For April’s book club session we read Nancy Kress’s Beggars in Spain. I first read Beggars in Spain a while ago, and it is fairly rare that we choose a book for book club that isn’t new to me. The book was written before the internet had fully taken hold—before we understood just how profoundly technology would reshape not only how we work, but how we assign value to people. And yet, for a novel so rooted in its moment, it has proven strangely durable in my own thinking. My mind has returned to it again and again, particularly at inflection points—whenever a new technological shift begins to redraw the boundaries of who contributes, who thrives, and who is left behind.
Nancy Kress imagines a world divided by a single engineered advantage: the ability to live without sleep. The Sleepless are more productive, more economically valuable, and—unsurprisingly—more powerful. It is a clean, almost clinical premise, and that clarity is both the book’s strength and, at times, its limitation. Written before the complexity of the internet economy, platform dynamics, and algorithmic influence, the novel presents inequality in stark, binary terms. There are those who can produce more, and those who cannot. The resulting social fracture is direct, ideological, and at times almost too neatly drawn.
Kress anchors this divide in a question that echoes a familiar moral frame:
“If you beg from those who have nothing to give, is it any less wrong than stealing from those who have more than enough?”
The title itself gestures toward this tension—what is owed, what can be given, and what happens when need and capacity no longer align. The Sleepless are not simply advantaged; they exist in a system where traditional expectations of mutual obligation begin to break down.
And yet, beneath that simplicity lies the reason the book still lingers. The Sleepless are not merely more efficient; they fundamentally disrupt the social contract. If productivity becomes the primary measure of worth, what happens to those who cannot—or will not—compete on those terms? What obligations, if any, do the advantaged have to the rest? These questions feel even more urgent now than they did when I first encountered them. Today, the divide is less about genetics and more about access—to data, to compute, to systems of leverage that amplify certain individuals and organizations far beyond others. But the underlying tension is the same.
What makes Beggars in Spain particularly compelling is that it refuses easy answers. The Sleepless are not villains, nor are they purely sympathetic. They are, in many ways, rational actors responding to a system that rewards their capabilities. The discomfort comes from recognizing that their logic is not entirely wrong—and that the consequences of that logic are deeply destabilizing.
At the same time, the novel does feel dated in its execution. The characters often serve as vessels for ideas rather than fully realized individuals, and the social dynamics lack the messy, networked complexity that defines modern life. Conflict unfolds more like a structured debate than an emergent property of overlapping systems and incentives. For some folks in our book club, this made the narrative feel somewhat distant, even as the themes remain sharply relevant.
But perhaps that distance is part of its value. By stripping the problem down to its essentials, Kress exposes a core question that continues to resurface in different forms: how do we build a society that remains humane in the face of uneven capability? When technological or biological advances create outsized gains for some, how do we prevent that divergence from calcifying into permanent division?
If anything, the book reads now less as a prediction and more as a recurring thought experiment—one that replays each time a new technology reshapes the landscape. Whether the dividing line is sleeplessness, artificial intelligence, or something yet to come, the challenge remains: how do we ensure that progress does not come at the expense of cohesion?
That is why, decades later, Beggars in Spain continues to echo. Not because it got every detail right, but because it understood the shape of human nature and a question we would keep asking.