The Best of Nancy Kress

by Nancy Kress

Nancy Kress, winner of multiple awards for her science fiction and fantasy, ranges through space and time in this stunning collection. Anne Boleyn is snatched from her time stream--with unexpected consequences for two worlds. A far-future spaceship brings religion to a planet that already harbors shocking natives. People genetically engineered to never need to sleep clash with those who do. A scientific expedition to the center of the galaxy discovers more than anyone bargained for. A woman finds that ''people like us'' does not mean what she thinks it does.

Praised for both her hard SF and her complex characters, Nancy Kress brings a unique viewpoint to twenty-one stories, the best of a long and varied career that has won her five Nebulas, two Hugos, a Sturgeon, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award.

Table of Contents:

Introduction
And Wild For to Hold
Out of All Them Bright Stars
Pathways
Dancing on Air
Unto the Daughters
Laws of Survival
Someone To Watch Over Me
Flowers of Aulit Prison
Price of Oranges
By Fools Like Me
Casey's Empire
Shiva in Shadow
Grant Us This Day
Kindness of Strangers
End Game
My Mother, Dancing
Trinity
People Like Us
Evolution
Margin of Error
Beggars in Spain

Genres: Science Fiction, Short Stories, Speculative Fiction, Fiction, Anthologies, Collections, Fantasy

560 pages, Hardcover

First published September 30, 2015

About the author

Nancy Kress is an American science fiction writer. She began writing in 1976 but has achieved her greatest notice since the publication of her Hugo and Nebula-winning 1991 novella Beggars in Spain which was later expanded into a novel with the same title. In addition to her novels, Kress has written numerous short stories and is a regular columnist for Writer's Digest. She is a regular at Clarion writing workshops and at The Writers Center in Bethesda, Maryland. During the Winter of 2008/09, Nancy Kress is the Picador Guest Professor for Literature at the University of Leipzig's Institute for American Studies in Leipzig, Germany.

Excerpted from Wikipedia.

Reviews

[Karl]

This hardcover is numbered 488 of 1000 produced and is signed by Nancy Kress.

Contents:

009 - Introduction
011 - "And Wild For to Hold"
055 - "Out of All Them Bright Stars"
063 - "Pathways"
091 - "Dancing on Air"
141 - "Unto the Daughters"
151 - "Laws of Survival"
185 - "Someone To Watch Over Me"
195 - "Flowers of Aulit Prison"
231 - "Price of Oranges"
255 - "By Fools Like Me"
269 - "Casey’s Empire"
289 - "Shiva in Shadow"
341 - "Grant Us This Day"
349 - "Kindness of Strangers"
367 - "End Game"
381 - "My Mother, Dancing"
305 - "Trinity"
441 - "People Like Us"
449 - "Evolution"
473 - "Margin of Error"
481 - "Beggars in Spain"
557 - Copyright Information

Note: Each story has an afterword by the author.

Dust Jacket by Tom Canty

[Kristen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection contains 21 short stories, novelettes, and novellas; an introduction by the author; and an afterword written by the author following each story. Nancy Kress selected her own favorites from her work, although she wasn't able to include a couple of her favorite novellas due to length. It's a wonderful collection of stories, I am in awe of the amount of intriguing ideas and characterization Nancy Kress can pack into a short story!

Full Review: http://www.fantasybookcafe.com/2015/0...

[Kara Babcock · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow did I write really long reviews back in the day! I was just reading back over some of my Nancy Kress reviews to remind myself what I thought of her other works. I went into a lot of detail with my Sleepless trilogy reviews. I guess that was the privilege of having more time in third-year university. Now I’m an adult, with a job, and a house for just over a week as of this writing. Ain’t nobody got time to review no books now.

First off, shout out to Subterranean Press for their usual high standard of production on The Best of Nancy Kress. I doubt I would have bought this if it were just an ordinary collection in a bookstore—I like Kress, but I don’t like her that much. But Subterranean Press only gives you the best. The endpapers on this thing have this cool quilted texture going on …

… but enough about the book; let’s talk about the book, shall we?

