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| "This colossal anthology covers the return of sf to themes based in the hard sciences. . . . A very satisfactory overview of a major portion of contemporary sf and a sterling achievement by Tor and the Hartwell-Cramer team."
Booklist
From Paul McAuley's tale of runaway technology ("Gene Wars") to Gregory Benford's story of evolution and murder ("Immersion"), the 41 stories in this annotated anthology provide a strong argument for the revival of hard sf as a major force in the genre in the 1990s. Library Journal |
Nancy Kress: Beggars in Spain
Nancy Kress (1948- ) is one of the major SF writers of the last two decades, well-known for her complex medical SF stories, and for her biological and evolutionary extrapolations in such classics as Beggars in Spain (1993), Beggars and Choosers (1994), and Beggars Ride.(1996). In 1998 she married SF writer Charles Sheffield. In recent years, she has written two science thrillers, Oaths and Miracles (1995) and Stinger (1998), SF novel Maximum Light (1998), and Probability Moon (2000) and Probability Sun (2001), the first and second books in a trilogy of hard SF novels set against the background of a war between humanity and an alien race. Her new novel, Probability Space, is out in 2002. Her stories are rich in texture and in the details of the inner life of character and have been collected in Trinity and Other Stories (1985), The Aliens of Earth (1993), and Beaker's Dozen (1998). She teaches regularly at summer writing workshops such as Clarion, and during the year at the Bethesda Writing Center in Bethesda, Maryland. She is the Fiction columnist for Writer's Digest.
Kress, as much as any SF writer today, is an heir to the tradition of H. G. Wells. Nowhere in her work is this more evident than in "Beggars in Spain," and the novels that have grown out of it. With this story, she began her magnum opus. In this story she deals with human and social evolution, with class and economic issues, and with ordinary characters, as Wells did in "A Story of the Days to Come," and When the Sleeper Wakes. It is a more European than American approach, though set in the USA.
Here, genetically engineered children requiring no sleep are persecuted for their differentness, a theme with roots both in Zenna Henderson and A. E. van Vogt's Slan. Discussing Beggars in Spain, the novel that grew out of this novella, in an interview, she said:
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The tension between the state and the individual is what gives most fiction its pull and when I wrote Beggars in Spain, I was thinking of Ayn Rand's objectivism at one pole, and at the other, Ursula K. Le Guin's Anarres in The Dispossessed. Anarres is Le Guin's version of anarchy, which is an intensely social system as she has set it up, and where solidarity is the basis for the construction of the society. So individual responsibility in the one end, solidarity in the other end, and what I wanted to do in Beggars in Spain is show that neither of these, to me, are especially good solutions: objectivism, because it ignores the fact that we are a social species; and anarchism, as Ursula Le Guin portrays it, because it is to me too idealistic. |
Thus Kress called two of the most powerful streams of political discourse in SF into question at the beginning of the decade, and like Kelly, below, finds a center by posing questions.