Jessa Gamble

In the 1990s, science fiction writer Nancy Kress envisioned a world where an elite few never had to sleep. Her Hugo and Nebula award-winning Beggars series posited a gene-therapy fix to sleep, dreamed up by gifted children let loose in a lab. The Sleepless were not only more productive but also more intelligent and emotionally stable while the sleep-dependent Beggars became an underclass of…

In 1945, Canadian homes were still heated either by coal or by wood. My grandparents had shivered through depression-era Ottawa winters, desperate for fuel. Now the war was over, and fortunes were to be made, but to avoid flooding the housing and labour markets, the Canadian military did not demob everyone at once. This left my grandfather kicking around at a sniper training facility in Fort…