Order from a Major Online Bookstore
Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine
Save Your Time And Money
| AnyBook4Less.com | Order from a Major Online Bookstore |
|
| Home | Store List | FAQ | Contact Us | | ||
| Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine Save Your Time And Money |
||
 |
Title: Beggars Ride by Nancy Kress ISBN: 0-8125-4474-9 Publisher: Tor Science Fiction Pub. Date: 15 December, 1997 Format: Mass Market Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $5.99 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.1 (10 reviews)
Rating: 2
Summary: Perfunctory writing suits unengaging characters
Comment: It's a credit to Nancy Kress's skill that she got me to read to the end of the book, though I think it might have been more a case of wanting to see the entire train wreck.
The Beggars World series started off with a simple premise that quickly got out of hand: people who don't need to sleep are...well, omnipotent supermen. Eh? Having written herself into a box, Kress keeps the Sleepless offstage for nearly the entire book, then dispenses with the problem entirely through a pair of perfunctory, Sterling-esque plot twists. It kills me that I can't reveal them. Suffice to say that they're logically implausible given the nature of the people they affect, as painstakingly delineated over the preceding hundreds of pages.
Fine. But who are the Emergency Backup Protagonists? We've met them before: whiney milquetoast-with-a-woody Jackson, his daffy sister, quasi-Hellbitch Vicki, and Certified Hellbitch Cazie. Oh, don't forget sooper-genius hacker Lizzie, who reverts to Liver speech, her, when under stress, notices, and then just keeps doing it, her. Gaak.
Well then. Maybe the overarching theme redeems the book. Why yes, it does: Feeling sad? Feeling blue? Turn that frown upside down and just whistle a happy tune! I can't imagine this book actually suggests that one can overcome crippling anxiety and depression by make-believe and goodthink, so I must have misunderstood this part.
Did I mention the whole series is set in one of the most numbingly unpleasant dystopias ever to grace the SF field? If you're going to go that route, you'd better give us characters that make us care, that engage our sympathy or outrage. But all the groups we meet--Livers, donkeys, Sleepless--are so thoroughgoingly repellent that you kind of wish the bad guys *would* win and exterminate the species already, so we can start over with monkeys or penguins or something.
Rating: 4
Summary: DYSTOPIA a la carte
Comment: The Beggars Trilogy is a sordid tale depicting a drug addicted U.S. population a century into the future. The bio-engineered, genius tribe called the Sleepless decide to play god with the common man. They essentially turn man into plants. They used an injection of nanobots to grow a network embedded in man's skin- enabling him to feed from the soil as roots nourish a tree. Further, man's skin could also use photons like plants do in photosynthesis. How does that sound? The leitmotif reminds me of Eugene O'Neill's LONG DAYS JOURNEY INTO NIGHT. If in a century nanotechnology engulfs genetic engineering it appears the result shown in this book will be artificial life, not enriched life. Genius in this tale snuffs out both hope and free will. The Super sleepless had as much fear of innovation as the retarded sleepers. As both sides fought to retain the old and curtail the new, we are led to a total impasse. A snake swallowing its own tail.
This series is quite an undertaking. The craft of writing is mastered, the suspense sustained to the end, and lots of learning was dispensed on how the brain parts work. The question that must have kept cropping up with Ms. Kress was, "What do I do for an encore?" This confrontation with biogenetic engineering took the reader as deeply into dystopia as is inhumanly possible. Some of the characters actually evolved right out of the human race to become the Sleepless Masters who fortunately, it turned out, had an Achilles heel. The Sleepless saw themselves as gods to the unevolved human. When their plan went up in smoke not a tear was shed by the reader. Why not? Because here was a story of sex without joy, intelligence like dead AI, and spirituality without god. The trilogy spanned over a hundred years but where were the holidays, where was Easter and Christmas? It was bleak, bleaker and bleakest.
Rating: 5
Summary: Best of the Beggars series
Comment: I don't know what my fellow reviewers are smoking --this is definitely the best of the Beggars trilogy. Not that you can really read it apart from the rest of them; you really need all three to see how far Kress got with developing the Beggar-world, which started (in Beggars In Spain) like all good science fiction does, with a simple question: What if people didn't need to sleep anymore? And went on from there, sort of answering that question directly in BIS and more dealing with the ramifications of it in Beggars and Choosers and becoming more of an attempt to tap into the quasi-mystic Answering Big Questions vein of science fiction in Beggar's Ride. Her solution as I understand it is basically sort of a tempered enthusiasm for modern science: look outward, but don't forget to look inward as well. That's the best I can describe it without giving too much away. And I love the way how from book to book Kress has no problem moving on to new characters. The scientific denouement is at the end of BR is not the wow-shocker that concluded BIS and B&C, but I only enjoyed BR more for it, and for Kress's guts in not feeling like she had to blow up the Death Star to get her point across (though that happens too). Within the trilogy we go from a world from where some people can't sleep to one where everyone has to look within themselves for answers, and it's just amazing how we went from good honest hard SF to wonderful philosophical SF within these three books. The changes, and the way things changed, are amazing. Good good stuff.
 |
Title: Beggars & Choosers by Nancy Kress ISBN: 0812550102 Publisher: Tor Books Pub. Date: February, 1996 List Price(USD): $5.99 |
 |
Title: Beggars in Spain by Nancy Kress ISBN: 0380718774 Publisher: Eos Pub. Date: 01 March, 1994 List Price(USD): $7.50 |
 |
Title: Probability Sun by Nancy Kress ISBN: 076534355X Publisher: Tor Science Fiction Pub. Date: 17 February, 2003 List Price(USD): $6.99 |
 |
Title: Probability Space by Nancy Kress ISBN: 0765345145 Publisher: Tor Science Fiction Pub. Date: 30 December, 2003 List Price(USD): $6.99 |
 |
Title: Probability Moon by Nancy Kress ISBN: 076534341X Publisher: Tor Science Fiction Pub. Date: 16 September, 2002 List Price(USD): $6.99 |
Thank you for visiting www.AnyBook4Less.com and enjoy your savings!
Copyright� 2001-2021 Send your comments
