Liberty's Daughter

Winnipeg seems to be a black hole in terms of getting Naomi Kritzer books. The Winnipeg Public Library has two older UA novels currently but the copy of her book of short stories, Cat Pictures Please, that I took out in 2018 seems to have been deleted. Neither of the two independent bookstores that I patronize has any of her books although they would order them. Fortunately for me, friends in Minneapolis went to the signing of this book and got me a copy. (They are really good friends because they found out that the cost to mail it to me was almost as much as the cost of the book.) It was wonderful to read the first book of what promises to be a very interesting series.

Rebecca (who prefers to be called Beck) lives on a seastead with her show more father. The seastead is an manmade archipelago in the Pacific Ocean composed of constructed platforms and old ships. Like an archipelago, there are individual islands most of which are joined by bridges but a few can only be reached by boat. The seastead was started by libertarian separtists who didn't want to be subject to government interference in their lives so, of course, there are few laws. Beck and her father moved to the seastead from California after her mother's death. Beck receives tutoring along with the handful of other teenagers on her island but she still had time to get a part-time job. She works for a store that specializes in finding hard to acquire objects and it turns out Beck is good at finding things. When she finds the sparkly high-heeled sandals that some customer wants they are the property of a debt slave i.e. a person who moved to the seastead for work but had to borrow money to get on the islands and has to work that debt off. This debt slave, Debbie, came with her sister Lynn but her sister has been missing for 3 weeks. Debbie wants Beck to find Lynn in return for the sandals. Beck may be young but she's smart and she knows her way around the seastead. Her father is also quite influential but Beck has to tread carefully in terms of letting him know what she is doing. While Beck does succeed in finding Lynn she also finds more than she expected. It turns out that her mother is very much alive and has been trying to communicate with Beck by sending letters to the American consulate. When Beck takes Lynn there to get her legal assistance she is handed a letter from her mother. Quite a shock for Beck which leads her to wonder what else her father might have hidden. His work involves genetic manipulation of diseases so there's quite a scope for secrets. Can you imagine the potential for chaos if a new disease is unleashed on the seastead? The plot whizzes along, taking the reader with it.

Kritzer has done a great job of world-building. I could easily picture all the places that Beck took us. I just hope it's not too long until the next book in the series is out. show less

This is a "fix-up" of six novellas originally published in F&SF, about a teenage girl living on a libertarian seastead in the near future. I do like Krtizer, but going in I was a bit skeptical, because I didn't see how that might capture what I like about her work, which is (as I said in my review of her Hugo Award for Best Novelette finalist for this year) that "she tells stories about the hard work we do to maintain community." But Kritzer finds a place for that here, as what her protagonist discovers is that even in an every-man-for-himself environment, people still form community and help each other. I don't think it's a perfect book—the somewhat jerky movement of plot betrays its origins as six separate stories, the ending leaves show more perhaps slightly too many threads and ideas unexplored—but overall I enjoyed it a lot and found it very readable. Neat sense of a possible world, and I liked how that world was slowly unspooled. (Fun fact: I asked my local library to purchase this, and though they did, they reclassified it from "Teen" [where I put it since it was a Lodestar Award finalist] to "Adult.") show less

Rebecca lives with her father on a libertarian seasteading complex; since he’s a stakeholder, they live pretty well. But when, at sixteen, Rebecca starts doing jobs to earn her own money, she discovers many dark sides, including the way that people are pushed into slavery for debt. At the same time, she’s been raised in the ideology and likes the freedom of action she has. It seemed a bit optimistic about the long-term chances of survival when whoever controls the water treatment plant can (a) charge what they like and (b) determines through their competence whether people will survive, but maybe that’s appropriate for a sixteen-year-old protagonist for whom everything is possibility.

I read this young adult work as part of the Nebula Award/Norton packet. I found it to be a breezy, intense read, genuinely interesting from page one. I think my only issue was that it was clear that different segments were published separately, as the sections still felt somewhat disjointed. A fabulous work, though. I've really enjoyed everything I've read by Kritzer.

Briskly paced story of a 16yr old girl, daughter of a "big man" on sea platform where law is minimal and only enforced within agreed boundaries. The action is in two parts, a finder/detective portion that sets the scene and later resources and a epidemic portion that changes the game. Significant plot elements require a minor to be the character of agency, but don't make the level of competence entirely convincing.

Becks lives on a SeaStead with her father who is one of the leaders of this space, which is organised in a somewhat haphazard libertarian manner with different zones and rules. Becks has contacts and is willing to trade for people but when disease starts to spread she finds that not everything is as it seems.
Apparently this was a number of short stories brought together into a novel and sometimes it feels like some different snapshots of this world. It took me a few goes to get started on it and properly into the story.