Search Worlds Without End

Hugo and Nebula Award winning novella.

Leisha Camden is a genetically engineered 'Sleepless.' Her ability to stay awake all the time has not only made her more productive, but the genetic modifications have also given the 'Sleepless' a higher IQ and may even make them immortal. Are they the future of humanity? Or will the small community of 'sleepless' be hunted down as freaks by a world that has grown wary of its newest creation?

The story originally appeared in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, April 1991 and has been published as a seperate novella twice. It is included in the anthologies:

• The Year's Best Science Fiction: Ninth Annual Collection (1992), edited by Gardner Dozois
• Nebula Awards 27 (1993), edited by James Morrow
• The New Hugo Winners, Volume IV: (1992-94) (1997), edited by Gregory Benford
• The Science Fiction Century (1997), edited by David G. Hartwell
• The Hard SF Renaissance (2002), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer
• Best of the Best Volume 2: 20 Years of the Year's Best Short Science Fiction Novels (2007), edited by Gardner Dozois.

The story is included in the collections Beaker's Dozen (1998) and The Best of Nancy Kress (2015). It was expanded to the full novel Beggars In Spain (1993).

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.M

But Leisha Camden has chosen to remain behind in a world that envies and fears her "gift" - a world marked for destruction in a devastating conspiracy of freedom... and revenge.

In Beggars and Choosers, Kress returns to the same future world created in her earlier work, an America strangely altered by genetic modifications...

Most of the world is on the verge of collapse, overburdened by a population of jobless drones and racked by the results of irresponsible genetic research and nanotechnology. Will the world be saved? And for whom?

Now the trilogy is completed in Beggars Ride, a compelling novel of science fiction that raises one of the most ambitious and large-scale works of the decade to the status of finished masterpiece. 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.

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?