Beggars in Spain

This is a difficult novel. At its core it's exploring the core question of the social contact: what do we owe each other?

This is explored from the perspective of wildly differing productive ability. A generation of genetically-improved people are smarter, more productive, healthier, and much longer-lived than the rest of us, all derived from not needing to sleep. At the same time, the world is being economically transformed by the recent development of small, reliable, safe cold fusion reactors — meaning that there is just so much less work needed for everyone to have the necessities of life.

And in between fear and economic anger and other sundry effects, a major subgroup of these sleepless form their own commune based on an utterly bananas-level extreme philosophy that the productive owe the unproductive absolutely nothing. To the point that when a member of their community is injured and acquires a disability which interferes with their ability to work, they are summarily executed.

Look, I just don't know what to do with this. The libertarian anti-socialist perspective here is just cartoonishly evil. There's not even an interesting debate to have, and in fact the novel does not meaningfully address any of the genuine questions about socialism or different productivity at all. At the same time, there's another conceit (cold fusion) which should cause us to question what the value/importance/utility of work is when there is so little labor needed to provide for everyone.

The key tension, the key philosophical question — what do the productive owe the unproductive — is almost completely sidelined with cardboard-cutout arguments which don't address anything. In the end, this transforms the novel from being an exploration of the issues to being just an exploration of some people who hold incredible power and bizarre views. I picke this up again because I thought it would provide an interesting perspective on contemporary economic questions. It does not.