Beggars and Choosers

Name: Beggars and Choosers
Brand: Blackstone Audiobooks
Availability: InStock
Author: Nancy Kress
ISBN: 9781433270024

Author: Nancy Kress

Narrator: Stefan Rudnicki, Cassandra Campbell, Mirron Willis, and Kirsten Potter

Unabridged: 12 hr 8 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Blackstone Audio, Inc.

Published: 02/17/2009

Categories: Fiction, Science Fiction

Synopsis

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 handsome and intellectually superior genemodified humans, 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 The Sleepless, radically altered humans, have withdrawn from the rest of the race to an island retreat, from which they periodically release dazzling scientific advances.Most of the world is on the verge of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 nanotechnology. Will the world be saved? And for whom? Beggars and Choosers is a rich, morally complex novel of a future world eerily like our own tomorrow. It is a major work of hard science fiction.

About Nancy Kress

Nancy Kress is the author of thirty-five books, including twenty-eight novels, four collections of short stories, and three books on writing. She has also authored over 100 short stories. Her work has won six Nebulas (for Beggars in Spain, The Flowers of Aulit Prison, Out of All Them Bright Stars, Fountain of Age, The Erdmann Nexus, and Yesterday’s Kin); two Hugos (for Beggars in Spain and The Erdmann Nexus); a Sturgeon (for The Flowers of Aulit Prison); and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award (for Probability Space). Her work has been translated into Swedish, Danish, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Polish, Croatian, Chinese, Lithuanian, Romanian, Japanese, Korean, Hebrew, Russian, Hungarian, and Klingon, none of which she can read. Much—though not all—of her later work concerns genetic engineering, on which she holds strong opinions. She has contributed stories on this topic to an anthology based on Microsoft’s Advanced Research division and to one created by the magazine Economist to showcase tech developments in the year 2050, among others. In addition to writing, Nancy has taught creative writing at various venues around the country, including Clarion, and abroad, and for thirteen years, she and Walter Jon Williams co-taught Taos Toolbox, a two-week intensive SF-writing course.Nancy lives in Seattle with her husband, writer Jack Skillingstead, and Pippin, a very indulged Chihuahua.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Kara on May 10, 2011

My golden standard when it comes to stories of genetic manipulation and its effects on society is Gattaca. I've only seen it twice, I think, yet its impact on my consciousness (and conscience) remains clear in my mind. Growing up concurrently with the Human Genome Project and watching the advancemen......more

Goodreads review by fromcouchtomoon on July 28, 2015

Kress does rich, white women really, really well, in almost a contemptible way. Some readers might mistake these protagonists for heroes, but the experiment is too complex for that. "Who should control technology?" is the question and, while the ridiculous social labels threaten to wreck the whole t......more

Goodreads review by Oleksandr on May 30, 2024

This is the second volume of Sleepless trilogy by Nancy Kress. It was nominated for Hugo, Nebula and Locus awards in 1995. The first book, Beggars in Spain, I’ve read a bit earlier (the review is here) and in this review, I’ll discuss some plot lines that spoil the first volume, so read on your own......more

Goodreads review by Kaiju on May 23, 2022

I really enjoyed Beggars and Choosers. For whatever reason, the story just grabbed me. I liked the alternating perspectives (conceptually) with the exception of Drew Arlen's. The whole Lucid Dreamer thing didn't make sense to me in the first book, and still doesn't make sense here either. Additional......more

Goodreads review by Nancy on July 05, 2015

The following review has spoilers for Beggars in Spain, the first book in the Sleepless Trilogy. There are no real spoilers for Beggars and Choosers. Genetic modification has run amok in the 21st century, dividing America into two groups: genetically enhanced donkeys who rule the world, and livers wh......more