Nancy Kress

Nancy Kress (born 1948 in Buffalo, New York) is a science fiction writer. She began writing in 1976 but has achieved her greatest notice since the publication of her Hugo and Nebula-winning novella "Beggars in Spain" in 1990.

She tends to write technically realistic stories set in a fairly near future that has a plausible connection to the present. Her fiction often involves genetic engineering, and, to a lesser degree, artificial intelligence.

In this encyclopedia, she shows up in lists of both hard and soft science fiction authors. This perhaps indicates the futility of such categorizations, but she does occupy something of a middle ground. She shows an interest in the internal lives of her characters that may be lacking in, say, Larry Niven or Greg Egan, and the areas of science and technology in which she is most interested are "softer" than the hard SF favorites of physics and space flight. On the other hand, she is much more interested in the technical details of her imagined science than, say, Ursula LeGuin. And some of her stories are quite suspenseful and plot-driven, which many associate to the "hard" side of the spectrum.

She loves ballet, and has written stories around it.