THE MANCHURIAN LOBBYIST

                      THE MANCHURIAN LOBBYIST

Gil Russell, Agent

The Meredith Scott Literary Agency

523 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10023

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

Author:  The Probability Broach, The Crystal Empire, Henry

Martyn, Pallas (forthcoming), et al.

Editor, LEVER ACTION BBS (303) 493-6674, FIDOnet 1:306/31/4

Libertarian Second Amendment Caucus

NRA Life Member