Beggars Ride (Hardcover)

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.

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.