The Beggars' Ride

With this final installment, Kress brings her Beggars trilogy to a powerful close. The earlier novels (Beggars in Spain and Beggars and Choosers) chronicled the rise of the Sleepless, genetically enhanced humans whose capacity to learn and work without rest quickly left the remainder of humanity behind. As much as Sleepers may envy the Sleepless, however, they crave the advancements provided by Sleepless scientists. Now, in the 22nd century, 125 years after the genetics breakthrough that created the Sleepless, beauty and intelligence are easy for the wealthy, known as ""donkeys,"" to achieve with ""genemod."" Outside the cities, unenhanced ""Livers"" survive on the scraps of the rich. Traditional medicine no longer exists. Thanks to Sleepless research, a single injection of Change gives the human body a lifelong ability to fight off disease and regenerate cells. When the supply of Change is suddenly cut off, however, the tenuous equilibrium between Livers and genemod donkeys is shattered--and this time there doesn't seem to be any help coming from the Sleepless. If Kress's characters aren't quite as compelling as they were in the previous two Beggars books, perhaps that's because, with crucial exceptions, genetics (rather than character) is destiny in the latter stages of her nanotech world. Class warfare isn't all that distinguishable from race war, as the donkeys and the Livers head toward conflict and as a group of the Sleepless, led by Jennifer Sharifi, try to exploit that struggle for their own ends. The scale of Kress's vision is large as she lays out a drama that--convincingly if unsurprisingly--argues that moral quandaries can't be addressed by technology. (Nov.)