Beggars in Spain (Kress; reread)

seekingferret posted about Beggars in Spain, which I hadn't reread for just about forever, and I went and found our copy the other day and narfed it up. The novel (which is what we own) is basically the novella with several other parts tacked on. Beggars in Spain is nominally about a bioengineered trait to go without sleep (the "Sleepless"), which creates a superclass of those people, who then have to deal with bigotry and fear from the rest of the populace (the "beggars"). One of the tacked-on parts deals with the further-bioengineered SuperSleepless, who are much more intelligent than the Sleepless, and how the Sleepless deal with that.

I had some interesting reactions to this reread, most of which weren't actually relevant to the philosophical questions being asked in the book.

( 'Howard Roark has a baby'; nerd camp; 1%; twenty years' hindsight; siblings and family community; ecology vs. trade )