Nancy Kress is a writer with a lot of fascinating ideas. I’ve sometimes been critical of her characters and her plotting, but at the end of the day, she writes great science fiction. Her focus on near-future advances in medicine and biotechnology really intrigue me. Biology is the “squishy” science, and so, science fiction with biological nova often seems to be treated like softer SF than science fiction with flashy physics conceits. Nevertheless, sometimes Kress’ stories often seem like the hardest and most realistic science fiction out there.

I won’t go story-by-story here. A few general comments, first. I like the author afterwords. I prefer afterwords to forewords, because then I get to read the story without any preconceptions. Kress keeps her afterwords short, which is a mixed blessing. Some of the stories are self-evident. Others are provocative, and I could have sat down with her for a long conversation afterwards. Similarly, Kress nails it in her introduction when she says, “I think that stories are usually good in parts” and explains that “the stories in this book try to do different things”. The Best of Nancy Kress doesn’t mean that every story in this collection is amazing, for your particular definition of amazing; nor does it mean you will enjoy every single one (I certainly didn’t). But this is the best Nancy Kress has to offer (within the limitations of space), and boy, is it an impressive selection.

The collection opens with “And Wild For to Hold”, a story about stealing Anne Boleyn out of time. It is bonkers, in such a compassionate way. It’s time travel, yet it’s not; it’s a story of love and deceit; yet it’s not. I don’t actually know if I liked it (I get this a lot with time travel stories), but I was moved by it. Kress basically sits down and explains how Anne would react if she were kidnapped by “demons”, demonstrating, in the process, that it doesn’t matter whether you understand the technology around you: if you find the right fulcrum, you can still bend the world to your will.

I was surprised by how much I liked “Dancing on Air”, given that I’m not all that fascinated by ballet or professional dancing. Yet this is parallel to more commonly-discussed issues like doping in sports: as science improves our ability to enhance the abilities of athletes and performers, where do we start drawing lines? I love how Kress portrays the dog in this story, using simple sentence structures to remind us that his intelligence is limited compared to the human characters. It’s really well done.

“The Price of Oranges” is another good use of time travel, this case in the form of a stable wormhole (aka a time closet) to explore differences in generations.

I’d already read “Shiva in Shadow” elsewhere (don’t remember quite where), and it is just as good a second time around. I love the idea of a science mission to Sagittarius A* and the use of “analogues” to explore nearer to the black hole. Also, there’s a lot of commentary on gender roles going on, some of which I have mixed feelings about. As captain, Tirzah acts as both a surrogate mother and a sexual partner to Ajit and Kane. And Kress doesn’t seem to interrogate critically these dual expectations. The idea that women who sleep with men should also have to nurture them and “manage” their fragile egos seems to me to be a symptom of patriarchy rather than a clever response to it. Indeed, Kress is really good at diverse representations in her fiction, but some of her conceptions of gender feel very binary and biologically-determined. This comes up in many of her stories, not just this one.

Overall, The Best of Nancy Kress is a beautiful collection of Kress’ stories. It was a great thing to crack open in the summer, to delve into once or twice a day, time permitting. I wouldn’t say any of the stories particularly changed my appreciation for Kress, none of them stood out to me as a story that stopped me in my tracks. But the collection, as a whole, has reminded me how much I enjoy Kress’ ideas, and the time she puts into crafting believable societies that result from them.

[Tim Hicks · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wasn't going to go five stars.
Then I thought, "What would you take one away for?"
Then I thought, "This could be split in two and they'd BOTH be at least 4 stars."

I don't recall a weak story in the bunch.
"Beggars in Spain" deserves every award it got.
Great variety.
As good a collection of shorts as I have ever seen.

[Fiona Knight · Rating 5 out of 5]

Review is for Someone to Watch Over Me - This could have inspired any number of Black Mirror episodes, but that feels like faint praise. It's a near-future story of technologically-aided obsession, and really takes using your children as pawns in a breakup to a whole new level. At some point I'll have to get around to the whole book - this was really well done.

[Austin Beeman · Rating 4 out of 5]

THE BEST OF NANCY KRESS
RATED 88% POSITIVE. STORY SCORE 4.19 OF 5
21 STORIES : 9 GREAT / 8 GOOD / 3 AVERAGE / 1 POOR / 0 DNF

The 21st Century has been a good one for women in science fiction. Women authors have dominated the major awards. Ursula K Le Guin and Octavia Butler have been deservingly promoted into the pantheon of the genre, spoken of in the same breath with greats like Asimov, Bradbury, and Heinlein.

