Nancy Kress

Powerful end-of-the-world science fiction that is well written, elegantly structured and delivered on personal, human scale that increases its impact.


Nancy Kress' novella packs a big punch into a small package by combining powerful ideas with a clever story-telling structure and telling the story through the eyes of people you don't typically find at the heart of a so-this-is-the-end-of-the-world? story.

The makes-my-brain-stutter title, 'After The Fall, Before The Fall, During The Fall' show more isn't just decorative. It reflects the three converging timelines the story is told on.

We start 'After The Fall' in 2035, with twenty-seven human survivors, split between the ageing adults and the often weak or disabled young, living in a dome they didn't build and can't leave, on a devastated barren Earth and hoping to be the future of humanity.

We go back to 'Before The Fall' and watch a quant mine the data that tells her the world is heading for disaster and knowing that not only will no-one listen but that sharing the data will make her a target.

We converge on 'During The Fall' through an elaborate hard-for-the-reader-to-predict-but-fun-to-watch path. Then, right at the end, when we think we know just how bad everything is and how blind we were and how screwed we are, we get something new.

Nancy Kress makes this multiple timeline technique work well, using it to increase the tension and the sense of doom while leaving just enough wriggle room for hope that you don't give up.

The book was published in 2012. Reading it in 2020, it seems even more grimly plausible than it must have done then. I think it's a great example of Cli Fi (Climate Fiction). show less

My reactions to reading this novel in 1993. Spoilers follow.

One of the best sf novels I’ve ever read. This is an example of a sf novel dealing with large ethical questions in a style that reminded me a great deal of James Gunn’s 1950s sociological novels like The Joy Makers and The Immortals. First an ethical question is examined from one angle, usually at novella length (and I did greatly admire the opening part of this novel in its solo publication as the novella “Beggars in show more Spain”). Then the question is examined from another angle by presenting some new – usually technological or scientific – factor.

This novel has three things going for it.

The first is the ethical question it debates. How do individuals, socieities, and political systems cope with the essential inequality of man. The second is its realistic extrapolations of genetic engineering. The third is its preoccupation with American society -- no part of this part takes place outside of America – except for the illegal surgery on Drew in Mexico. Even Sanctuary is legally under U.S. jurisdiction. Kress has given a great deal of thought to her questions and the result is a fine novel.

Kress starts out in the first part with the creation of the Sleepless. Even just working with the advantage of not needing sleep is bad enough. Yet most of these Sleepless have been modified for high intelligence, and they all turn out to be very long lived. They are clearly superior to us Norms. Kress does a nice job with brief touches denoting Sleeper reactions like Moms who can’t handle constantly crying babies who never sleep or Sleepless skaters being banned from the Olympics because they can practice so much more. And they’ll be able to use their advantages a long time. People don’t deny their superiority and naturally resent it with various legal and personal consequences.

Most of the Sleepless subscribe to the libertarian (I suspect the specific influence of Ayn Randian given an interview I read with Kress.) philosophy of Kenzo Yagai, inventor of plentiful energy via cold fusion. He sees the basis of society as voluntary contract between two parties with third parties sometimes benefitting. The problem is – and it’s a real one – is that to Sleepless eyes the normal “Beggars” have nothing to give them nothing to trade but demand the fruits of their labor gained in the pusuit of personal excellence. Leisha Camden, protagonist and hero of this novel, resolves this problem (and I find this vision more convincing upon a second reading) by seeing society not based on linear trade but an ecology where people sometimes offer help without any real hope of direct gain and indirectly see benefits from the action of strangers. The Sleepless withdraw into the world, and the We-Sleep economic/political movement sweeps the Normal Sleeper world. Calvin Hawke, its leader, realizes the fundamental inequality of man, that not all can compete evenly in the pursuit of excellence (e.g. economic wealth, scientific achievement), so Sleepers are encouraged to boycott Sleepless and buy shoddier Sleeper goods. It all sounds plausible, a variation on the economic nationalism that puts up tariffs.

Kress than further alters things with more genetic alterations in the space Sanctuary colonoy – “Supers” are born with profoundly altered intelligences. On Earth, the exact opposite philosophy to Yagaism (Curiously, Yagai came to America because it was the last refuge of free enterprise.) reigns: a welfare state run by Normal “donkeys” with a mass of “Livers” bribed with increasing Dole benefits controlling things through their votes, and it’s all funded by the licensed patents of Yagai’s cheap fusion products that were willed to America. Eventually, this too collapses (and we never really discover how America will fare – I suspect its covered in later novels of the trilogy) when the license runs out, and America no longer has exclusive rights to “Y-energy” products. Throughout this, the Sleepless leader Jennifer Sharifi, gets more fanatical. She has adopted the view that community comes first and starts to suppress dissent and secretly hatches a plot – enforced by biological weapons – to secede from the U.S. (Hence the Abraham Lincoln epigraphs that open each section). Sharifi not only accepts the philosophy that the strong and productive owe nothing to those with nothing to trade, the so-called Beggars in Spain of the title. They eventualy refer to most of the Normals as Beggars, and the rebel Super children ironically adopt the name. Sharifi maintains that the weak and non-productive have no moral claim on the moral productivity of the strong (private charity, freely given, is another matter). The logical and political consequences of not agreeing leads to the welfare state of this book, a state that eventually levies incredibly heavy taxes on the Sleepless. However, Sharifi takes to killing handicapped, injured individuals (after all, they can not contribute anymore to the community and would feel very guilty about not be able to do so.), forcibly aborting babies that spontaneously revert to Normal form. The Superbabies – aided by the new art form of Sleeper Drew (an art which initiates a form of useful lucid dreaming in the Supers) – revolt, Sharifi’s plot falls through and her whole council is to be tried for treason, and a rapproachment may be underway between Sleeper and Sleepless as mediated by the Supers. However, this is uncertain as is America’s fate.

