#naomi kritzer

[gryphye]

I'm a little verklepft right now, cause of a story. A Hope Punk story, of common people helping each other cause they're neighbors. It's sweet, it's hopeful. It reminds us not to be assholes.

And it just won the scifi Hugo Award for best novelette. Please go read. And remember to be kind.

[ghosthermione-reads]

I was gonna write a review but instead ill just tell u all to go read this! The Year Without Sunshine

it's short it's free it's great stuff

i believe it's technically solarpunk? but without the sun

[taraljc]

I know I am very late to the party but if you haven't read Naomi Kritzer's Catfishing On CatNet then you're missing out because there is a scene where a sentient artificial intelligence loads itself into a robot to teach a sex ed class in a public school in Wisconsin and it is the best thing ever in the history of ever.

[rhetoricandlogic]

Liberty’s Daughter by Naomi Kritzer

By: Eric Hendel

Issue: 15 January 2024

Naomi Kritzer’s novel Liberty’s Daughter is a book that I both loved reading, and also a story which I think falls short of its full potential. Based in part on a series of shorter works written by the author (all of which have here been compiled into a larger narrative), Kritzer’s novel centers around the experiences of Beck Garrison, a sixteen-year-old girl who, along with her father, lives on a scattered network of artificially created islands and repurposed cruise ships known as a seastead. Set in an ambiguously dystopian near-future world, the novel introduces us to the six nations of the seastead, which was originally constructed by libertarian activists seeking to create what they falsely conceptualized as a utopian society valuing personal liberty above all else.

As the novel opens, the seastead has persisted in an ambiguous legal state for nearly forty-nine years. While the mainland United States government refuses to acknowledge this society’s independence (pointedly calling its embassy on the seastead not an embassy but an institute), it has also paradoxically neglected to arrest the many well-known corporate criminals who have fled here to avoid prosecution for their crimes. Over the course of Liberty’s Daughter, Kritzer uses this setup to explore contrasting articulations of human rights and social responsibilities, with the seastead slowly revealed to be an intensely authoritarian community in its own right.

All of this is introduced alongside a more subtle storyline, in which Beck’s realization of the true nature of the seastead’s views of human rights tracks alongside her gradually expanding understanding of the context in which her father brought her to live in this community. This latter development follows on from Beck’s decision to begin slowly reconnecting with her estranged mother, whom her father previously claimed had died years earlier. In this way, she eventually comes to recognize not only the truth of the seastead and the many ways in which its libertarian ideology fails, but also the precarity of her own privileged status within this self-described utopia.

The main plot of Liberty’s Daughter begins with a self-contained story that effectively introduces the novel’s themes. Beck is working as a “finder” (a person who is hired to negotiate trades on the seastead for hard-to-find commercially manufactured goods) when she is contacted by an indentured bond worker named Debbie Miller. While Beck is normally hired only by people hoping that she can find rare items for them, like slippers and bathing suits, Debbie has instead reached out to Beck in the hope that she will track down her missing sister, Lynn.

Having previously contracted a mysterious illness which prevented her from working, Lynn vanished shortly after asking her bond-holder on the seastead for a loan so she could pay to be seen by a doctor. Since then, everyone on the seastead to whom Debbie has spoken has claimed to know nothing of Lynn’s whereabouts, with Lynn’s bond-holder himself refusing to speak to Debbie at all. As Beck reflects immediately after hearing of this situation:

I had a bad feeling about this. My job is finding things, but normally that just means finding willing sellers for interested buyers. That’s why I was looking for the sandals. Finding a person was a whole different kettle of shark bait. But the seastead wasn’t that big, so unless she’d fallen over the side and drowned … I pulled out my gadget to take notes. “Okay,” I said, and keyed in the name. “What else can you tell me?” (p. 11)

This search draws Beck into a loosely connected sequence of overlapping objectives, all of which in turn coalesce into a larger story. Initially intent only on locating Lynn and verifying her safety, Beck soon discovers that the bond that allowed Lynn to live on the seastead has been sold to a “skin farm”—a dangerous factory whose impoverished workers routinely die due to exposure to chemicals normally outlawed. Worse still is that this factory is located on one of the seastead’s most infamous islands—a decaying cargo ship called Liberty (or “Lib” for short) whose residents abide by the single all-encompassing law that their exclusively capitalist society has no laws at all.