For some reason, Nancy Kress hasn’t been lauded in the same discussions, but I believe that she belongs on any list of science fictions greatest writers. Perhaps because Kress operates best in the longest of short forms, the novella, her work is too long to be widely anthologized and too short to be printed in a single volume.

A Nancy Kress story is a story that starts first from the science. As all great science fiction should be! What if we could engineer children that didn’t sleep? What would the discovery of aliens force us to understand about humanity? How would be overreact after ecological devastation? Can the destruction of cities be an act of love? Can we torture ourselves enough to prove the existence of God? What would we sacrifice for our family?

Family is important in Kress’ work. Sisters feature prominently with the complex challenges of that relationship. Much of the emotional power in this anthology comes from families that are stretched to the breaking point.

Class issues set the background of most stories … and jump into the foreground from time to time. I’ve long believed that no one can write “poor people in the future” like Nancy Kress, although most of the stories that led to that opinion don’t make it into this collection.

One final important trait of Kress’ writing in the prevalence of very intelligent and professional women. Science Fiction has always loved the ‘compentent man’ protagonist. WIth Nancy Kress, the ‘competent woman’ take center stage.

I found of a little weakness if some of her ‘religious rebuttal’ stories, but one of her stories about the search for God is one of her very best.

This is a strong recommendation and an invitation to explore the Best of Nancy Kress

A spectacular NINE stories join the All Time Great List:

Out of All Them Bright Stars • (1985) • Brief and full of import. A waitress in a diner serves an alien, but learns a hard truth about humanity that she never wanted to know. One of those stories that transcend the genre and could be enjoyed by anyone who loves literature.

Pathways • (2013) • Kress writes with great empathy for her characters. This is the story of a bright young woman with no education trying to save her family from a horrible genetic disease by courageously volunteering for a medical experiment that she doesn’t understand. I absolutely adored this.

Laws of Survival • (2007) • A young female scavenges within the Dome that aliens placed to imprison humanity. She stumbles into a facility where she, with a simple robot companion, must train dogs or face her own destruction. Compelling, charming, and with solid suspense.

By Fools Like Me • (2007) • A brief and painful story about overreaction caused by suffering. In an eco-apocalypse, remnants of the old world’s wastefulness (such as books made from trees) are Sins to be destroyed. A dying grandmother and her granddaughter come across a bundle of books. They decide to read them instead of immediately destroying them and they pay the price for that ‘betrayal.’

Shiva in Shadow • (2004) • A very impressive piece of space adventure. A three person crew is made up of two scientists and a nurturer/leader, who narrates the story. They are on a mission to explore anomalies from a massive black hole. The story is full of old-school scientific research and psycho-sexual interplays of jealousy and betrayal. What makes the story even better is that, when a probe is launched, the story splits between the perspectives of the real humans and their digital personas on the probe.

The Kindness of Strangers • (2008) • Aliens are destroying the world’s largest cities. One by one. At the same time, a woman is having an affair with a man whose family dies in one of those cities. The two of them are shuffled into a containment camp with other refugees. Very well written characters and a powerful and difficult message for humanity.

My Mother, Dancing • (2004) • A heart wrenching story about a far future humanity that has perceived religious implications to the Fermi paradox. If we are alone in the universe, it is our obligation to populate the universe. What if we are wrong?

Trinity • (1984) • A difficult, disturbing, and riveting masterpiece. Seena tries to save her sister Devrie who is slowly killing herself by starvation as part of a scientific/religious cult/experiment that is using twins to try to prove the existence of God. The experiment works with two mind together, so Seena hunts down her cloned twin. The characters are realistic and well detailed with intense emotions. This novella moves propulsively, violating taboos , and ends with an explosion of a denouement, both challenging and fulfilling.

Beggars in Spain • (1991) • Children are altered to beborn without the need for sleep and have a huge advantage over those who do. Society’s reaction is violent. This is Kress’ masterpiece and a challenging story about the inequalities of birth, status, wealth, and more. It is also a haunting look into a possible future.

https://www.shortsf.com for more than 65 reviews of science fiction anthologies

***

THE BEST OF NANCY KRESS IS RATED 85% POSITIVE
21 STORIES : 9 GREAT / 8 GOOD / 3 AVERAGE / 1 POOR / 0 DNF

And Wild for to Hold • (1991) • novella by Nancy Kress

Good. The Church of the Holy Hostage kidnaps people from history in the hope of reducing deaths and suffering of many. When they take Anne Boleyn from the Tower of London, she starts manipulating those around her in an attempt to regain some power over her destiny.

