This sets up tensions as the girls grow up. Of their two baby girls, only one is modified, the other ordinary.
Dramatically, the couple obtains the treatment and becomes pregnant - but with twins. There are three or four plot-lines, and themes, going on. The story begins as this treatment is still confidential, but a well-off couple has learned of it and wants the modification for their upcoming daughter. The premise is that a genetic modification has been developed that will allow humans to live without sleeping. It’s one of the greatest science fiction novellas of all time.
She received award nominations (and one win) for three or four stories in the ’80s, with the one under discussion here, “Beggars in Spain,” won both the Hugo and Nebula and remains her most famous story. Kress began writing in the late 1970s, produced three fantasy novels in the early 1980s (which I’ve never read), then settled into writing science fiction, increasingly with a bent toward hard SF of a biotechnical sort, considering issues ranging from genetic engineering to alien psychology. It was the basis for a novel of the same name, published in 1993, that in turn formed the basis for a trilogy with later novels Beggars and Choosers (1994) and Beggars Ride (1996). It won both the Hugo and Nebula for best novella, placed 2nd in that year’s Locus Poll/Awards (to a story by Kristine Kathryn Rusch), and won three lesser awards/polls. This week’s novella covered by the Facebook Group reading Gardner Dozois’s big anthology first discussed here is “Beggars in Spain” by Nancy Kress, first published in the April 1991 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction.
0 kommentar(er)
