Type of bind: Mass Market Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN num: 9780812544749
ISBN number: 0812544749
Label: Tor Science Fiction
Manufacturer: Tor Science Fiction
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 416
Printing Date: December 15, 1997
Publishing house: Tor Science Fiction
Sale Popularity Level: 665915
Studio: Tor Science Fiction
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Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
Nancy Kress, one of the leading writers of science fiction today, has written a number of provocative and award-winning stories and novels. But it is with the Beggars trilogy that she has reached the pinnacle of her success. Developed out of her Hugo and Nebula Award-winning novella, 'Beggars in Spain,' the trilogy was launched with Beggars in Spain (1993), also a Nebula nominee for best novel, and continued in Beggars and Choosers (1995). Both received widespread praise and unusual enthusiasm. Locus, for instance, referred to 'the joy of reading a work of SF so intelligent, humane, involving, utterly genuine...magnificent,' and went on to say, 'It is Kress's brilliant achievement in Beggars and Choosers, that scientific progress and human idealism, the driving forces behind some of the best hard SF...,never leave behind the passionate muddle that is life....'
Now the trilogy is completed in Beggars Ride, a compelling novel of science fiction that raises one of the most ambitious and large-scale works of the decade to the status of finished masterpiece. Kress, a writer who had been appropriately compared to H.G. Wells and Aldous Huxley, deals with evolutionary forces, genetic engineering, technological progress, and social and class conflict, confronting enduring issues that face human society in this century and the next.
The Sleepless and the SuperSleepless, two generations of genetically modified superhumans, are now in conflict with each other, and with the spectrum of normal humanity, whose radical division into the rich and poor has made a parody of democracy in the twenty-second century. Human civilization has been transformed. Now it may be destroyed. And if it falls, what kind of world is left, what kind of humanity?
Nancy Kress has written a work of fiction that culminates and brings to new fruition the Wellsian strain of SF invented a century ago.
Amazon.com Review:
Nancy Kress ends her Beggars trilogy (which began with the novella later turned into a novel, Beggars in Spain) almost full circle from where it began. Against a backdrop where rich humans have themselves modified to perfection and poor, unmodified 'Livers' eke out a nomadic existence, the genetically superior Sleepless have stopped distributing Change. Change is the miracle substance that prevents disease in all humans. In cutting off Change, the Sleepless have ignited a class war that will ultimately be resolved not by technology and science, but by the children of technology, who must live side-by-side despite their differences.
User popularity level:
Rated by buyers 
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a sci fi book i borrowed from my friend. it's the last in a trilogy i did not read, but i was able to understand the jist of it. this is a future i actually could imagine, with those beautiful, drugged people being the ruling class. i found all of the characters very interesting, although the main guy was kinda dislikeable because he acted so weak half the time. very good book, you should read it.
Rated by buyers 
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I picked up Beggar's Ride in a bookstore without noticing that it was book three of a trilogy. I'm usually a stickler for reading an author's books in the order they were written - even when they're unrelated. So, reading the third book in a trilogy without reading the very first two is a stretch for me, but I did it. And, boy was I disappointed.
In my experience, you don't read later books very first because, in an effort to make sure the reader knows what is going on, authors tend to give away important plot information from the very first two books. Not this one! I managed to get through this book without truly understanding the sleepless, the super sleepless or anything about what motivated them. I learned nothing about the Change wars. While I could follow the plot of Beggars Ride reasonably well; without any information about the world it just wasn't very interesting.
The characters in Beggars Ride were, generally, not very interesting. In many cases, their motivations were incomprensible. The plot twists (which I won't reveal for those who still want to read this) felt like real cop-outs and the ending seemed more than a little unrealistic.
Since I didn't read the very first two books in the trilogy, I'll give Ms. Kress the benefit of the doubt and give her two stars. But, really, all books should stand on their own. They should be better when read as a series, but comprehensible independently. Next time, if Ms. Kress can't be bothered to work the pertinent details into the story, maybe she should consider providing a written version of "previously on..."
Rated by buyers -
I loved Beggars in Spain and have read it and the sequel, Beggars and Choosers, many times. However, this novel is a bad ending to the trilogy, mainly perhaps because my favorite character, Leisha Camden, was killed off in the second novel. Most of the characters are two-dimensional and unlikable, except for Lizzy, a throwback genius Liver who is doomed to a welfare existence.
Rated by buyers -
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.
Rated by buyers -
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.
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