Out of All Them Bright Stars • (1985) • short story by Nancy Kress

Great. Brief and full of import. A waitress in a diner serves an alien, but learns a hard truth about humanity that she never wanted to know. One of those stories that transcend the genre and could be enjoyed by anyone who loves literature.

Pathways • (2013) • novelette by Nancy Kress

Great. Kress writes with great empathy for her characters. This is the story of a bright young woman with no education trying to save her family from a horrible genetic disease by courageously volunteering for a medical experiment that she doesn’t understand. I absolutely adored this.

Dancing on Air • (1993) • novella by Nancy Kress

Good. Unsolved ballerina murders, many of whom have altered their bodies to get an advantage. An enhanced guard dog’s POV. Painful dynamics between mother and daughter.

Unto the Daughters • (1995) • short story by Nancy Kress

Average. Feminist Garden of Eden story told from the perspective of the snake.

Laws of Survival • (2007) • novelette by Nancy Kress

Great. A young female scavenges within the Dome that aliens placed to imprison humanity. She stumbles into a facility where she, with a simple robot companion, must train dogs or face her own destruction. Compelling, charming, and with solid suspense.

Someone to Watch Over Me • (2014) • short story by Nancy Kress

Good. An obsessed mother, recently divorced with restrained orders against her, secretly has illegal surveillance cameras implanted in her small child. Her obsessive observation of her ex-husband’s new life sends her spiraling out of control.

The Flowers of Aulit Prison • [Probability Universe] • (1996) • novelette by Nancy Kress

Good. An excellent exploration of an alien culture that takes a communal shared reality very important, people are punished by being declared dead and then ignored. A woman who killed her sister in a fit of rage is given the change to be a prison informant against a human who is believed to be plotting something against the state.

The Price of Oranges • (1989) • novelette by Nancy Kress

Good. Charming tale of two older men in 1989 who sit, talk, and try to make the best of life. One man travels back in time 1937 to buy things at must cheaper prices —- and maybe find a man to make his granddaughter happier.

By Fools Like Me • (2007) • short story by Nancy Kress

Great. A brief and painful story about overreaction caused by suffering. In an eco-apocalypse, remnants of the old world’s wastefulness (such as books made from trees) are Sins to be destroyed. A dying grandmother and her granddaughter come across a bundle of books. They decide to read them instead of immediately destroying them and they pay the price for that ‘betrayal.’

Casey's Empire • (1981) • short story by Nancy Kress

Average. A young man who wants to be a science fiction adventure writer experiences obstacles to that dream from the academic literary establishment … and then UFOs.

Shiva in Shadow • (2004) • novella by Nancy Kress

Great. A very impressive piece of space adventure. A three person crew is made up of two scientists and a nurturer/leader, who narrates the story. They are on a mission to explore anomalies from a massive black hole. The story is full of old-school scientific research and psycho-sexual interplays of jealousy and betrayal. What makes the story even better is that, when a probe is launched, the story splits between the perspectives of the real humans and their digital personas on the probe.

Grant Us This Day • (1993) • short story by Nancy Kress

Poor. A kinda stupid religious story in which God is a failing art student and the earth is his project that has gone off the rails. Ironically, this feels like amateurish student work when compared to the rest of Kress’ stories.

The Kindness of Strangers • (2008) • short story by Nancy Kress

Great. Aliens are destroying the world’s largest cities. One by one. At the same time, a woman is having an affair with a man whose family dies in one of those cities. The two of them are shuffled into a containment camp with other refugees. Very well written characters and a powerful and difficult message for humanity.

End Game • (2007) • short story by Nancy Kress

Good. A socially stunted scientist discovers that ‘static’ in the human brain impairs our ability to accomplish things. He tests a new drug on an assistant who becomes a chess savant, but less human.

My Mother, Dancing • (2004) • short story by Nancy Kress

Great. A heart wrenching story about a far future humanity that has perceived religious implications to the Fermi paradox. If we are alone in the universe, it is our obligation to populate the universe. What if we are wrong?