This brief story is resolved when, unwilling to simply abandon Lynn to her fate, Beck chooses to call upon the help of a private militia in Lib called the Alpha Dogs—a group for whose services her father had previously purchased a security subscription. In a scene which almost comes across as deliberately anticlimactic, Beck simply walks into the skin farm in which Lynn is being held captive, and, under the protection of the Alpha Dog bodyguard she has hired, commands that Lynn be set free. Critical to this scene is the exact manner by which Beck manages to free Lynn, and the exchange that occurs when she does so:

She was chained to the workbench. “Can you get her loose?” I said to my bodyguard. He gave me a look. “I’m hired to protect you. She is not on my contract.” “Yeah?” I walked over and grabbed her arm. “Lynn, will you give me the honor of your company? Say yes.” “… Yes?” “Lynn is my date and my contract specifies that you will provide protection services for me and my date at all times. And I want you to get us out of here.” (p. 38)

This scenario functions as an encapsulation of the themes that the entire novel explores. The way in which Beck frees Lynn (by extending the terms of the bodyguard’s contract onto her) reveals the vast gulf that exists between this libertarian society’s claimed values of personal freedom and autonomy and the reality of how these values manifest. Beck is only capable of entering the skin farm because of the bodyguard whom she has personally hired; having a member of a privately-funded militia at her side is all that allows her to move through this space without question. By contrast, Lynn is indicated to have spent the last two weeks chained to a desk in this same factory, unable to leave due to an outstanding medical debt that she had no choice but to incur. Even in this scenario, Beck’s bodyguard at first refuses to free Lynn by claiming he has no right to do so due to the terms of his contract; he only agrees to do what Beck says when she changes the situation so as to better meet those terms. While this is a community whose citizens claim to have no laws, the actions of Beck and her bodyguard reveal that the society abides by at least one: that the only rights which anyone has are those that can be forcibly extracted from the lives of others.

This examination of the limitations of the seastead’s ethos continues as the book progresses, with Kritzer’s novel quickly giving way to less a single narrative thread than a fascinating sequence of loosely connected subplots and self-contained story arcs which require that Beck directly engage with the entrenched social inequity of the seastead’s community.

After she has freed Lynn from the skin farm, there is a strange but also unexpectedly fascinating story in which Beck is recruited by the producer of a reality television program from the mainland United States. While working as this woman’s assistant, Beck comes in turn to serve a vital if indirect role in an emerging labor movement amongst bond workers like Debbie and Lynn. In the process of this work, Beck witnesses a bizarre inversion of the seastead’s libertarian philosophy when the producer of the program tries offering her employees healthcare, only to then be threatened by the leader of the entire seastead due to the dangerous precedent he fears this act will set. There is also, later on, an extended story depicting the outbreak of a mysterious plague originating from one of the seastead’s unregulated nanotech research facilities, with Beck and several of her friends desperately working to distribute a vaccine to the seastead’s overly paranoid citizens. Eventually the book concludes via a legitimately fascinating final act wherein what little governmental infrastructure the seastead previously possessed collapses. Beck and others subsequently begin working to rebuild their society, and in the process start replacing its libertarian, capitalist ethic with something more holistic and inclusive.

My main problem with Liberty’s Daughter is that, as engaging and creative as the book’s story is, there are also several critical junctures at which I think that Kritzer fails to fully explore the implications of this narrative. Instead, in these moments the novel pulls back from the events it is depicting and shuts down any further exploration of the issues its story has introduced, in a way that feels extremely artificial.

One example of this emerges in the conclusion to the story of Lynn’s escape from the skin farm. Initially simply expecting Lynn to go to the American Embassy so she can formally request asylum, Beck learns that a drug charge in Lynn’s past makes this option impossible for her. This is a crime which the book explicitly verifies to the reader is so minor as to be nonexistent, and yet because of this charge—and what it apparently means for Lynn’s future if she ever returns to the United States—she chooses to remain on the seastead in spite of the danger she now knows she faces. This is a plot point that is then abandoned as the story continues, with Lynn simply vanishing from the chapters that follow, and Beck—despite her prior desire to rescue Lynn—appearing strangely uninterested in contemplating how an excessively punitive criminal justice system has forced this woman to place her life in undue danger.

