Naomi Kritzer, author of Liberty’s Daughter
Genre Fiction Category, sponsored by Macalester College
Each week leading up to the 36th annual Minnesota Book Awards, we are featuring exclusive interviews with our finalists. You can also watch the authors in conversation with their fellow category finalists here.
What is one detail you wanted to include in this book, but couldn’t find a place for?
In the original version of the final part, we see Beck attempt to attend an American high school and get in escalating trouble because she gets hungry in class and just gets out a snack. It’s a terrific scene, but what that portion of the book actually needed to be was the story of Beck getting to know her mom, so I cut it.
Tell us about someone who proved instrumental to the creation of this book.
My sister, Abi Kritzer, went to college with the guy who founded (and still runs) the Seasteading Institute. I first encountered the concept of seasteading in the context of, “oh, wow, this guy I sometimes see commenting on my sister’s LiveJournal is doing what now?” and was sufficiently intrigued that I did a bunch more digging. So my sister is one example; Patri Friedman, her former classmate the seasteading advocate, is another.
Tell us about a favorite read from the past year. Why did you find it enjoyable, insightful, or memorable?
One of my favorite books last year was Ink Blood Sister Scribe. (Which is also up for the Minnesota Book Award!) A lot of urban fantasy glosses over the problem of how magic exists in the real world while not being noticed by the majority of people walking around. This book really gets into the weeds of that worldbuilding in a super interesting way, exploring both the problems created by the secrecy, and the question of who has access to the stuff that can be created with magic and what they do with it.
Please tell us something about yourself that is not widely known.
As a hobby, I make tiny freehand landscape embroideries. I did embroidery in high school and then mostly quit, but picked it back up in 2020 because I needed to do something on zoom calls that kept my hands busy without distracting me from the conversation. I’m still doing regular Zoom calls and also still doing embroidery. I have made dozens of these little embroideries and most of them are just in a box. I need to figure out something to do with them.
Share your thoughts about the role and value of libraries.
Before I was a writer, I was a reader. These days, I do most of my reading on an e-reader, because I can make the font big enough to avoid eye strain. (I’ll note that I already wear progressive-lens glasses – if I didn’t, I wouldn’t be able to read normal print at all.) When I hear about a book I want to read, I hop onto the library app and put myself on the waiting list for it, and as books come in, I can check them out online and download them straight to my e-reader. Of the books I read last year, I read almost twice as many library books as I did books I owned in some form.
So on an entirely personal level, libraries are where I go to get most of my reading material!
On a larger level, libraries are one of our greatest public assets and resources. At the center is free access to information, but they do so much more than that – like the Innovation Lab at the downtown St. Paul library, which lets people make an appointment to use a laser cutter, a 3D printer, a sewing machine, and a number of other pieces of specialized equipment.
The extent to which libraries look at resources and ask the question “how do we make this available to the public” is unparalleled.
Naomi Kritzer is a science fiction and fantasy writer, author of Catfishing on CatNet, Chaos on CatNet, and a collection of short fiction called Cat Pictures Please and Other Stories. Her fiction has won the Hugo Award, the Lodestar Award, the Edgar Award, the Locus Award, and the Minnesota Book Award.