Trinity • (1984) • novella by Nancy Kress

Great. A difficult, disturbing, and riveting masterpiece. Seena tries to save her sister Devrie who is slowly killing herself by starvation as part of a scientific/religious cult/experiment that is using twins to try to prove the existence of God. The experiment works with two mind together, so Seena hunts down her cloned twin. The characters are realistic and well detailed with intense emotions. This novella moves propulsively, violating taboos , and ends with an explosion of a denouement, both challenging and fulfilling.

People Like Us • (1989) • short story by Nancy Kress

Average. Two very different classes of society meet for dinner … and one of them brings an alien.

Evolution • (1995) • novelette by Nancy Kress

Good. Antibiotic-immune diseases are making hospitals no-go zones. Mix in family dynamics, anti-science terrorism, and really well written characters. This is a very good story. And has quite a bit of resonance as I read it for the first time in 2020.

Margin of Error • (1994) • short story by Nancy Kress

Good. A genetically perfect woman comes to try to get her sister to rejoin a genetic experiment that has started to break apart at the 12 generation. She believes that her sister will leave her lower class life of children. Instead of help, she finds subtle vengeance.

Beggars in Spain • [Sleepless] • (1991) • novella by Nancy Kress

Great. Children are altered to beborn without the need for sleep and have a huge advantage over those who do. Society’s reaction is violent. This is Kress’ masterpiece and a challenging story about the inequalities of birth, status, wealth, and more. It is also a haunting look into a possible future.

[Riju Ganguly · Rating 5 out of 5]

This massive tome is one of the treasures of recent sff. It contains twenty one stories— several of them of novella length. Apart from representing the expanse as well as depth of Kress's writings, it reintroduces us to those works which have become cornerstones of our psyche once we read them. They were~
1. The flowers of Aulit Prison
2. Shiva in Shadow
3. Trinity
4. Beggars in Spain
... and many more. It's very difficult to exclude any of these tales from memory. I had read several of them in Gardner Dozois's annual anthologies. They all came back while reading this beautiful hardcover presented by the good people of Subterranean Press.
If you are looking for an immersive experience that would help you to look at this world and beyond, but from other... rather different perspectives, this is the best book to read. Go for it!
Highly recommended.

[Laika · Rating 3 out of 5]

Okay, continuing to work through my backlog on these! And learning the perils of letting it build for a month because my memories of most of the stories in this are already getting a bit vague and scattered.

So, getting the basic details out of the way – my first short story collection of the year, 600 pages of the works of Nancy Kress, curated and selected by the author herself as all her favourites that would fit in one volume. Someone on here (can’t remember who and tumblr search is being its usual unusuable self, unfortunately) recommended Beggars In Spain to me a while back, and this was the only volume my library system had that included it. So, 500-ish pages of other stories as a nice bonus until I got to the end and remembered that that’s the reason I’d gotten the book out in the first place.

The stories run from less than ten pages to a novella, and Kress includes a little half-page afterward following each. Usually either a reflection on the meaning of the story or an anecdote about its writing or reception, and then where and when it was originally published and any awards it won. And there were a lot of awards You can get a lot of short stories nominated for Hugos over 45 years of writing. The little snapshots of a, like, SF/F writer subculture and the relationships therein were all charming, anyway.

The stories themselves were of pretty wildly varying subject matter, though all science fiction of one kind or another. Everything from post-apocalyptic ruins to spaceships studying the galactic core to the drama and intrigue of gene-modding among high class ballerinas twenty minutes from now. The quality varied – it would pretty much have to, for like two dozen stories written across a span of decades – but overall it was really quite good.

Tone was rather more consistent. Some were happier than others, of course, but even the most fantastical and high concept worlds were pretty grimy and compromised and full of petty politics and pettier assholes. Capital H Heroes were pretty thin on the ground, even (especially) among the various protagonists. Kress seems to have a rare love for women who aren’t just, like, spiky, but genuinely flawed and unpleasant to be around (easier to pull off with short stories than novels, I suppose).

Short stories are great for just putting people in situations generally, really – not sure how long you could really draw out ‘feeling awkward and shitty because the guy you’re having an affair with was on a ‘business trip’ to visit you when aliens abducted and/or killed everyone in the city his wife and kids were in. He absolutely blames you for this,’ but it’s sure a hook!