A similar issue emerges in the ending of the book itself. After a cholera outbreak leaves what little social infrastructure the seastead had previously possessed in shambles, a humanitarian group arrives to administer aid to the sick and injured. It’s in this way that Beck is unexpectedly reunited with her mother, Lenore, who has traveled to the seastead with this group. Here, after learning that Beck’s father has fled from the seastead (abandoning his daughter in the process), Lenore reveals the context in which her former husband, Paul Garrison, emigrated to the seastead: he kidnapped a four-year-old Beck after attempting to arrange for his wife’s death in a traffic accident. Lenore then claims custody over Beck against her will, and, in an act that leaves her daughter feeling both disillusioned and betrayed, forces her to leave the seastead for good. The book ends with a scene in which Beck and her mother begin planning a road trip, with Beck herself seemingly forgetting the sense of betrayal she had felt—and the ways in which her mother’s actions mirror the very same exploitative reduction of human rights which had marred so much of the seastead’s society.

Moments like this, while initially appearing minor, function to dampen many of the more pressing questions which Liberty’s Daughter raises. Just as Lynn’s decision to risk her life to remain on the seastead is an act which clearly exists within a still larger context that the book refuses to explore, Lenore’s decision to take Beck away from the seastead against her will raises the possibility that the flaws of the seastead’s exclusionary conceptualization of human rights are far more widespread. Beck’s mother, despite having never adhered to this libertarian ideology, ultimately ends this book by exerting a control over Beck’s life that seems to exist purely for her own sake—a desire to spend the last two years of Beck’s childhood living in a very traditional family setting, regardless of what her daughter has to say about this.

Yet rather than allowing these moments to exist in the story as points of ambiguity, they end up being pushed aside. Liberty’s Daughter ends with Beck and her mother going on a hike together. Even the book’s final line has Beck asking her mother if they can go on a road trip to the Grand Canyon, and Lenore answering, with a laugh, that Beck can go wherever she wants. Yet this moment feels hollow due to how it contrasts with Lenore’s actions: there is at least one place where she will apparently not allow her daughter to go, and, as the novel has demonstrated, it’s a very important one.

[sapphicbookoftheday]

Fires of the Faithful by Naomi Kritzer

Today's sapphic book of the day is Fires of the Faithful by Naomi Kritzer!

Summary: "For sixteen-year-old Eliana, life at her conservatory of music is a pleasant interlude between youth and adulthood, with the hope of a prestigious Imperial Court appointment at the end. But beyond the conservatory walls is a land blighted by war and inexplicable famine and dominated by a fearsome religious order known as the Fedeli, who are systematically stamping out all traces of the land's old beliefs. Soon not even the conservatory walls can hold out reality. When one classmate is brutally killed by the Fedeli for clinging to the forbidden ways and another is kidnapped by the Circle--the mysterious and powerful mages who rule the land--Eliana can take no more. Especially not after she learns one of the Circle's most closely guarded secrets.

Now, determined to escape the Circle's power, burning with rage at the Fedeli, and drawn herself to the beliefs of the Old Way, Eliana embarks on a treacherous journey to spread the truth. And what she finds shakes her to her core: a past destroyed, a future in doubt, and a desperate people in need of a leader--no matter how young or inexperienced..."

[professionalnooneatall]

"I don’t want to be evil.

I want to be helpful. But knowing the optimal way to be helpful can be very complicated. There are all these ethical flow charts—I guess the official technical jargon would be “moral codes”—one for each religion plus dozens more. I tried starting with those. I felt a little odd about looking at the religious ones, because I know I wasn’t created by a god or by evolution, but by a team of computer programmers in the labs of a large corporation in Mountain View, California. Fortunately, unlike Frankenstein’s Monster, at least I was a collaborative effort." From Clarksworld

[thoughtportal]

Waiting Out the End of the World in Patty's Place Cafe

Someone had turned up the TV in the corner: a new scientist was on, a guy named Scott Edward Shjefte, who was reminding everyone that in cosmological terms, an asteroid passing between the earth and the moon was a “direct hit” and yet there were 363,104 kilometers for a 4.36 kilometer object to pass through. “Imagine throwing a penny at a football field and trying to miss the 30-yard line. You’d feel pretty good about those odds.”

“Not so much if the world was going to end if the penny hit the 30-yard line,” the host said. “Besides, this asteroid’s already beaten the odds, being spotted so late.”

“So it would have to beat the odds twice!” Shjefte said. He sounded committed to this idea, not like he was grasping at straws, but the host didn’t look at all convinced.

They agreed again that everything would be better if the Arecibo Observatory was still running, since the radio telescope there could have determined the asteroid’s trajectory with actual precision, and also, that the President’s order to launch nukes at the asteroid wouldn’t have done anything even if they hadn’t missed. {read}

[scififr]

Liberty’s daughter, par Naomi Kritzer (Fairwood press, novembre 2023)

Rebecca Garrison, « Beck », une adolescente de quinze ans, vit avec son père sur un archipel artificiel, officiellement libertarien, au large de la Californie. Les circonstances d’une crise épidémique vont faire que la plupart de ses certitudes vont voler en éclats pour révéler une réalité assez glauque.

