It’s the birthday of award-winning science fiction author Nancy Kress, whose books include Beggars in Spain (1991), Probability Space (2003), Fountain of Age (2007), and Yesterday’s Kin (2014), among many others. She has won six Nebula Awards, two Hugos, and a host of others.

Kress was born Nancy Anne Koningisor in Buffalo, New York, in 1948, and raised in East Aurora, New York. She taught fourth grade for several years before moving to Rochester, New York (BOO-YAH!) to get married and do the stay-at-home-mom thing. According to her web site, she was not good at embroidery or quilting so became a writer instead. (She should watch her back: that’s the sort of comment that sends frustrated writers over the edge.) After she and her first husband divorced in 1984, Kress worked in advertising, wrote fiction part time, and sometimes taught at SUNY Brockport, where she’d already picked up a couple master’s degrees.

Then in 1990 she began writing full time, and right out of the gate she wrote the novella Beggars in Spain (later expanded into a full novel), and right out of the gate Beggars in Spain won a Nebula, a Hugo, and an Asimov Science Fiction Magazine Readers’ Award. (Mildly fun set of facts: the Hugo Awards’ web site claims that the Hugo is “science fiction’s most prestigious award.” Awards are chosen by members of the World Science Fiction Convention, so in other words, readers. The Nebula, on the other hand, is voted on by members of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, Inc., so in other words, fellow authors. While I don’t see any claims on the Nebula web site to being the most prestigious SF award, others sites will claim this, so this means, you guessed it, DIFFERENT WEB SITES MAKING CONTRADICTORY CLAIMS. Who knew, right? So it really comes down to, who gives the coolest trophy? The design of the Hugo trophy changes year to year but always includes a shiny finned rocket. The Nebula trophy is a transparent block containing a glitter spiral nebula and gemstone planets. Glitter! And just sort of suspended there, like magic! These people are not messing around. I hereby declare the Nebula Award the coolest SF award.)

So, Beggars in Spain. In this novel, Kress explores one of her big interests, genetic engineering. A small set of children are genetically engineered to not need sleep (and as a byproduct of this, end up with longer life spans). The extra hours they have each day to pursue their interests, anything from law to ice skating, gives the Sleepless a huge advantage over the Norms, and societal strife ensues. (The only area in which the Sleepless do *not* excel is art: evidently, dreaming is essential to art, so the Sleepless produce very few if any artists.) I don’t tend to read much SF, but I read Beggars in Spain years ago and found it absolutely fascinating. And imagine, those of you who are parents: you have a child, and the child NEVER SLEEPS. Aaaagh! (The novel addresses this.)

Kress married SF writer Charles Sheffield in 1998; Sheffield died of brain cancer in 2002. Kress is now married to writer Jack Skillingstead. They live in Seattle with a pantload of shiny finned rockets and suspended glitter nebulae, and a toy poodle.

Have a lovely, icicles-melting sort of Saturday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.