Familial relationships that are, lets go with troubled, are a whole other recurring theme, too. Sororicidal sisters, deadbeat dads, obsessive ex-wives, parents putting their children through experimental gene-therapy to make sure they grow up with the ideal body to vicariously live out their dreams, the whole set. There’s even some dubiously consensual clone incest at one point!

Though honestly the lack of capital-h Heroes goes beyond just morality – thinking about it, most of the short stories are told from the perspective of observers, survivors, sufferers of exotic diseases, journalists poking at a mess from the outside. People whose world is being acted upon by forces far beyond their control, if not beyond their understanding entirely, and either bearing witness or struggling to adapt and get by. The stories where the protagonists had real agency – the scientists exploring the galaxy’s core, the time-travellers taking an alternate Anne Boleyn hostage to prevent the English Civil Wars – are usually the tragedies. There are a lot of those – or, if not tragedies, then at least stories that end badly for almost everyone involved. I’m halfway convinced that short stories are just a more appealing format for properly bleak fiction, really – less investment in characters’ wellbeing, or narrative expectations pushing towards growth or happy endings.

And now, before I focus on discussing Beggars In Spain specifically, some call outs for the short stories that really stuck in my head

• The aforementioned gene-moding scandals in New York ballet, partially told through the perspective of the engineered-to-be-as-smart-as-a-5-year-old bespoke guard dog contracted to protect a start ballerina. Nicely understated cyberpunk setting and also felt extremely realistic as the sort of thing we’ll absolutely be having scandals about in fifty years tbh.
• A woman discovering that the aliens are here amid the ruins of postwar Earth because they started getting our television broadcasts and decided that the only thing we had worth taking was dogs, but are stuck here until they figure out how to train them to be as good and heroic as they are in the movies.
• A disenchanted and nostalgic man in the 80s finding a specific cupboard that goes back to one specific day in 1935 (I think. Pre-war but Roosevelt administration). He uses this exclusively to make his social security cheque go further and buy little presents for his friend with what in the 80s is pocket change. The actual plot involves despairing over how cynical and bleak-minded his granddaughter the artist is, and deciding to go back and a Good Man to introduce her to.
• An extremely short one – just a one-scene vignette, really – about a waitress in a vaguely ‘50s diner when one of the aliens whose been in the news so much escapes their minders and wants to try an apple pie.

(There were also, I must admit, a decent number of stories that left me cold or that I just didn’t see the point of including, but, again, pretty much inevitable in any big collection, isn’t it?)

But okay, so! Beggars in Spain! It’s definitely an interesting novella, and given the fact that it’s 30 years old and was by all accounts incredibly successful I do kind of wonder how many common tropes about the whole super-intelligent designer babies conceit I’ve encountered elsewhere first are downstream of it?

Because I mean, ostensibly it’s about children modified in utero to not need to sleep, but practically that cashes out to them all being creative productive polyglot geniuses. Which is certainly the fantasy of never having to sleep with zero downsides, though honestly I’m pretty sure I’d spend at least half the extra time fucking around online. That said, the sense of alienation the protagonist has dealing with a world where almost everyone around her seems to just be wasting a third of their lives laying down is really well done.

It’s the sort of novella that you could probably write a dozen a dozen different essays about, and would probably benefit from being analyzed with less than a month’s distance and quotes on hand, but for all the futurism (and really not the best story in the collection for that, honestly), the thematic throughline that stood out to me is actually just libertarianism? Or not quite the right word, probably, though it is our heroine’s ideology (she is, after all, the favoured daughter of a self-made magnate, amid a social circle of the golden children of the striving upper-middle class). But the specific idea of enlightened selfishness, that the contract is the basis of all society, that no one owes anyone anything, and you are only worth what you can produce to offer up in exchange to others.

It’s where the title comes from, after all – the eponymous beggars with nothing to offer except their need who are entirely superfluous and inconvenient to the lives of the Sleepless ubermensch; what are they owed? The orthodox answer of the movement basically every major character at least ostensibly ascribes to is ‘nothing’.