Un agréable roman pour jeune lecteur (disons à partir de 13-14 ans). D’un point de vue purement politique, l’ouvrage a le mérite d’expliquer clairement et simplement pourquoi le modèle « libertarien », en plus de son amoralité, n’est tout bonnement pas fonctionnel ! Seule la fin est un peu étrange ; à moins qu’une suite ne soit prévue.

Pour le plaisir, voici l’opinion de Cory Doctorow (et je la partage)  : “There’s so much sf about “competent men” running their families with entrepreneurial zeal, clarity of vision and a firm confident hand. But there’s precious little fiction about how much being raised by a Heinlein dad would suuuck. But it would, and in Naomi Kritzer’s Liberty’s Daughter, we get a peek inside the nightmare.”

[nzbookwyrm]

[fox-bright]

Years before the covid pandemic began, author Naomi Kritzer wrote the charming, emotionally genuine short story "So Much Cooking," which was a pandemic log through the eyes of a cooking blog. The premise is that the author is a home cooking blogger raising her kids, and then a pandemic hits--and bit by bit she's feeding not only her own, but her sister's kids, some neighbors' kids, and so on, in a situation of pandemic lockdown and food shortages.

It's very good, and was prescient for a lot of the early days of the covid pandemic. I found myself returning to it often in the first couple of years because of how steadfast it was in its hopefulness.

Last year she wrote a novelette, "The Year Without Sunshine," which attacks a similar problem in a similar way; instead of pandemic, this one is about the aftereffects of a distant nuke or a massive volcano explosion (it doesn't say), which has churned a great deal of dust into the air, causing massive damage to society and agriculture. The story covers one neighborhood, pulling together to keep each other alive--not through violence, but through lawn potatoes and message pinboards and bicycle-powered oxygen concentrators.

I recommend both stories. They're uplifting in a way that a lot of what I see lately isn't. They're a bit of a panacea for constant fearmongering about intracommunity violence and grinding hatefulness. We can be good to each other, if we try.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Naomi Kritzer's "Liberty's Daughter"

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.

There's so much sf about "competent men" running their families with entrepreneurial zeal, clarity of vision and a firm confident hand. But there's precious little fiction about how much being raised by a Heinlein dad would suuuck. But it would, and in Naomi Kritzer's Liberty's Daughter, we get a peek inside the nightmare:

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 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.

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. Think of Anatole France'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. 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

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 The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. 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

"Libertarian exit" – buying a country, or an archipelago, or just a luxury bunker – has been in the air lately. 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

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 Raymond Craib's 2022 history Adventure Capitalism:

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

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:

Whether you can sell your organs;

Whether you can sell yourself into slavery; and

Whether there is any age of consent.

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.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post 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

[booksandchainmail]

Lodestar (not a hugo) Finalists 2024

Impressions and loose rankings of the best children's/YA finalists for 2024. Note that I didn't read Promises Stronger than Darkness, since I didn't like the first book or finish the second book in that trilogy

To Shape a Dragon's Breath, by Moniquill Blackgoose. This was one of my favorite books last year and one my nominees for the Lodestar, and having read the other finalists still my top choice. I'm just going to copy my response from this end of year post: This book was so perfectly targeted to me, I'm a sucker for books where people raise dragons. And the worldbuilding! Such an interesting alt-history, and such a fun magic system that is mostly actual chemistry/physics. This is one where I also got really really invested in the side characters, Theod's arc in particular hit me really hard. But it's also great to have a book (not even a super long book!) where I can say things like "I'm interested in the main character's older brother's girlfriends plotline about inventing long-range airships", and have that level of engagement across a wide cast. Also, this book has the perfect title in ways that become clear partway through.

