 --> 00:02:38.700 Van Vogt was born in 1912 on a farm in Manitoba and died in Southern California 11 years ago 32 00:02:38.700 --> 00:02:43.080 last week on January 26, 2000. 33 00:02:43.080 --> 00:02:48.600 He began writing professionally at the age of 20 when he sold his first true confession 34 00:02:48.600 --> 00:02:56.000 story to a pulp magazine. Sam Moskowitz in his 1966 book Seekers of Tomorrow, Masters 35 00:02:56.000 --> 00:03:01.560 of Modern Science Fiction, writes that during the next seven years Van Vogt subsisted on 36 00:03:01.560 --> 00:03:09.240 sales of confessions, love stories, trade magazine articles, as well as occasional radio plays. 37 00:03:09.240 --> 00:03:15.800 Then in 1939, at the age of 27, he decided to try his hand at science fiction, something 38 00:03:15.800 --> 00:03:23.800 is something he had enjoyed reading ever since he was around 14 years old, but had, for some reason, never attempted to write. 39 00:03:23.800 --> 00:03:34.800 His very first efforts won him major acclaim within the science fiction field, and sufficient extra income that he decided to move to Los Angeles, where he spent the rest of his life. 40 00:03:34.800 --> 00:03:40.800 And what about McAllister, the reporter from the mid-20th century American Midwest? 41 00:03:40.800 --> 00:03:46.960 Well, as I mentioned, he found himself living 7,000 years in the future, on an earth ruled 42 00:03:46.960 --> 00:03:52.420 by a single monarchical government, the Empire of Isher, it was called. 43 00:03:52.420 --> 00:03:57.140 And scattered throughout this empire were what the citizens of the empire knew simply 44 00:03:57.140 --> 00:03:59.320 as the weapon shops. 45 00:03:59.320 --> 00:04:04.220 They were everywhere, in major cities and in small towns, and even by the standards 46 00:04:04.220 --> 00:04:09.660 of the time in which they flourished, they were equipped with amazing technology. 47 00:04:09.660 --> 00:04:14.260 Their front doors would not admit any government employee. 48 00:04:14.260 --> 00:04:21.220 Anyone else could enter freely and buy a high-quality energy weapon that could be used only defensively. 49 00:04:21.220 --> 00:04:27.140 If anyone tried to use it to commit a crime, to initiate force against another person, 50 00:04:27.140 --> 00:04:28.840 it would fail to work. 51 00:04:28.840 --> 00:04:33.860 The weapon shops also operated a system of courts, in which those who could not obtain 52 00:04:33.860 --> 00:04:40.900 Injustice, for whatever reason, from the Imperial Courts, might seek redress of their grievances. 53 00:04:40.900 --> 00:04:46.140 One citizen of the Empire of Isher, who speaks personally with McAllister, calls the Weapon 54 00:04:46.140 --> 00:04:52.040 Shops, the common man's only protection against enslavement, and a defender of the spirit 55 00:04:52.040 --> 00:04:54.740 of liberty and the rights of the individual. 56 00:04:54.740 --> 00:05:00.020 Later, another character explains that the Weapon Shops were founded more than two thousand 57 00:05:00.020 --> 00:05:07.460 by a man who decided that the incessant struggle for power of different groups was insane, 58 00:05:07.460 --> 00:05:11.300 and the civil and other wars must stop forever. 59 00:05:11.300 --> 00:05:17.300 What this man proposed was that an organization should be set up which would have one principal 60 00:05:17.300 --> 00:05:23.580 purpose, to ensure that no government ever again obtained complete power over its people. 61 00:05:23.580 --> 00:05:29.580 A man who felt himself wronged should be able to go somewhere to buy a defensive gun. 62 00:05:29.580 --> 00:05:33.500 You cannot imagine what a great forward step that was. 63 00:05:33.500 --> 00:05:38.060 Under the old tyrannical governments, it was frequently a capital offense to be found 64 00:05:38.060 --> 00:05:41.620 in possession of a blaster or a gun. 65 00:05:41.620 --> 00:05:46.940 According to this character, for defensive purposes, a weapons shop gun is superior to 66 00:05:46.940 --> 00:05:49.500 an ordinary or government weapon. 67 00:05:49.500 --> 00:05:53.700 It works on mind control and leaps to the hand when wanted. 