Naomi Kritzer’s Liberty’s Daughter (2023) is a good old fix-up novel, stitching together several stories published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction during the mid-2010s. Its near-future setting introduces us to Beck Garrison, a resourceful teenager growing up on the Seastead — an extranational collection of offshore platforms and tethered yachts situated off the coast of California. Beck moved there with her controlling father Paul, after her mother’s death; that relationship may be strained, but Beck’s relationship to life on the platforms is far from it. Indeed, Beck has a no-nonsense, get-things-done approach that she converts into a career as something of an amateur scrounger. As she makes friends and connections across the various oceanic settlements, her individual missions contribute to a greater understanding of the Seastead and its many mysterious workings — while also pulling back the veil on her murky family past.
Fix-up novels can be a tricky beast; short-story pacing doesn’t always translate to novel length, and sometimes the Frankenstein seams can show. To Kritzer’s credit, Liberty’s Daughter reads effortlessly as a coherent, extended narrative — decidedly episodic, but with continuity of voice, theme, and world-building that carries the story smoothly across its sections. Beck may be unrealistically wiser than her years, but she is a relatable, rallying figure, giving a winning coming-of-age vibe to a richly imagined, futuristic sociopolitical critique. A quick, enjoyable read.
