L. Neil Smith was born in Denver, Colorado on May 12th, 1946. His father was an Air Force officer, so he grew up all over North America in places like Waco, McQueenie, and Laporte, Texas; Salina, Kansas; Sacramento, California; and Gifford, Illinois — all before he was in 5th grade — and then St. John’s, Newfoundland and Ft. Walton Beach, Florida where he graduated from high school.

Neil always expected to be a scientist, leaning toward marine biology (especially tidepool studies) and organic chemistry — a special science achievement award was generated just for him in junior high school — until he discovered the stifling degree to which the academic sciences are regimented, and that most science consists of writing grant applications and washing laboratory glassware. Later, his scientific focus began to center on paleontology, archaeology, anthropology, and human evolution, interests often reflected in his work today. Along the way, Neil also acquired a deep interest in language and history, and studied Latin, German, and what was then called “comparative philology.”

Neil began shooting when he was around 11 years old, through a joint program of the National Rifle Association and the Boy Scouts of America. Ultimately, he won the rank of Eagle Scout and “more sharpshooter bars than I can remember.” Neil has also studied European fencing and certain of the Asian martial arts, including Judo, Tae Kwon Do (in which he broke his foot, “forcing” him to sit still and write his first novel), and Tai Chi. Recently, he has begun looking into Dim Mak, the “forbidden” martial art. A gunshop owner, laboratory ballistician, and reserve police officer in the early 1970s, he is often recognized as “one of the world’s leading authorities on the ethics of self-defense.”

Music — primarily guitar and banjo — has always been a large part of Neil’s life (lyrics to several of his earlier songs may be found in his 1986 novel The WarDove) and he was practicing six hours a day when other young men his age were learning to drive and obtain their licenses, something he himself has never accomplished. In high school and college, he performed solo, and led a number of small groups and bands including “The Shady Grove Singers,” “The Roughriders,” and “The Original Beautiful Dreamer Marching Jug Band.” His first “real” job was as a banjo player at a Shakey’s pizza parlor. Today he sometimes participates in a weekly “bluegrass jam” at a local bar and restaurant called “Avogadro’s Number.”

Greatly preferring science fiction — “the only remaining literature of ideas” — to any other literary form, Neil’s boyhood favorites were Arthur Clarke, Theodore Sturgeon, Isaac Asimov, Poul Anderson, Richard Wilson, Robert Scheckley, Zenna Henderson, and of course, Robert A. Heinlein, to whose works his own are often favorably compared. Later, he discovered the books and stories of the late H. Beam Piper; his daughter is named after one of Piper’s characters, the Princess Rylla in Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen.

Shortly before Heinlein’s death, Neil learned that the “Old Man” read every novel he had written, and approved of them highly, advising aspiring writers that “L. Neil Smith writes good books,” containing “exactly the right mixture of sex, violence, and political preachment.” Neil has never worried about critics since then.

It was through his interest in science fiction that Neil first encountered the works of Ayn Rand in 1961, when he read Anthem, The Fountainhead, and Atlas Shrugged and knew he had found the worldview that would guide him for the rest of his life. He also recognized (and has since written about) the unique way that the ideas of Rand and Heinlein complement each other, and it was this direction he began to take philosophically and politically. It was at a party one evening in 1962 that he learned — from friendly John Birch Society members — that he was and remains today) a libertarian.

Neil joined the Libertarian Party in 1972, the first full year of its existence, serving on the national platform committee in 1977 and 1979. He has run for political office twice, setting records of one kind or another each time. It was in 1972 that he met the great libertarian teacher and philosopher Robert LeFevre. Neil became a life member of the National Rifle Association in 1974. In 1977, frustrated by the course American politics was taking, he began work on a highly polemic science fiction novel, originally titled The Constitution Conspiracy, which he hoped would do the same thing for libertarianism that Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin did for Abolitionism or Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward and the works of H.G. Wells did for early socialism.

That novel was published in December of 1979, by Del Rey Books, a division of Random House, the first publisher that read it, under the more familiar title The Probability Broach and has since acquired a reputation as the “definitive” libertarian novel. It was the first of 28 L. Neil Smith books (so far), including The Crystal Empire, Henry Martyn, Pallas, Bretta Martyn, Star Wars: The Lando Calrissian Adventures, The Mitzvah and Hope — with Aaron Zelman — and Forge of the Elders.

Neil has adapted The Probability Broach as a 185-page full color “graphic novel,” which is also available as a webcomic, and has also written graphic novel/webcomic scripts for Roswell, Texas, TimePeeper, the forthcoming Phoebus Krumm. At the moment he’s working on a number of new books, another with famous cartoonist and humor writer Rex F. “Baloo” May (who collaborated with him on Roswell, Texas), as well as a third volume of what will ultimately be the four-book “Ngu Family Saga.” He is writing Where We Stand, a book on libertarian policy with his daughter Rylla.

A highly prophetic author, Neil’s writings have predicted, among other things, the collapse of the Soviet Empire, the laptop computer and the PDA, wall-sized flat video screens, .40 caliber weapons, the Internet as we now know it, computer-aided forensics, and the digital watch. His novels have won four Prometheus Awards and numerous Freedom Book of the Month and Freedom Book of the Year awards, as well.

In addition to THE MORATORIUM, his personal website “The Webley Page”, and an energetic blog on the site of his comic book publisher, for more than 12 years Neil has been the publisher of The Libertarian Enterprise, a weekly journal reflecting the opinions of a couple of dozen writers, acting as the “conscience” of the libertarian movement.

For several years, Neil was an enthusiastic competitive shooter, favoring NRA Hunter’s Pistol, the half-scale version of international handgun metallic pistol (he used a S&W 10mm revolver and shot in the mid 20s). He plans to resume competition when he can find the time. He is also a philosophical advocate of hunting, in the manner of Jose Ortega y Gasset.

At present, and for the foreseeable future, he lives in Fort Collins, Colorado with his wife Cathy, his daughter Rylla, her dog named Graywind, and two cats, Amber and Ambrose.