Mastodawn

There's so much #sf about "competent men" running their families with entrepreneurial zeal, clear vision and a firm confident hand. There's very little fiction about how much being raised by a #Heinlein dad would suuuck. But it would, as @naomikritzer's *Liberty's Daughter* shows:

https://fairwoodpress.com/store/p148/LIBERTY%27S_DAUGHTER.html

--

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/21/podkaynes-dad-was-a-dick/#age-of-consent

1/

LIBERTY'S DAUGHTER

NAOMI KRITZER November 2023 978-1-958880-16-6 Cover art by Leon Tukker trade paperback and ebook Order copies below, or buy print or ebooks of this title from these dealers. Beck Garrison lives on a seastead — an archipelago of constructed platforms and old cruise ships, assembled by libertarian separatists a generation ago. She's grown up comfortable and sheltered, but starts doing odd jobs for pocket money. To her surprise, she finds that she's the only detective that a debt slave can afford to hire to track down the woman's missing sister. When she tackles this investigation, she learns things about life on the other side of the waterline — not to mention about herself and her father — that she did not expect. And she finds out that some people will stop at nothing to protect their secrets . . .Also available from Naomi Kritzer:Cat Pictures Please

FAIRWOOD PRESS

Cory Doctorow Nov 21, 2023

Beck Garrison is a seasteader, living on a floating platform built by #libertarian cranks to get away from big government, taxes, and the idea that people owe each other care and consideration. Various kinds of market trufans have built their own fiefdoms: there's a sin city, a biotech free-for-all, a lawless Mad Max zone, and so on.

2/

Cory Doctorow Nov 21, 2023

Beck's father, Paul, is some kind of local functionary. He's wealthy and respected, both a power-broker and a power in his own right. He pays for Beck to get private tutoring (no public schools - no public *anything*) and if she needs bailing out from some kind of sticky situation, he's got her on his account with Alpha Dogs, the toughest mercenaries on the sea (no police, either). An armed society is a polite society, after all.

3/

Cory Doctorow Nov 21, 2023

Beck has a job, naturally (there ain't no such thing as a free lunch). She's a finder: for all that the steaders worship commerce as a sacrament consecrated to the holy Invisible Hand, there's not a lot of retail at sea. California - the nearest onshore neighbor - has lots of pesky taxes, and besides, it's a long ways off. Besides, space is at a premium on the stead, so people don't have attics and basements to fill with excess consumer junk.

4/

Cory Doctorow Nov 21, 2023

Instead, when a steader needs something - a shoelace, a fashion accessory, or any other creature comfort - they hire a finder like Beck to clamber around between the decks of the aircraft carriers, scows, yachts and other vessels comprising the stead. It's a good way for Beck to earn spending money, and she's a natural at it. After all, she's been a steader since she was four, when her mother died in a drunk driving accident and her father took her to sea.

5/

Cory Doctorow Nov 21, 2023

The story opens with a finding job. Beck wants a pair of sparkly shoes for her client, and the woman who owns them is an indentured servant whose sister has gone missing. Find the sister, get the shoes.

Indentured servant? Yeah, of course. Freedom of contract is the one freedom from which all the others flow, so you can sell yourself into bond labor. Hell, maybe you can earn enough to buy a share in the stead and become a co-owner/citizen.

6/

Cory Doctorow Nov 21, 2023

This is the setup for Beck's adventure, which sees her liberating bond slaves tricked into fatal work details, getting involved in reality TV production, meeting illegal IWW organizers, and becoming embroiled in a pandemic that threatens the lives of all the steaders. It's a coming of age novel, told with the same straightforward, spunky zeal of Heinlein's juvies, but from the perspective of the daughter, not the dad.

7/

Cory Doctorow Nov 21, 2023

Kritzer makes it clear that growing up under the thumb of a #TANSTAAFL-worshipping, self-regarding, wealthy autocrat who worships selfishness as the necessary precondition for market clearing would be a goddamned nightmare.

8/

Cory Doctorow Nov 21, 2023

She also thinks through some of the important implications of life in one of these offshore libertarian archipelagos, like the fact that the wealthy residents would be overwhelming drawn from the ranks of corporate criminals and tax-cheats, and the underclass would be bail-skipping proles ensnared in the War on Drugs.