68 00:05:53.700 --> 00:05:57.540 It provides a defensive screen against other blasters. 69 00:05:57.540 --> 00:06:03.020 More important, many millions of people have the knowledge that they can go to a weapons 70 00:06:03.020 --> 00:06:06.880 shop if they want to protect themselves and their families. 71 00:06:06.880 --> 00:06:12.300 And even more important, the forces that would normally try to enslave them are restrained 72 00:06:12.300 --> 00:06:16.900 by the conviction that it is dangerous to press people too far. 73 00:06:16.900 --> 00:06:23.980 And so a great balance has been struck between those who govern and those who are governed. 74 00:06:23.980 --> 00:06:29.220 At one point, one of the major characters in the novel accuses a leading bank of defrauding 75 00:06:29.220 --> 00:06:32.900 him and takes his case to the weapon shop courts. 76 00:06:32.900 --> 00:06:40.480 The court rules in his favor and tells him, The bank is triple fined 36,300 credits. 77 00:06:40.480 --> 00:06:44.820 It is not in our interest for you to know how this money is obtained. 78 00:06:44.820 --> 00:06:50.020 Suffice to know that the bank pays it, and that of the fine, the weapon shops allocate 79 00:06:50.020 --> 00:06:53.560 to their own treasury a total of one half. 80 00:06:53.560 --> 00:07:00.880 The other half, and as if on cue, a neatly packaged pile of bills fell onto the table. 81 00:07:00.880 --> 00:07:03.120 For you, said the court. 82 00:07:03.120 --> 00:07:08.520 Returning triumphantly to his home town after adjudication of his case, this character is 83 00:07:08.520 --> 00:07:13.840 told by a local employee of the weapon shops that in the four thousand years since the 84 00:07:13.840 --> 00:07:19.560 brilliant genius Walter S. Delaney laid down the first principles of weapon shop political 85 00:07:19.560 --> 00:07:26.080 Philosophy, we have watched the tide of government swing backward and forward between democracy 86 00:07:26.080 --> 00:07:32.320 under a limited monarchy to complete tyranny, and we have discovered one thing. 87 00:07:32.320 --> 00:07:35.960 People always have the kind of government they want. 88 00:07:35.960 --> 00:07:39.240 When they want change, they must change it. 89 00:07:39.240 --> 00:07:45.940 As always, we shall remain an incorruptible core, devoted to relieving the ills that arise 90 00:07:45.940 --> 00:07:50.100 is inevitably under any form of government. 91 00:07:50.100 --> 00:07:55.540 The Weapon Shops of Isher by A. E. van Vogt is one of a number of classic science fiction 92 00:07:55.540 --> 00:08:01.500 novels that embody libertarian ideas, and the widespread popularity of science fiction 93 00:08:01.500 --> 00:08:07.540 is undeniably one of the factors that has helped to keep individualism, including political 94 00:08:07.540 --> 00:08:13.580 individualism, otherwise known as libertarianism, at the center of American culture during the 95 00:08:13.580 --> 00:08:17.100 in the often difficult years of the 20th century. 96 00:08:17.100 --> 00:08:21.380 All the best-known libertarian novels are science fiction novels. 97 00:08:21.380 --> 00:08:27.620 Atlas Shrugged, 1984, We, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. 98 00:08:27.620 --> 00:08:33.640 Some people will tell you that there's a natural affinity between science fiction and libertarianism. 99 00:08:33.640 --> 00:08:39.220 One of those people is Eric S. Raymond, who makes his argument in an insightful and persuasive 100 00:08:39.220 --> 00:08:43.300 essay called A Political History of SF. 101 00:08:43.300 --> 00:08:48.940 According to Raymond, science fiction as a literature embraces the possibility of radical 102 00:08:48.940 --> 00:08:53.980 transformations of the human condition brought about through knowledge. 103 00:08:53.980 --> 00:09:00.180 Its stories take place within a knowable universe, one in which scientific inquiry is both the 104 00:09:00.180 --> 00:09:05.740 precondition and the principal instrument of creating new futures. 105 00:09:05.740 --> 00:09:11.400 Science fiction is not always optimistic about the futures it portrays, Raymond acknowledges, 106 00:09:11.400 --> 00:09:17.560 But he argues, when it is not optimistic, its dystopias and cautionary tales tend to 107 00:09:17.560 --> 00:09:22.640 affirm the power of reasoned choices made in a knowable universe. 