Science & Technology - Fiction, Social Science Fiction, High Tech and Hard Science Fiction

Beggars & Choosers

Name: Beggars & Choosers
Author: Nancy Kress
ISBN: 9780812550108

by Nancy Kress

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Overview

In Beggars and Choosers, Kress returns to the same future world created in her earlier work, an America strangely altered by genetic modifications. Millions of ordinary people are supported by the efforts of the handsome and intellectually superior gene-modified, who are in turn running scared in the face of the astonishing, nearly superhuman powers of the Sleepless, who have their own agenda for humanity. The Sleepless, radically altered humans, have withdrawn from the rest of the race to an island retreat, from which they periodically release dazzling scientific advances. Most of the world is on the verge of collapse, overburdened by a population of jobless drones and racked by the results of irresponsible genetic research and nano-technology. Will the world be saved? And for whom?

About the Author, Nancy Kress

Nancy Kress was born and raised in upstate New York, where she spent most of her childhood either reading or playing in the woods. She earned a bachelor's and master's degree in education, as well as an M.A. in English. While she was pregnant with the second of her two sons, she started writing fiction. She had never planned on becoming a writer, but staying at home full-time with infants left her time to experiment.

In 1990 she went full-time as an SF writer. The first thing she wrote in this new status was the novella version of Beggars In Spain, which won both the Hugo and the Nebula Award. She is the author of more than twenty books, including more than a dozen novels of science fiction and fantasy, as well as three story collections, and two books on writing. Of her most recent novels, Probability Space (Tor, 2002) won the John W. Campbell Award for Best SF novel. Her short fiction has appeared in all the usual places, garnering her one Hugo and three Nebula Awards. Her work has been translated into Swedish, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Polish, Japanese, Croatian, Lithuanian, Romanian, Greek, Hebrew, and Russian. She is also the monthly "Fiction" columnist for Writer's Digest Magazine and she teaches writing regularly at various places, including Clarion and The Writing Center in Bethesda, Maryland. She currently resides in Rochester, New York.

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Editorials

Locus

Intellegent, humane, involving, utterly genuine... magnificent.

Roland Green

The sequel to the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning "Beggars in Spain" (1993) stands independently of it, despite taking Kress' story of both human and societal evolution several steps farther. The world is now divided into the nearly superhuman Sleepless, the genuine "homo superior" (the genetically engineered elites who do much of the work), and the virtually unemployable masses. Apart from the struggle for power and survival among the three groups, the novel's future U.S.A. faces the threat of uncontrolled nanotechnology. Kress's work remains strongly character driven, an approach that in her hands raises social-speculation sf to about as high a level as one can reasonably expect.