Beggars Ride (Beggars Trilogy, Book 3) - Hardcover

Kress, Nancy

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312858175 ISBN 13: 9780312858179

Publisher: Tor Books, 1996

Synopsis

Nancy Kress, one of the leading writers of science fiction today, has written a number of provocative and award-winning stories and novels. But it is with the Beggars trilogy that she has reached the pinnacle of her success. Developed out of her Hugo and Nebula Award-winning novella, "Beggars in Spain," the trilogy was launched with Beggars in Spain (1993), also a Nebula nominee for best novel, and continued in Beggars and Choosers (1995). Both received widespread praise and unusual enthusiasm. Locus, for instance, referred to "the joy of reading a work of SF so intelligent, humane, involving, utterly genuine...magnificent," and went on to say, "It is Kress's brilliant achievement in Beggars and Choosers, that scientific progress and human idealism, the driving forces behind some of the best hard SF...,never leave behind the passionate muddle that is life...."

Now the trilogy is completed in Beggars Ride, a compelling novel of science fiction that raises one of the most ambitious and large-scale works of the decade to the status of finished masterpiece. Kress, a writer who had been appropriately compared to H.G. Wells and Aldous Huxley, deals with evolutionary forces, genetic engineering, technological progress, and social and class conflict, confronting enduring issues that face human society in this century and the next.

The Sleepless and the SuperSleepless, two generations of genetically modified superhumans, are now in conflict with each other, and with the spectrum of normal humanity, whose radical division into the rich and poor has made a parody of democracy in the twenty-second century. Human civilization has been transformed. Now it may be destroyed. And if it falls, what kind of world is left, what kind of humanity?

Nancy Kress has written a work of fiction that culminates and brings to new fruition the Wellsian strain of SF invented a century ago.

About this title

About the Author

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.

Reviews

YA. This third volume in the award-winning trilogy (Beggars in Spain [1993] and Beggars and Choosers [1994]) takes the masterful story of genetic manipulation to its logical conclusion. Kress continues in the same tradition of terrific storytelling, but this series must be read in order. While this title does not stand on its own, YAs who enjoyed the first two will like it.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

With this final installment, Kress brings her Beggars trilogy to a powerful close. The earlier novels (Beggars in Spain and Beggars and Choosers) chronicled the rise of the Sleepless, genetically enhanced humans whose capacity to learn and work without rest quickly left the remainder of humanity behind. As much as Sleepers may envy the Sleepless, however, they crave the advancements provided by Sleepless scientists. Now, in the 22nd century, 125 years after the genetics breakthrough that created the Sleepless, beauty and intelligence are easy for the wealthy, known as "donkeys," to achieve with "genemod." Outside the cities, unenhanced "Livers" survive on the scraps of the rich. Traditional medicine no longer exists. Thanks to Sleepless research, a single injection of Change gives the human body a lifelong ability to fight off disease and regenerate cells. When the supply of Change is suddenly cut off, however, the tenuous equilibrium between Livers and genemod donkeys is shattered?and this time there doesn't seem to be any help coming from the Sleepless. If Kress's characters aren't quite as compelling as they were in the previous two Beggars books, perhaps that's because, with crucial exceptions, genetics (rather than character) is destiny in the latter stages of her nanotech world. Class warfare isn't all that distinguishable from race war, as the donkeys and the Livers head toward conflict and as a group of the Sleepless, led by Jennifer Sharifi, try to exploit that struggle for their own ends. The scale of Kress's vision is large as she lays out a drama that?convincingly if unsurprisingly?argues that moral quandaries can't be addressed by technology.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

On 22nd-century Earth, Dr. Jackson Aranow finds he must begin to practice real medicine when artificially engineered superhumans withhold the genetically enhanced Change formula. In the conclusion to her "Beggars" trilogy, Kress shows us the pitfalls in a world dependent on medical technology and the consequences for humans. Highly recommended for sf collections.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Tor Books
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0312858175
• ISBN 13: 9780312858179
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304