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Gil Russell, Agent
Dear Gil:
After writing 18 SF novels in 15 years, it's time for a
change. How about a thriller that'll keep you up and turning
pages all night?
In the background, DoD has become no more than a welfare
system for redundant engineers and foundering corporations. The
military is only good for beating up on Third World losers, and
can't tell an airliner from an enemy fighter-bomber. Against
foes foreign and domestic, the only bulwark of America's unique
historical institutions is an armed citizenry, growing restive
under an unbearable burden of taxes and increasingly vocal about
it.
My first characters are left-politicos led by a senile,
obsessive -- but totally fictional -- Senator from Ohio and his
colleague, a semi-convicted murderer from Massachussetts. They
form a bipartisan cabal with the President, an ancient preppie
bright enough to see that he's the Jimmy Carter of the GOP and
determined to become its Lyndon Johnson if he has to destroy the
republic in order to save it. They scheme to strip Americans of
the hardware politicians always find so discouraging and turn
people back into the loot-producing serfs Alexander Hamilton
intended them to be.
They enlist the nation's top gun control advocates, which
look like any wine-and-cheese liberal pressure group. In fact
they're memberless fronts originally created by a Nixonian Odessa
of ex-CIA types determined to drag Dick -- or his political
ideas -- out of cryogenics where he stored himself two decades ago and
prop him up in the Oval Office for one last hurrah. The spooks
control the so-called mental health industry, grim gulags where
the light of the Constitution never shines and real-life mad
scientists pump helpless captives full of memory-cauterizing
voltage and identity-dissolving chemicals, producing customized
high tech zombies, sent home on disability payments to watch
daytime TV and gobble Twinkies with inhuman patience until
they're needed.
Now periodically we get enough of the gore that electronic
fear-merchants splash across our living room carpets every night,
or fed up with intrusive, incessant nagging labeled "public
service messages". Some of us appear to have absorbed the fact
that the Bill of Rights means what it says and that the state's
latest moral substitute for war is being waged against freedom
itself. It's then that one of these zombies gets a call with
key-words buried in it, "You have miles to go and promises to
keep, Orville-Bob...", takes up his saturdaynightspecial or his
evilassaultrifle (depending how he's been programmed), while the
senators, spooks, and fear-merchants warm up the public relations
machinery.
The zombie finds a Campfire Girls convention and blows away
as many photogenic victims as possible, then eats his front sight
and yanks the trigger one more time. Psycho-vultures descend on
the community and the media make a big deal of his history of
mental illness without mentioning the 20,000 laws already on the
books which forbid him to own guns. Instead, they blame tens of
millions of innocent gun owners (the killer isn't available for a
post-bloodbath interview, but his neighbors all say he was very
quiet) give 51% of their time to the front-groups who built the
killer in the first place and 51% to the spinless, dull-witted,
militantly moderate President and the senators from Ohio and
Massachussetts who "spontaneously" produce a 1500-page bill
depriving us not only of guns, but of kitchen knives, keyrings,
and fingernails.
Not one reporter asks why liberal Democrats are in bed with
Nixon's CIA.
Anyone who tries to point out that this spectacular and
convenient mass-Osterizing happened the very week the legislature
began deliberating gun laws, and that similar "coincidences" have
occurred in three states over the last six months, is kept off
the air at all costs. Maybe he'll get locked up and become the
next trigger-zombie.
The new bill violates 153 Constitutional provisions and
includes a death penalty for even thinking about Dan'l Boone's
flintlock, but gets befuddled blessings from the President. TV
keeps the pressure on: lavishing thousands of praise-filled
air-hours on the "courageous" senators who wrote it, they
simultaneously condemn it as too moderate, a sellout to the gun
lobby.
Now for a plot-twist: the rich, powerful, multimillion-member
group created to defend the principle of armed citizenry
to the death (and take whatever heat ol' Prez won't accept as his
part of the deal) inexplicably finds itself weak, poor, and
inclined to compromise -- although the media characterize it as
unyielding. Its official spokesmen help by shaving their heads
to enchance an already amazing resemblance to Nikita Khruschev.
We don't find out until the next-to-last chapter that it's as
stuffed with ex-Nixonites as the so-called liberal gun control
organizations.
I haven't figured out how the conspiracy gets exposed, but I
gotta have a happy ending. Maybe, although they don't know it,
the spooks were conditioned to kill themselves like zombies, to
give the President credible deniability. The senators are
convicted under a little known statute for violating their oath
of office and sent to a high-walled place with bars -- where the
regular tenants treat them the same way they've been treating
Senate pages for years.
Maybe I should update it to include a President who really is
a clone of Jimmy Carter and his wife, a reincarnation of Joan Crawford.
The media -- this is where I'm having trouble. My first
thought was, once the plot was exposed, they changed their ways
when they realized that their First Amendment rights weren't any
more secure than the Second Amendment rights of the gun owners
they persecute. But I can hear you saying right now that no
editor will go for that.
This is a novel, after all. It has to be believable.
L. Neil Smith
My home on the web, The Webley Page: www.webleyweb.com/lneil/
My e-zine The Libertarian Enterprise: www.webleyweb.com/tle/
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