Not that any of them actually act like individuals interacting solely through mutually beneficial contracts, which I’m fairly sure is in fact the point – the Sleepless invent nationalism before any of them turn thirty, going to great effort to support and look after each other on the basis of Sleepless-solidarity and an assumption that each of them is the future of humanity. And on the other hand, the protagonist’s father is a domineering, overbearing ass of a partner, draining both of his wives’ personality and will to live in turn until they get tired of being bitter social secretaries for him and quit. Equitable, contractual relationships are thin on the ground – and of course the entire climax is the protagonist relying on friends and an estranged sister to rescue an abused child who surely isn’t likely to pay any of them back for the effort anytime soon.

I thought the hypocrisy was neatly done, anyway. Especially since it’s never really confronted – none of the Sleepless ever show the slightest awareness that the lengths they’ll go to for the sake of each other purely on the basis of their shared enhancements seem to contradict the ideology they treat as holy writ.

Overall not exactly my favourite book of the year, but a fair bit better than a lot of what I’ve read so far. So I’ll call it a win. Just for the time capsule effect of reading stories written by the same author across four decades, if nothing else.

[Bonnie Hughes]

Nancy Kress. Short stories

Excellent as always. I could read her 24/7 if I didn't have to sleep.I would recommend it highly to anyone

[Fantasy Literature]

4 stars from Marion: http://www.fantasyliterature.com/revi...

[L · Rating 5 out of 5]

How convenient that I found myself reading this collection of (mostly) short stories shortly before beginning to teach a new prep--Disability and Society. Kress writes of many things, of course, but one is genetic modification and other bodily alterations. Here she raises issues such as what is it to be human? what is able-bodied? are those with modifications "better" than the rest and what might that mean? Great stuff! This collection does contain my favorite of Kress' stories--Dancing on Air--and my least favorite of her work--Beggars in Spain--both relevant to issues I'll be thinking about and raising with my students this semester.

Beyond my personal, professional interest, Kress includes so many absolutely wonderful stories! As with any collection, I found some more appealing than others, but there were very, very few that I didn't like and not a one that left me cold. I believe this is because the person who selected the stories was, in fact, Nancy Kress herself. Whose "favorites" would include the best & those most worth reading? I was delighted with this collection.

[Rabby Hasan · Rating 5 out of 5]

She is the great writer.This massive tome is one of the treasures of recent sff. It contains twenty one stories— several of them of novella length. Apart from representing the expanse as well as depth of Kress's writings, it reintroduces us to those works which have become cornerstones of our psyche once we read them. They were~
1. The flowers of Aulit Prison
2. Shiva in Shadow
3. Trinity
4. Beggars in Spain
... and many more. It's very difficult to exclude any of these tales from memory. I had read several of them in Gardner Dozois's annual anthologies. They all came back while reading this beautiful hardcover presented by the good people of Subterranean Press.
If you are looking for an immersive experience that would help you to look at this world and beyond, but from other... rather different perspectives, this is the best book to read. Go for it!
Highly recommended.

[Terry · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am very reluctant to admit, given my frequent dismissal of the format, that Nancy Kress gives short stories a good name. A significant part of her appeal to me is that she can develop characters quickly. I found myself engaged by them even in the short 2000-word stories. It helped that the plots are focused enough that these stories feel like novels. And, of course, without the important themes and ideas, for all their merits, they would have fallen flat. By the way, the two plus years between my starting and finishing this collection should not reflect on the excellence of the book - if pressed, I can explain.

[Cori Samuel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic collection, especially recommended for readers who enjoy character-centred scifi (along the lines of Becky Chambers, Lois Macmaster Bujold, Ursula K LeGuin etc.)

I super-enjoyed her short commentary after each story, too -- never over-egging the pudding for the story itself, and including a perfectly lovely 'reader, I married him'.

Also a short-cut to reading a tonne of Nebula and Hugo award-winning short stories from back before things went completely sideways.

[Brian · Rating 5 out of 5]

To be honest I didn't know what to expect from Nancy Kress regarding a short story collection. But her stories run the gauntlet - from character driven to hard science to everything in between. I'm glad I picked this up.

[Rachel · Rating 5 out of 5]

First rate! Nancy Kress is one of my favorite writers. I'd read about half the stories, and re-read a few of those. I liked the author's notes at the end of each story; they added depth to the stories and provide details of her career.

