Description:

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.

Amazon.com Review

Nancy Kress ends her Beggars trilogy (which began with the novella later turned into a novel, Beggars in Spain) almost full circle from where it began. Against a backdrop where rich humans have themselves modified to perfection and poor, unmodified "Livers" eke out a nomadic existence, the genetically superior Sleepless have stopped distributing Change. Change is the miracle substance that prevents disease in all humans. In cutting off Change, the Sleepless have ignited a class war that will ultimately be resolved not by technology and science, but by the children of technology, who must live side-by-side despite their differences.

From Publishers Weekly

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.
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