108 00:09:22.640 --> 00:09:28.160 They tell us that it is not through chance or the whim of angry gods that we fail, but 109 00:09:28.160 --> 00:09:34.280 through our failure to be intelligent, our failure to use the power of reason and science 110 00:09:34.280 --> 00:09:37.760 and engineering prudently. 111 00:09:37.760 --> 00:09:42.800 Science fiction's central assumption, as Raymond sees it, is that applied science is 112 00:09:42.800 --> 00:09:49.580 our best hope of transcending the major tragedies and minor irritants to which we are all heir, 113 00:09:49.580 --> 00:09:54.900 and that it is scientists and engineers who liberate the future to become a different 114 00:09:54.900 --> 00:09:57.200 place than the present. 115 00:09:57.200 --> 00:10:02.760 Science fiction's basic motive, he argues, is a sort of lust for possibility, a desire 116 00:10:02.760 --> 00:10:20.520 Not surprisingly, then, science fiction has a bias towards valuing the human traits and 117 00:10:20.520 --> 00:10:27.560 social conditions that best support scientific inquiry and permit it to result in transformative 118 00:10:27.560 --> 00:10:34.920 of changes to both individuals and societies, also of social equilibria which allow individuals 119 00:10:34.920 --> 00:10:41.160 the greatest scope for choice, for satisfying that lust for possibilities. 120 00:10:41.160 --> 00:10:48.560 That is, the strongly bound traits of SF imply a political stance, because not all political 121 00:10:48.560 --> 00:10:54.860 conditions are equally favorable to scientific inquiry and the changes it may bring, nor 122 00:10:54.860 --> 00:10:57.580 to Individual Choice. 123 00:10:57.580 --> 00:11:03.700 As Raymond sees it, the power to suppress free inquiry, to limit the choices and thwart 124 00:11:03.700 --> 00:11:09.940 the disruptive creativity of individuals, is the power to strangle the bright transcendent 125 00:11:09.940 --> 00:11:12.580 futures of optimistic SF. 126 00:11:12.580 --> 00:11:18.940 Tyrants, static societies and power elites fear change above all else. 127 00:11:18.940 --> 00:11:25.660 Their natural tendency is to suppress science, or seek to distort it for ideological ends, 128 00:11:25.660 --> 00:11:29.260 as for example Stalin did with Lysenkoism. 129 00:11:29.260 --> 00:11:36.580 In the narratives at the center of SF, political power is the natural enemy of the future. 130 00:11:36.580 --> 00:11:43.940 Science fiction is thus the natural literary expression of political individualism, libertarianism. 131 00:11:43.940 --> 00:11:50.300 It is, as Raymond puts it, the literature that celebrates not merely science and technology, 132 00:11:50.300 --> 00:11:57.420 but technology-driven social change as a permanent revolution, as the final and most inexorable 133 00:11:57.420 --> 00:12:02.540 foe of all fixed-power relationships everywhere. 134 00:12:02.540 --> 00:12:09.500 As if to illustrate Raymond's point, though long before it was actually made, in 1962, 135 00:12:09.500 --> 00:12:15.540 When Eric Raymond was four years old, an Englishman named Eric Frank Russell published a novel 136 00:12:15.540 --> 00:12:18.380 called The Great Explosion. 137 00:12:18.380 --> 00:12:23.960 The explosion in Russell's title has nothing to do with gunpowder or nitroglycerin or anything 138 00:12:23.960 --> 00:12:25.220 of that sort. 139 00:12:25.220 --> 00:12:30.600 It has to do with the fact that sometime in the 22nd century, a hundred or more years 140 00:12:30.600 --> 00:12:37.580 from now, a crank named Johannes Praetorius van der Kamp Bleeder accidentally invented 141 00:12:37.580 --> 00:12:42.740 A New Way to Power Spaceships, The Bleeder Drive, it was called. 142 00:12:42.740 --> 00:12:48.500 It made hay of astronomical distances and astronautical principles, Russell wrote, and 143 00:12:48.500 --> 00:12:53.020 put an end once and for all to the theory that nothing could exceed the velocity of 144 00:12:53.020 --> 00:12:54.020 light. 