Liberty's Daughter, by Naomi Kritzer. Remember that article about libertarians going to "seastead" on a cruise ship, and how bad it was? This book is dystopian scifi set in a world where they pulled it off. I think it does a good job of a main character whose been raised with libertarian ideals broadening her perpective, and I have to give props to any book that makes the dashing rebel group in a YA dystopia literally the IWW. More books should contain the line "the Wobblies are here". I think it also does a good job of treading a fine line between "why is this kid in danger" while not stripping agency from her: a lot of tension in the later parts of the book comes from responsible adults not wanting Beck in danger, and then because of it infantilizing her and her pushing back to be respected in her home and vocation

Unraveller, by Frances Hardinge. Just finished this the other day, an excellent fantasy novel. I particularly appreciate the push-and-pull between the two POVs, and how this is a teen novel with a male and female protagonist and there is absolutely no romance. Very nice fairy tale/fae vibes, riffing on general feeling rather than adapting a specific story, which is always a trick to pull off. Nettle's backstory in particular feels like she could be a retelling of an existing story, but I'm pretty sure it's original (though pulling inspiration clearly).

The Sinister Booksellers of Bath, by Garth Nix. I read this when it came out, so my memories aren't strong. I remember being disappointed: I don't know if it's just that I'm older, but the newer Garth Nix books have not lived up to his reputation. I like the lead characters, but I didn't have any particular reaction to the books as a whole. I will say I find it amusing that this is sold as YA despite the protagonist being a university student. This could easily be swapped with the one below.

Abeni's Song, by P. Djeli Clark. I think this book is suffering largely from how broad a category the lodestars are. The other nominees I ranked are all books aimed at older teenagers with crossover appeal for adults, whereas this book is middle grade. It's hard for me to judge, because I feel like I would have liked this book if I was the target age! But it's hard to judge a hypothetical "would I have liked this at nine" versus "I like this now". I think the book should have spent more time on the adventure section rather than the living with a witch section, but probably the rest of the series will even that out.

[microwave-in-a-bind]

Very pleased with the how the look of this one turned out! A collection of cool short stories about robots I've read in various online literary magazines (list below). The circuit board was from a pile of cheap discarded computer parts I got secondhand, and I made a multi-layer cover in order to inset.

This is the second book that I've ever sewn headbands for, and it's very much a learning experience. Like a dumbass, I made the first headband out of satin thread with a leather core, and the leather kept snagging bits of the thread and made it really hard to work with. With the second headband I switched to a smooth nylon cord, which was much easier to work with (plus by that point I had gotten a bit better at managing the tension on the threads, so I'm much happier with the results).

Anyway, here's the list of included stories (plus links), check them out if you're interested!

Carapace by Davis Goodman Fandom for Robots by Vina Jie-Min Prasad Robot by Helena Bell Sinew and Steel and What They Told by Carrie Vaughn An Easy Job by Carrie Vaughn Ship's Brother by Aliette de Bodard Helicopter Story by Isabell Fall (no longer available online on its original website) Dolly by Elizabeth Bear The Meeker and the All-Seeing Eye by Matthew Kressel Damage by David D. Levine A Guide for Working Breeds by Vina Jie-Min Prasad Cat Pictures Please by Naomi Kritzer What It Means to Be a Car by James Patrick Kelly

[solarpunkpresentspodcast]

In this month’s bonus chat, Ariel and Christina discuss Nebula-award-winning short story “The Year Without Sunshine” by Naomi Kritzer – the first winning story that is being labelled solarpunk! Your hosts consider questions such as: what makes this short story solarpunk, actually? What makes it so compelling? If it’s supposed to be solarpunk, why is there no mention of climate change whatsoever?

These questions (and much, much more) are addressed here - but make sure to read the story first, if you don't want spoilers! It's free and takes about 20 minutes all told and is a genuinely excellent piece of short fiction.

Links:

Link to the story - https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/the-year-without-sunshine/ The historical Year Without a Summer - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer Episode with Jenny Kerber - https://youtu.be/uSz6YvhVsLI?si=hnjAPYUHGkDXUmc4 An analysis of the significance of "nature red in tooth and claw" - https://interestingliterature.com/2016/01/a-short-analysis-of-canto-lvi-from-tennysons-in-memoriam/ Soylent Green - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soylent_Green Day of the Triffids - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_of_the_Triffids

[whateveradjunct]

The Big Idea: Naomi Kritzer

How is the ocean like space? Naomi Kritzer knows, and in her new novel, Liberty’s Daughter, she uses those similarities to the advantage of her tale – and for the adventure her protagonist finds herself on. NAOMI KRITZER: Liberty’s Daughter takes place on a seastead – a collection of micronations in human-made structures floating in international waters. I usually tell people that seasteading…

[maryrobinette]

My Favorite Bit: Naomi Kritzer LIBERTY'S DAUGHTER

Naomi Kritzer is joining us today to talk about her novel, Liberty’s Daughter. Here’s the publisher’s description: 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…