Customer Reviews

Beggars Ride (Beggars Trilogy, Book 3)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

"Beggars Ride" is both the shortest and the least satisfying book in Ms. Kress' "Beggars" series. From the standpoint of construction, the book has a number of contrived plot devices. I can't go into those without giving away parts of the story. Suffice it to say, they will be obvious to most readers. The author introduces one appealing new character who overcomes her psychological and emotional difficulties through force of will. In her earlier books, Ms. Kress explored the impact of both real and perceived psychological differences on groups of people. The message from this book seems to be that you can will away shortcomings and change your neural function at the same time. Had the first book of the series been of the quality of "Beggars Ride", I certainly would not have gone further. This was a disappointing end to an otherwise powerful exploration of social inclusion, exclusion, and discrimination.

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.

This was a terrible finale to an otherwise pretty good trilogy. Social interaction and even the science was unrealistic beyond what should be expected from mediocre science fiction, and the book basically undid everything that happened in the previous two books. Don't finish this trilogy. Go read something else.

I don't know what my fellow reviewers are smoking --this is definitely the best of the Beggars trilogy. Not that you can really read it apart from the rest of them; you really need all three to see how far Kress got with developing the Beggar-world, which started (in Beggars In Spain) like all good science fiction does, with a simple question: What if people didn't need to sleep anymore? And went on from there, sort of answering that question directly in BIS and more dealing with the ramifications of it in Beggars and Choosers and becoming more of an attempt to tap into the quasi-mystic Answering Big Questions vein of science fiction in Beggar's Ride. Her solution as I understand it is basically sort of a tempered enthusiasm for modern science: look outward, but don't forget to look inward as well. That's the best I can describe it without giving too much away. And I love the way how from book to book Kress has no problem moving on to new characters. The scientific denouement is at the end of BR is not the wow-shocker that concluded BIS and B&C, but I only enjoyed BR more for it, and for Kress's guts in not feeling like she had to blow up the Death Star to get her point across (though that happens too). Within the trilogy we go from a world from where some people can't sleep to one where everyone has to look within themselves for answers, and it's just amazing how we went from good honest hard SF to wonderful philosophical SF within these three books. The changes, and the way things changed, are amazing. Good good stuff.

There's an old rule in writing stage plays: "If there's a gun on stage in the first act, fire it before the end of the second." Nancy Kress started the trilogy with a bang and ended with a whimper. Many great ideas and characters were trotted out in the first two volumes and summarily ditched in the last. One thing Nancy does well is create compelling characters, but to dump so many of them (or turn them into cardboard cutouts) in this book is a slap in the face for the readers.

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.

Disappointing. Looks like she was trying to wrap up the trilogy without putting too much effort into it. It lacked much of the depth and richness of her previous books.

Although the Beggars Trilogy has gone slightly downhill from the original Beggars in Spain, it has maintained far better than most multiple-book serials. Tremendous change, growth, and evolution as well as unexpected events, both positive and negative have been the trademarks of this series. Although this book isn't quite as exciting as its predecessors, it is unique and the best of the bunch when it comes to many of its characters. It is rare that I find a book that can paint characters nearly as well as this one.

_Beggars in Spain,_ the first volume in this trilogy, deservedly won a number of awards in both its short and long forms, and the sequel, _Beggars and Choosers,_ was also excellent. This conclusion, however, while it does its job of wrapping everything up (more or less), is not nearly as convincing. The second volume ended with the Super Sleepless bestowing on mankind, for better or worse, the Change Syringes, which, through some fascinating biochemistry and nanotech, remade the human body to be capable of absorbing nutrients directly from the sun and the soil. So much for starvation and so much for the dependence of the un-genemod Livers on the Donkeys for at least their bare subsistence. But such a radical biological change also means radical social change and the third volume opens a few years the other side of the devastating Change Wars, in which the Livers -- 80% of the U.S. population, mostly ignorant and uneducated, and a drag on the cloistered Donkey economy -- have regressed to nomadic tribes who move with the seasons. (They can lie down in the mud and feed anywhere, but they can still freeze to death in the winter.) And, following twenty-seven years in prison for treason after her attempt to blackmail the government through biological terrorism into allowing the secession of the Sanctuary suborbital habitat, Jennifer Sharifi has been released -- and she wants "final security" for those she regards as her people, regardless of who else has to suffer. Meanwhile, Lizzie Francy, now seventeen, has become perhaps the most skilled data-dipper (i.e., Net hacker) in the country and it's her skills that will become crucial in saving what remains of society. And there are several new characters, especially Dr. Jackson Aranow and his extremely fragile sister, Theresa, who turns out to be far stronger than she ever imagined.

Yes, it's a complicated plot and you have to have read the first two books to have any hope of understanding what's going on, but it all often seems strained and contrived. It's also nearly all action this time with not nearly so much of the philosophical underpinnings as the earlier volumes, and it tends to treat the United States as an isolated, globally uninvolved entity in matters of science, though the author makes it clear the world is closely knit financially and in its communications. I don't think infectious biotech could be so geographically restricted, either. Finally, the ending is ultimately unsatisfying in its hints of uncertain, piecemeal survival; the characters seem way too optimistic about their future, but I don't believe Kress really meant the subsequent future to be dystopian. As always, Kress's writing is vivid and the development of her characters is complete, but her control of her story simply isn't up to the first two volumes.

Beggars Ride by Nancy Kress is the last of the Beggars in Spain trilogy and is good, but I think of the three Beggars and Choosers is the best. While the first two books stood well on their own, I don't think Beggars Ride could be easily understood without reading at least one of its predecessors because the characters and situations appear full blown, without enough background to feel you know them. The theme of the books is about the sociological stresses between the genetically modified and those who aren't. It is the ancient battle between the rich and the poor or the mentally bright verses the dull witted, basically the haves and the have nots. In this book the have nots are genetically enhanced so they never need food and can never get sick. As they no longer need the genetically modified haves the societies of both have broken down. The big problem both face is that the syringes that contain the genetic modifier are almost gone and they can't inoculate the new children who need food and can die of disease. The beauty of this story is its clear and possible depiction of what happens when everybody has everything they need to survive, but the challenges that make life worth living. It is a chilling look into the future that reminds us that an important part of being human is to overcome the obstacles survival puts before us and to help those below or above us to survive because their talents may be what save us in the future.