The original novella, “Beggars in Spain”, won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards. I’m not sure why.

This volume includes the original novella along with two follow-on books that continue to explore the ideas in the novella. Basically, a genetic modification is discovered that allows recipients to be free of sleep, gaining them an extra eight or so hours a day to do whatever they’d like. Kress believes that with that extra eight hours, the Sleepless would throw themselves into academic, legal, scientific, and financial research, allowing them to rise to the top of society. Because the Sleepless are elite, normals hate them. The Sleepless are hated even more once research shows that they benefit from extended lifespans as a side effect of their lack of need for sleep.

The result is a society tilted sharply against the Sleepless—they cannot serve on juries, hold political or judicial offices, and are generally discriminated against. Luckily, they’re all geniuses, so they create their own companies that quickly dominate their markets.

But society retaliates even more, pushing many of the Sleepless to form their own militant enclave. Eventually, even that isn’t safe enough, so they move to an orbital space station, but that station still falls under the laws of the U.S. Guess where that leads.

Frankly, I didn’t buy it. I wasn’t convinced that people would hate the Sleepless before they learned of their extended lifespans, and tacking that on to make them more hateful didn’t really work for me either. Considering how smart these people were supposed to be (and I found it very, very hard to believe that everyone with an extra eight hours a day would use that time effectively), they never really seemed to understand anything happening around them well enough to deal with it in a sensible way. Kress’s exploration of a Randian contract-based society didn’t convince me, either (although, to be fair, I don’t buy Rand’s ideas at all).

Maybe worth a read out of curiosity, or if you’re into Rand, but I couldn’t honestly recommend it to anyone.