[Leslie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Love it! A few of the stories were not my favorite, but several will have me thinking about them for days.

[Robert · Rating 4 out of 5]

good collection of stories by an author I enjoy

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderful play of ideas and possible futures in this collection of her short stories.

[Warren Dunham · Rating 4 out of 5]

nice group of stories ranging from an Anne Bolin time travel to an alternate view point of the snake in the garden of eden, to a story on kids genetically engineered to not sleep.

[Karen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nancy Kress was able to pick her own favorites among her many short stories. An outstanding collection!

[Earl Truss · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved this book, except for a couple of the stories.

[Dasha]

I picked this one up for "Beggars in Spain".

[Jonah · Rating 5 out of 5]

reset my entire brain the first time and made me cry the second time

[Abcdarian · Rating 3 out of 5]

Generally good, but not exactly cheerful stuff.

[Morgan McGuire · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nancy Kress is amazing. This is definitive sci-fi, and also definitive feminist literature. These stories are 100% focused on the female characters and their stories.

My favorite stories from this collection were the most imaginative and alien ones where the narrator is a dog, a snake, an alien, a housewife, a waiter, a priest...voices I've never heard before in science fiction with this much careful attention to detail.

Kress includes hard science, economics, sociology, psychology, love, stress, joy, violence, and all other elements of life. This gives a richness that is uniquely sci-fi in its willingness to get theoretical and philosophical, but also great literature through its grounding in human experiences. Sometimes the central conflict or relationship is human-alien or human-science; just as often it is sister-sister or mother-daughter. Or all of the above.

She can really push the limits of the bizarre in these short stories, since each world only has to hold together for 2-5k words. The earlier stories are the most fantastical and satisfied my escapist desires for fiction. Many later ones are open critiques of American class divisions, which have a different kind of appeal.

Beggars in Spain was the perfect conclusion to the collection, a novella that is as aggressive as the other stories but has time to let us really get comfortable with the characters and their relationships.

[Felice · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author herself chose the stories and novellas in this excellent collection. Kress often writes from the point of view of interesting female characters, and she does so in an involving and intriguing manner. That means that her most famous long piece, Beggars in Spain, an award winner is told from the point of view of a girl becoming a woman and her "twin" sister is her most important antagonist. In Dancing on Air, the world of ballet is the subject and several women are narrators, including older dancers, neophytes, and, of course, also dancer's mothers. The Flowers of Aulit Prison is another novella in which the female protagonist compels our attention with her unique story --and dilemma. While Shiva in Shadow is narrated by two sets of the same woman, a real one and one her "persona" both of them put into different types of crisis situations which they must solve as woman among men. These four are to my mind Kress' best stories and they are all longish and all require that length for the depth they eventually plumb. The last mentioned is my favorite and I think the best done. It is also one of the few stories Kress tells set in a deep space location: in fact at the edge of a galactic black hole the "two" teams are investigating. The rest are pretty much earthbound and home-scale, but that doesn't stop them from being thoughtful, and intriguing..

[Jim N · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Best of Nancy Kress is an absolutely superb short story collection, a representation of science fiction at it's best. The genre is ultimately about ideas and Kress is never short on ideas. She writes with confidence and enthusiasm in these stories, exploring an impressive variety of themes and never losing sight of the importance of creating interesting characters. The collection ends with her award-winning novella Beggars in Spain, which explores the idea of genetically modified humans who no longer require sleep. However, that story is the tip of the creative iceberg. I can't recommend this collection enough!

[Ashley · Rating 5 out of 5]

There's no short story collection where I'll like EVERY story. But the more I thought about it the more I thought, this should get five stars for Unto the Daughters alone. Add to that Dancing on Air and Wild for to Hold, both of which I would have given five stars on their own, and why shouldn't I give a five-star rating to the whole collection? I thought this was fantastic, and I'm so glad I happened to see it on the library shelf.

[Mary Rozday · Rating 5 out of 5]

SF Tour de Force

Nancy Kress, winner of SF awards, has conceived a variety of stories to delight and challenge. This book presents a broad range of her best stories between 1985 and 2014. It is a great selection to introduce readers to this author. Most enjoyable is the personal peek into her creative process and publishing history provided after each story. This anthology is a great addition to any SF collection.