Thumbs up for Beggars in Spain by Nancy Kress. Science fiction.
WOW. I feel a bit insufficient to review this. If someone had described Beggars to me as “a novel dealing with legal, political, financial and ethical philosophy in the wake of bigotry against genetically-modified individuals, with a lawyer as the main character and a denouement set off by a change in the tax code” I would said, “That’s nice – you keep it.” Good thing no one told me, because Beggars is amazing. If you like science-fiction with lots of meaty ideas and well-drawn characters who keep things moving steadily along as they struggle with the fact that there are no easy answers, I recommend you buy, borrow, steal – or beg – a copy as soon as you possibly can.
When had she begun to find funny such things as feet? Not, certainly, when she was young, in her twenties or thirties or fifties. Everything had been so serious then, of such world-shaking consequence. Not just the things that actually might have shaken the world, but everything. She must have been very tiresome. Perhaps there was no way to for the young to be serious without being tiresome. They lacked that all-important dimension of physics: torque. Too much time ahead, too little behind, like a man trying to carry a horizontal ladder with a grip at one end. Not even an honorable passion could balance very well. And while jiggling hard to just keep your balance, how could anything ever be funny?
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