Those major criminals whose crimes-through the contractual freedom of the place-existed mainly on paper, found it convenient, while there, to keep life on the streets fairly safe and minor crimes at a minimum.Īctually, finding libertarian ideas in Delany’s fiction should come as little surprise. Minor criminals were not likely to retreat there: enforcement agents could enter the u-l sector as could anyone else and in the u-l there were no legal curbs on apprehension methods, use of weapons, or technological battery. Problems a few conservative, Earth-bound thinkers feared must come, didn’t: the interface between official law and official lawlessness produced some remarkably stable unofficial laws throughout the no-law sector.

These sectors fulfilled a complex range of functions in the cities’ psychological, political, and economic ecology. Even if they turn around and say, all right, we’ll spend the money on things you can use, like an army or roads, that just turns it into glorified protection money, as far as we’re concerned.”Īt the corner, he turned toward the unlicensed sector.Īt founding, each Outer Satellite city had set aside a city sector where no law officially held-since, as the Mars sociologist who first advocated it had pointed out, most cities develop, of necessity, such neighborhoods, anyway. “Well, we were brought up to think of taxes as simply a matter of extortion by the biggest crooks who happen to live nearest to you. Delany’s Triton, and if it isn’t sufficient to indicate the explicitly libertarian thrust of the novel, consider this: It makes for competition between the parties, which, in our sort of system, is but individuating and stabilizing.” And you get the various benefits of the platform your party has been running on. You’re governed for the term by the government of whichever party you vote for. “And when you have an election, none of them ever wins?”īron watched Sam decide to laugh. Only about thirty to thirty seven, depending on which satellite you’re on.” There’re not hundred,” Sam said, sipping his broth. “They’re always telling on the news about all those hundred of political parties you have on each satellite, out where you guys are from.

Triton by Samuel R. Delany