145 00:12:54.020 --> 00:12:59.980 The entire galaxy shrank several times faster than Earth had shrunk when the airplane was 146 00:12:59.980 --> 00:13:01.260 invented. 147 00:13:01.260 --> 00:13:06.780 Solar systems, once hopelessly out of reach, now came within easy grasping distance. 148 00:13:06.780 --> 00:13:13.080 An immense concourse of worlds presented themselves for the mere taking and fired the imaginations 149 00:13:13.080 --> 00:13:15.380 of swarming humanity. 150 00:13:15.380 --> 00:13:20.660 Overcrowded terra found itself offered the cosmos on a platter and was swift to seize 151 00:13:20.660 --> 00:13:22.220 the opportunity. 152 00:13:22.220 --> 00:13:28.620 A veritable spray of bleeder-driven ships shot outward as every family, cult, group 153 00:13:28.620 --> 00:13:34.300 or clique that imagined it could do better someplace else took to the star trails. 154 00:13:34.300 --> 00:13:40.460 The restless, the ambitious, the malcontents, the martyrs, the eccentrics, the antisocial, 155 00:13:40.460 --> 00:13:43.500 the fidgety, and the just plain curious. 156 00:13:43.500 --> 00:13:49.140 Away they fled by the dozens, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands. 157 00:13:49.140 --> 00:13:56.500 In less than a century, 50% of the human race left aged and autocratic terra and blew itself 158 00:13:56.500 --> 00:14:02.160 all over the starfield, settling wherever they could give free vent to their ideas and 159 00:14:02.160 --> 00:14:15.700 400 years later, sometime in the 26th century, the government of Terra sends out a fleet 160 00:14:15.700 --> 00:14:21.700 of military and diplomatic vessels, each of which will call on a few of the many planets 161 00:14:21.700 --> 00:14:27.920 settled by humans during the Great Explosion and attempt to unify them into an empire. 162 00:14:27.920 --> 00:14:33.880 We follow one of these ships as we read Russell's novel and get to know the engineers, the soldiers, 163 00:14:33.880 --> 00:14:36.980 the crewmen and the bureaucrats on board. 164 00:14:36.980 --> 00:14:42.840 Like A. E. van Vogt's Weapon Shops of Isher, The Great Explosion is based in part on short 165 00:14:42.840 --> 00:14:48.640 fiction originally published in American pulp science fiction magazines during and just after 166 00:14:48.640 --> 00:14:50.460 World War II. 167 00:14:50.460 --> 00:14:55.480 The Weapon Shops of Isher is derived from three short stories which van Vogt had published 168 00:14:55.480 --> 00:15:06.880 The Great Explosion is based mainly on a longish story called And Then There Were None, which 169 00:15:06.880 --> 00:15:11.440 Russell published in Astounding Science Fiction in 1951. 170 00:15:11.440 --> 00:15:17.480 The original hardcover edition of The Great Explosion is 177 pages long. 171 00:15:17.480 --> 00:15:23.700 78 of those pages, a little less than half the entire length of the novel, is a slightly 172 00:15:23.700 --> 00:15:30.140 A reworked version of And Then There Were None, which details the experiences of those aboard 173 00:15:30.140 --> 00:15:35.340 the big military and diplomatic vessel we've been following around when they visit the 174 00:15:35.340 --> 00:15:39.780 fourth of the four planets they've been ordered to visit. 175 00:15:39.780 --> 00:15:44.160 The Terrans who settled this planet call themselves GANDs. 176 00:15:44.160 --> 00:15:49.860 They claim to derive their political philosophy from the work of a Terran of 600 years before 177 00:15:49.860 --> 00:16:11.780 They don't recognize absentee land ownership, for example. 178 00:16:11.780 --> 00:16:16.760 The only way you can own a plot of land is to occupy it and use it. 179 00:16:16.760 --> 00:16:20.400 And they have no money, at least in the usual sense of the term. 180 00:16:20.400 --> 00:16:25.480 Instead, they have a sophisticated barter system that seems to satisfy their economic 181 00:16:25.480 --> 00:16:32.040 needs quite admirably, though admittedly their society is not a densely populated one. 182 00:16:32.040 --> 00:16:37.040 It has no large cities, just small towns and rural areas. 183 00:16:37.040 --> 00:16:41.280 Perhaps Russell believed that the sort of society he depicted in And Then There Were 184 00:16:41.280 --> 00:16:46.400 None would only be workable under such circumstances. 