Throughout this plot are a lot of good things. I liked the poignant relationship between Sleepless. Leisha Camden and twin sister and Normal Alice Leisha. One is destined to achieve, beloved by her father, live a long life. Alice will have none of these things, but the sisters will develop a deep love for each other as Alice painfully realizes that hating Leisha for superiority will not change things. It’s a lesson we all have to painfully learn. As Kress has said in an interview, there is always someone who has more innate advantages in life than us be it looks, intelligence, energy, or money. She also rightly admits that this novel really does not come to a satisfactory answer to its deep, eternal philosophical questions. Its strength is answering the questions. Leisha Camden (the eternal exile from both the Sleepless and Sleeper worlds because neither accepts her and she will reject neither) comes to a couple of conclusions at novel’s end.

First, that the problems of the Sleepless in America society stem from trying to have a society where individuals can pursue individual excellence and still be considered equal. Inevitably, some become geniuses, some “resentful beggars”, some will benefit themselves and community, some will loot. Equality vanishes. This gloomy prognosis for American society seems credible, yet you could argue that the law never pretended everyone was equal, only that they would be treated equally. On the other hand, in a world with talented Sleepless, how can the Normals compete with such odds against them? A Hawke-like movement of shoddiness. And, of course, beggars begin to think its their right to the productive’s labor. (The sf element is just a way of showing up an already existing political/social question.) Leisha thinks the answer is not to assume that Beggars always stay Beggars, geniuses do not always remain productive. It’s true enough, and illustrates this with Beggar Arlen Drew developing a new artform (However, its after a coercive surgery by a Sleepless), and Sleepless Richard Keller becomes an aimless drifter.

Yet, Kress seems to imply that Leisha’s insight is an answer to the quandry, an argument to Sharifi’s philosophy. How do you know which Beggar will become productive? And, just as importantly, which ones won’t? You can’t, so should you be forced to support every one? Yet Sharifi also abandons the idea of obligation for past favors and loyalty itself. Do you get rid of an injured parent just because they’re no longer productive or do you seek to care for them as an acknowledgment for their gifts to you when you weren’t productive? And is it an obligation to do this or charity? Second, Kress shows this book has also been about American values. Leisha loves America and its ideals but criticizes Americans for respecting luck, fortune, rugged individualism, faith in God, beauty, spunk, pluck, grit, git, but never intelligence.

I have some minor complaints. While I realize sf’s strength is in distorting reality to make a point about man, technology, and society, I found some of the applications of Y-energy, specifically the many energy fields and force barriers, annoying and jarringly implausible and, I don’t think, really essential to the larger plot. They jarred because of the versimilitude of the genetic science. I also thought the SuperThought of strings made them seem alien, yet that thought process was not convincingly as useful as portrayed. Kress does have great skill in smoothly blending in explication in to story and a good way with character. As is typical with Kress (and the story was emotionally moving, especially the plight of all those Normals faced with the galling presence of the Sleepless), the story stumbled a bit at the end with not totally convincing answers to the story’s large problems. But, given the problems addressed, I’m not sure anything better was possible. Still, a very fine novel. show less

In the distant future, humanity is scattered across a few different planets, none of them Earth; some are run by libertarians (controlled by a single family because that’s how power works) and others are run by a corporate nanny state, with only Polyglot having something like democracy. When the discovery of a new gate between worlds, promising access to a new planet, destabilizes things, war breaks out and internal dissent threatens to take down both non-Polyglot regimes. It’s got show more Kress’s standard pessimism about governance as well as a lot of palace intrigue and some sf on the nature of consciousness. show less

Beginnings, Middles & Ends, by Nancy Kress is one of the best writing how-to's that I've read, yet. The book is targeted at both novelists and short story writers of any experience. Kress assumes little writing theory on the part of the reader and yet manages to be neither patronizing nor cliche when explaining basics (I swear some books are written from the same template - not this one!) Kress also takes care to emphasize that different writers work in different ways, addressing the show more "pantsters", who like to write without plotting, acknowledging that, for them, most of the advice will be relevant only after the first draft is done (but it will be relevant.)

So what's so good about this book? In short: it focuses on the writing. There's no showing off the author's understanding of Georges Polti, or proving that she bleeds Joseph Campbell. There are no structure formulas (three acts with seven turning points, no nine sequences, no 18 dips and crests of the roller coaster,) Kress has written a book which focuses on what you, the writer, need to know and do to organize your story's structure. Not that there's no theory, there's plenty, but it's all contextual, so it is clear how to apply it. How does Kress do this? Well - ahem - it's how the book is structured.

The title of the book is its structure. Starting with Beginnings, Kress discusses everything that needs to be considered when writing a beginning, which, of course, touches on everything from characterization, to language, to how the beginning effects the middle and the end. She acknowledges writers who find beginnings easy and offers assistance for those who find them difficult, addressing the various reasons one can become stuck while writing a beginning. Kress then gives the same detailed treatment for each of Middle and End, followed by a section on Revision.

I highly recommend this book to any writer, whether they are new to writing and don't know where to begin, or are wallowing uncertainly in a WIP. I particularly recommend this book to structure-phobics because, whether they think about it consciously while writing a first draft or not, a writer needs to know their craft and this book is a pain-free way to learn. I'll be putting this one on the #storycraft Book Chat list. show less