Sleepless (Kress)

In a world where the slightest edge can mean the difference between success and failure, Leisha Camden is beautiful, extraordinarily intelligent, and one of a growing number of human beings who have been genetically modified to never require sleep. Once considered interesting anomalies, now Leisha and the other "Sleepless" are outcasts, victims of blind hatred, political repression, and shocking mob violence meant to drive them from human society and, ultimately, from Earth itself. But Leisha Camden has chosen to remain behind in a world that envies and fears her "gift,” a world marked for destruction in a deadly conspiracy of freedom and revenge.

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 gene-modified 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 The Sleepless, radically altered humans, have withdrawn from the rest of the race to an island retreat, from which they periodically release dazzling scientific advances.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.

In this final installment of Nancy Kress's award-winning Beggars trilogy, it is now two hundred years in the future. Regular human beings hate and fear the Sleepless and the SuperSleepless, genetically-modified humans who are immune to disease and hunger and who do not need to sleep. When the Sleepless plot to take over the world and leave regular humans powerless, civilization and the very meaning of the word “human” hang in the balance.