Nancy Kress came into her own with this novel (which is the first of a trilogy, something I didn’t know until checking up for this post), winning the Hugo and Nebula awards in 1993 for the novella in which it originated. The book is more of a quartet of novellas than a single novel-length story, though this made no difference to my enjoyment of it.
Beggars in Spain, which begins in 2008, takes two ingredients from the science fiction counter: human genetic engineering is widely available and here we’re specifically concerned with a genemod that removes the need–and ability–to sleep, and a cheap, apparently unlimited source of energy has become available. The so-called Sleepless, partially due to other genemods and partially due to the other effects of removing the need to sleep, are smarter and healthier than Sleepers, plus they have that extra eight hours a day to get things done.
In the increasingly economically stratified American society, the Sleepers increasingly dislike these new folk, and dislike turns to hate and then to persecution and outright discrimination. Because the genemod is expensive and early experience shows that the Sleepless are hated even by their own parents, only a few thousand are ever engineered though, not surprisingly, the trait is a dominant one and generally inherited by offspring.
Kress also throws in the highly individualistic, even Randian, philosophy of Kenzo Yagai, the man who developed that cheap source of energy, which appeals greatly to the Sleepers. This is where the title comes from: if you’re walking down a street in Spain and one beggar asks you for money, do you give it to him? What about the second beggar? What if there are 100 beggars? In other words, what claim do the weak (i.e., unproductive) have on the strong?
Kress heightens the conflict by extrapolating the bread and circuses trend of mindless living, exacerbated by the massive loss of jobs to automation (and presumably cheaper labor elsewhere, though the story itself barely mentions the world outside of America) which is counterbalanced by the patent royalties on Yagai’s inventions, which he has given to the American government. Most people, by the end of the story, do little but party, watch sports, eat and sleep; a small percentage, the donkeys, run the corporations and government.
The Sleepers, with a handful of exceptions, despise and fear the Sleepers and physically isolate themselves, first in an enclave in upstate New York and later in an orbital habitat. Their intelligence and sense of purpose, plus having started out generally well off anyway, lead them to become an immensely wealthy clan, financially equal to any nation, but their small numbers and cultural position mean their political power is nowhere near commensurate with their economic status.
Beggars is clearly an attempt by Kress to debate the meaning of community and the best balance of group and individual. She closes by having her main character summarizing it to a young woman who is Sleepless and something more: “[We] saw that it’s not possible to have both equality, which is just another name for community sollidarity, and individual excellence.“
recommended
BillSaysThis 