9/

Cory Doctorow Nov 21, 2023

But *Liberty's Daughter* isn't a hymn to big government. Most of the steaders are escaping the US government, a state whose authoritarian and cruel proclivities are well-documented. Kritzer uses the labor dispute at the core of the novel to reveal *market* authoritarianism - the coercive power that hunger and poverty transfers from the have-nots to the haves.

10/

Cory Doctorow Nov 21, 2023

Think of #AnatoleFrance's wry observation that "the law, in its majestic equality, equally forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread."

If you're familiar with Kritzer's work, you won't be surprised to learn that she tells a zippy, fast moving tale that smuggles in sharp observations about the cleavage lines between solidarity and selfishness.

11/

Cory Doctorow Nov 21, 2023

Her story "So Much Cooking" - published years before the pandemic - captured life under lockdown with eerie prescience:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/17/pack-of-knaves/#so-much-cooking

More recently, her "Better Living Through Algorithms" is a dazzling display of knifework that'll cut you a dozen times before you even notice that you're bleeding:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/02/wunderkammer/#jubillee

12/

Pluralistic: 17 Apr 2020 – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow Nov 21, 2023

If you habitually read Kritzer's short fiction, *Liberty's Daughter* might be familiar to you, as it is adapted from a series of stories that originally ran in #TheMagazineOfFantasyAndScienceFiction. Kritzer's YA debut, *Catfishing on the CatNet*, was also adapted from a short story, "Cat Pictures Please," which won the Hugo Award in 2016:

https://boingboing.net/2019/11/19/setec-astronomy-kitteh.html

#LibertarianExit - buying a country, or an archipelago, or just a luxury bunker - has been in the air lately.

13/

Naomi Kritzer's "Catfishing on the CatNet": an AI caper about the true nature of online friendship | Boing Boing

Back in 2016, Naomi Kritzer won the Hugo award for her brilliant, endearing story Cat Pictures Please, in which an AI with an insatiable craving for cat pictures explains its view on the world and …

Boing Boing

Cory Doctorow Nov 21, 2023

It's a major element of my new novel, *The Lost Cause,* which came out this month - anarchocapitalist wreckers try to sabotage the Green New Deal from the seastead they've moored to the tallest point in the drowned Grand Caymans and declared to be a sovereign nation:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865939/the-lost-cause

14/

The Lost Cause

It’s thirty years from now. We’re making progress, mitigating climate change, slowly but surely. But what about all the angry old people who can’t let ...

Macmillan Publishers

Cory Doctorow Nov 21, 2023

Kritzer is great at catching that zeitgeist. Seasteading is part of a long, bitter dream of a certain kind of selfish person to escape society, a tale told in lurid and fascinating detail in #RaymondCraib's 2022 history *Adventure Capitalism*:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/14/this-way-to-the-egress/#terra-nullius

15/

Pluralistic: 14 Jun 2022 – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow Nov 21, 2023

There's a longstanding joke to the effect that you can shut down any discussion of the merits of a libertarian exit by asking three questions about the brave new world:

I. Whether you can sell your organs;

II. Whether you can sell yourself into slavery; and

III. Whether there is any age of consent.

16/

Cory Doctorow Nov 21, 2023

Kritzer tackles the first two, but tacks around the third. Instead, by giving us a young adult protagonist who has been raised in a rusting libertopia, she finds a decidedly less incendiary way to think about the role of autonomy in adolescents, and thus generates far more light than heat.

The result is a cracking read with a sting in its tail.

17/

Cory Doctorow Nov 21, 2023

Tomorrow (November 22), I'll be joined by Vass Bednar at the Toronto Metro Reference Library for a talk about my new novel, The Lost Cause, a preapocalyptic tale of hope in the climate emergency:

https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/705457551527?aff=oddtdtcreator

eof/

Generation of Lost Causes - Truth in Our Polarized Future

Author, activist, and journalist Cory Doctorow discusses generational divides and the risk of media induced polarization.

Eventbrite