185 00:16:46.400 --> 00:16:54.320 Russell was born 106 years ago last month, on January 6, 1905, in Sandhurst, a small 186 00:16:54.320 --> 00:17:00.440 town about 35 miles southwest of London, the home of the Royal Military Academy, where 187 00:17:00.440 --> 00:17:02.160 his father taught. 188 00:17:02.160 --> 00:17:07.460 The younger Russell pursued a military career in the Royal Air Force for two decades, before 189 00:17:07.460 --> 00:17:13.620 spending a few years as an engineer, and then, finally, in the late 1940s, when he himself 190 00:17:13.620 --> 00:17:17.900 Joseph was in his mid-40s, settling down to write full-time. 191 00:17:17.900 --> 00:17:23.780 He had begun writing in the 1930s, breaking into the American science fiction pulp magazines 192 00:17:23.780 --> 00:17:26.980 at around the same time as A. E. van Vogt. 193 00:17:26.980 --> 00:17:32.820 He wrote part-time for around 15 years, then fairly prolifically for another 15 years or 194 00:17:32.820 --> 00:17:37.620 so after he began devoting his full time to his literary endeavors. 195 00:17:37.620 --> 00:17:41.340 He wrote very little after around 1965. 196 00:17:41.340 --> 00:17:49.820 He died 33 years ago this month on February 28, 1978, at the age of 73. 197 00:17:49.820 --> 00:17:54.500 Since then, it's my distinct impression that his reputation among readers generally has 198 00:17:54.500 --> 00:18:00.300 gone into a precipitous decline, and libertarians are among those who would benefit most if 199 00:18:00.300 --> 00:18:03.180 this situation could be turned around. 200 00:18:03.180 --> 00:18:08.240 Novels, especially science fiction novels, have been an important means of spreading 201 00:18:08.240 --> 00:18:13.720 the word where libertarianism is concerned. They will continue to be an important means 202 00:18:13.720 --> 00:18:20.200 of getting our ideas out. And it is scarcely possible to conceive a more hardcore libertarian 203 00:18:20.200 --> 00:18:25.580 science fiction novel than The Great Explosion. Not only does it present us with a believable 204 00:18:25.580 --> 00:18:31.440 anarcho-capitalist paradise, but it is filled with a venomous contempt for everything about 205 00:18:31.440 --> 00:18:38.000 the state, especially military people, the more high-ranking, the more odious, and bureaucrats. 206 00:18:38.000 --> 00:18:45.000 Imagine a libertarian Catch-22 in space. It's that hilarious. It's that good. 207 00:18:45.000 --> 00:18:50.800 Yet this delightful minor masterpiece is currently out of print and becoming harder to find, 208 00:18:50.800 --> 00:18:56.320 unless you have a taste for 20-year-old disintegrating mass-market paperbacks or beat-up former 209 00:18:56.320 --> 00:19:02.760 library copies with stamps and stickers and filament tape and card pockets and dust jackets 210 00:19:02.760 --> 00:19:09.760 Van Vogt's Weapon Shops of Isher is out of print, too, but that's less important. 211 00:19:09.760 --> 00:19:18.760 Van Vogt's novel is of obvious interest to libertarians and to anyone interested in how libertarian ideas have made their way into our cultural tradition, 212 00:19:18.760 --> 00:19:27.760 but it holds its status as a classic work of science fiction despite the fact that, considered as a work of art, it's rather rudimentary. 213 00:19:27.760 --> 00:19:33.600 Van Vogt was an adequate writer at best, and he wasn't always at his best. 214 00:19:33.600 --> 00:19:39.000 His idea for a story is almost always more interesting than the actual story he ends 215 00:19:39.000 --> 00:19:41.880 up making out of that idea. 216 00:19:41.880 --> 00:19:46.920 Eric Frank Russell was a much better writer than Van Vogt, and The Great Explosion is 217 00:19:46.920 --> 00:19:53.400 much more deserving of both intellectual and literary immortality if only of a modest sort 218 00:19:53.400 --> 00:19:55.920 than is The Weapon Shops of Isher. 219 00:19:55.920 --> 00:20:02.000 Let's do our part, shall we, to ensure that Russell's best and most admirable novel gets 220 00:20:02.000 --> 00:20:04.600 its just desserts. 221 00:20:04.600 --> 00:20:05.600 This is Jeff Rigenbach.