Libertarian Paradise 29 December 2013
Every year I look forward to the release of the Year’s Best SF anthologies by David G. Hartwell. I don’t read a ton of science fiction but between reading those and listening to Escape Pod I feel like I’m exposed to a lot of the best stuff.
My favorite story in this Year’s Best was ‘Liberty’s daughter’ by Naomi Kritzer. I’d describe it as a hard-boiled, Young Adult detective story set in a floating Libertarian paradise. If that sounds intriguing you should just go read the whole story, the author has posted it on her website.
When reading the story I couldn’t quite decide if the author was a Libertarian who was envisioning this floating city as a paradise or a progressive looking at it as a dystopian future. If you spend a little time on the the author’s blog you’ll see she’s very active in local politics and that understanding of groups shows up in the story.
I enjoyed it so much I went looking for the other two stories in the series ‘High Stakes’ and ‘Solidarity’ which were in back issues of F&SF on Amazon. It was the first time I’ve stayed up that late reading in quite a while.
I should also note that it’s pretty awesome that so much of the content is available for sale on-line. I didn’t have to send off for back issues, or try to track down copies at the library, I could just 1-click purchase, and then do a bunch of fiddling with the Kindle app to get it to download but still pretty awesome.