Nancy Kress

Beggars in Spain: Book 1 of Beggars Trilogy

Nancy Kress

• 1994 Campbell 2nd
• 1994 Hugo-Novel nominee
• 1994 Prometheus finalist
• 1993 Nebula nominee
• Score: 26.44

Born in 2008, Leisha Camden is beautiful, extraordinarily intelligent . . . and one of an ever-growing number of human beings who have been genetically modified to never require sleep.

Once she and “her kind” were considered interesting anomalies. Now they are outcasts—victims of blind hatred, political repression and shocking mob violence meant to drive the “Sleepless” from human society . . . and, ultimately, from the 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…

Beggars and Choosers: Book 2 of Beggars Trilogy

Nancy Kress

• 1995 Hugo-Novel nominee
• 1995 Nebula nominee
• Score: 12.45

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 the handsome and intellectually superior gene-modified, 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 The Sleepless, radically altered humans, have withdrawn from the rest of the race to an island retreat, from which they periodically release dazzling…

Probability Space: Book 3 of The Probability Trilogy

Nancy Kress

• 2003 Campbell 1st
• Score: 10.53

In Probability Space, humanity’s war with the alien Fallers continues, and it is a war we are losing. Our implacable foes ignore all attempts at communication, and they take no prisoners. Our only hope lies with an unlikely coalition: Major Lyle Kaufman, retired warrior; Marbet Grant, the Sensitive who’s involved with Kaufman; Amanda, a very confused fourteen-year-old girl; and Magdalena, one of the biggest power brokers in all of human space.

As the action moves from Earth to Mars to the farthest reaches of known space, with civil unrest back home and alien…

Probability Sun: Book 2 of The Probability Trilogy

Nancy Kress

• 2002 Campbell 3rd
• Score: 6.52

Salvation or Annihilation?

A strange artifact has been discovered on a distant planet, an artifact that may be the key to humanity’s salvation. For we at war with the Fallers, an alien race bent on nothing short of genocide, and this is a war we are losing. The artifact is not only a powerful weapon, but possibly the rosetta stone to a lost superscience…a superscience that the Fallers may have already decoded. Or it may be a doomsday machine that could destroy the very fabric of space.

Maximum Light

Nancy Kress

• 1999 Spectrum shortlist
• Score: 6.49

By the middle of the twenty-first century the worldwide fertility rate has declined nearly eighty percent. No one knows why. Now the average age in the United States is fifty-four, and children are treasured and spoilt by those lucky enough to have them and coveted by the vast majority who can’t.

Maximum Light is the story of three people from different sections of this very different American society. Nick Clementi is seventy-five years old, a doctor, and an advisor to the Congressional Advisory Committee for Medical Crises. Shana Walders is twenty-six…

Beggars Ride: Book 3 of Beggars Trilogy

Nancy Kress

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?

The Beggars Trilogy

Nancy Kress

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.

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.

Probability Moon: Book 1 of The Probability Trilogy

Nancy Kress

Humankind has expanded out into interstellar space using star gates-technological remnants left behind by an ancient, long-vanished race. But the technology comes with a price. Among the stars, humanity encountered the Fallers, a strange alien race bent on nothing short of genocide. It’s all-out war, and humanity is losing.

In this fragile situation, a new planet is discovered, inhabited by a pre-industrial race who experience “shared reality”—they’re literally compelled to share the same worldview. A team of human scientists is dispatched—but what they don’t…

The Probability Trilogy

Nancy Kress

Humankind has expanded out into interstellar space using star gates-technological remnants left behind by an ancient, long-vanished race. But the technology comes with a price. Among the stars, humanity encountered the Fallers, a strange alien race bent on nothing short of genocide. It’s all-out war, and humanity is losing.

In this fragile situation, a new planet is discovered, inhabited by a pre-industrial race who experience “shared reality”—they’re literally compelled to share the same worldview. A team of human scientists is dispatched—but what they don’t…