\o/

Thank you so much! It's fantastic that it's by the MoPI dude.

-Robin

Yaaaaay! That's it. I had it in my Fictionwise account, it turns out. -_-

I think the reason I remember reading it online is that the Hugo nominee stories are distributed that way these days.

-Robin

It took me a long time to find a copy of the novel. I bought and read several others by Kress in the course of the search and they were good but not directly on the theme. I will expand on the juicy concepts below the tangent.

Tangent: I found Beggars at Elsewhere Books in San Francisco which is awesome. The store only has scifi/fantasy/mystery, much of it out of print, and the owner has probably read about 60% of the books in the store and is interesting to talk to. Also, there's an encyclopedia of science fiction you can browse at the front desk so you can look up a theme like "time travel" and get a list of books from 1940 to 1985 that dealt with the theme, and then go try to find them in the store.

Kress's other books have actually stayed with me longer because they were unique for science fiction in terms of characterization. Generally there is a strong correspondence between the "reality" of the book and the "mental models" of the main characters, and most characters share deep similarities with each other partly for this reason. For example, in Ender's Game, a basic theory of military strategy and human manipulation are common to many characters, are intelligible across characters even where they disagree, and they all basically work for those characters. The "military genius trait" means that a roughly coherent "military genius skill" is stronger or weaker in people, and it can be developed in a roughly linear way, and the ecological validity of the construct is never seriously in question.

Some of Kress's non-Beggars novels lack this "coherent reality-psychology correspondence" feature more dramatically than anything else I've seen anywhere in science fiction, with "incommensurably alien mindsets" not just between humans and extra-terrestrials, but also between human main characters. It is the best treatment I've ever seen of what it would be like for many people to be both sympathetic to the reader and yet all have a justifiable but vague sense that "the world is mad" when contemplating everyone else in the book.

I found Beggars to be less dramatic in this respect than otherwise -- it had more "incomensurable humans" than normal science fiction, but less than some of Kress's other work. I think part of this may have come from the fact that Kress had to posit a detailed theory of intelligence/sleep/thinking in order to write about humans who were cleanly and objectively superior to baseline humans.

Maybe it constrained the scope of her characterization when some characters were optimized all the way out to theoretical edge cases for the sake of exploring what happens politically and socially when some people having been optimized like this. That is, the story couldn't possibly work unless the superior characters where actually superior, and in order to portray that she had to use authorial fiat to make such-and-such minds find such-and-such traction in the depicted world. Maybe this limited the world and the characters more than was normal for her, so that the story looked more like the rest of science fiction (and thereby won a Hugo and Nebula)?

The novel, or the original short story? I read the latter a long time ago, but not the former.

It's on my list, actually; several friends have recommended it.

And now it is actually on the list. :)

-Robin