Last month I read Beggars in Spain after ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sanguinity recommended it in the comments to a post I wrote in which I (once again) objected to the necessity of sleep. I enjoyed it — enough that I'm currently reading the sequel — but I do have one objection to it that I perceive as a major flaw.
The premise of the book, as laid out in the first chapter, is the existence of genetically modified people who don't need to sleep. And we do get that. But we also get these same people having a number of other useful genetic modifications, one of which is that they're effectively immortal[/1]. Plus we also get a society with more or less infinite free energy.
And this is something that I've seen in a lot of science fiction (Robert Heinlein and Kim Stanley Robinson[/2] do it a lot): The problems of aging and energy are so large that they easily overshadow any other issues you might want to address, so you hand-wave them away so you can look at the other issues. Unfortunately, I don't feel like the issues of aging and energy are waved far enough away in Beggars in Spain, so that the issue of sleeping or not becomes negligible by the time you're about a third of the way into the book. The fact that the genetic modifications that created the sleepless also make them effectively immortal pretty much completely overshadows the issue of them not needing to sleep: When one group of people have an expected lifespan of 75 or so and the other has an expected lifespan of infinity, what does it matter that the second group gets an additional 35% of infinity?
Now it's possible that Kress addresses this issue in the second and third volumes of the series (I'm only about 15 pages into the second book). Or it's possible that she decided that lack of need for sleep wasn't really issue she wanted to address at all. But based on the reason that sent me to the book and the premise presented in the first few chapters of the book, it feels like a flaw in the book.
[/1] In the role-playing community in the 1980s, we called this "limited immortality" — you live forever unless you get killed.
[/2] It felt awkward to write "Heinlein and Kim Stanley Robinson," but at the same time, I didn't feel at all comfortable that people would know who I meant if I wrote "Heinlein and Robinson," so I've a stylistic decision that Heinlein, Asimov, McCaffrey, et al. don't get to be mononymous in my writing just because they happened be the first (or one of the first) to become famous while having an uncommon (in America, at any rate) surname.
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