Wil McCarthy has been receiving broad attention for the tetralogy launched with Rich Man’s Sky, the 2022 Prometheus Best Novel winner.
Beggar’s Sky, one of five 2025 Best Novel finalists, is the third novel in his exciting science fiction/mystery series and the direct sequel to Poor Man’s Sky.
With Prometheus Awards voting in its final weeks before the July 4 deadline, it’s worth highlighting how each of the authors of this year’s Best Novel finalists have been receiving broader cultural attention in interviews, podcasts and rave reviews.
In Part three of our ongoing series, we highlight and provide links to four interviews that McCarthy has done about his complex series, which projects the twists and turns in the industrial development and colonization of our solar system primarily through the private efforts of four billionaires.
Perhaps the most interesting and timely of McCarthy’s interviews was the one he did with Paul Semel after the publication of Beggar’s Sky.
FIRST CONTACT, THE ALIEN “BEINGS” AND THE NEXT SEQUEL
Semel, who has his own website at paulsemel.com, has been writing about books, video games, music “and other fun stuff” for more than twenty years. According to his bio, he’s also a regular contributor to Common Sense Media, Walmart GameCenter, and other magazines and websites.
A big fan of McCarthy, Semel has interviewed him several times over the years, including after the publication of each of his novels in his current series. His latest McCarthy interview focuses on what inspired and influenced Beggar’s Sky, described a a “hard sci-fi space opera/political spy thriller.”
Here’s how Semel begins the interview: “With Beggar’s Sky, writer Wil McCarthy is once again exploring the completely fictional, and downright outlandish idea, of what might happen if the super rich took over the space race. Like that would ever happen.”
In response, McCarthy describes his sequel and its focus.
“Not too much of a spoiler to say this is an alien contact novel, but one in which the contact is managed entirely by a single high-net-worth individual. That’s a lot of power for one person to wield, and it has a very distorting effect on the people and industries operating in cislunar space. Where previously there had been intrigues and what we could call ‘unfriendly competition,’ things are now threatening to break out into outright warfare. That’s where we are when the story opens.”
McCarthy confirms that the current Sky trilogy will expand into a tetralogy – though not right away, and not with the most obvious title for the fourth and final novel in the series. (The titles refer to a phrase within a popular children’s counting rhyme: “rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief.”)
Referring to his earlier interview with McCarthy after the publication of Rich Man’s Sky, Semel asked: “You said it was the first in an ongoing series, and that there were two more books planned: Poor Man’s Sky and Beggar’s Sky. But you then added, ‘…and there might be more after that.’ But you just said Beggar’s is the third book in a trilogy. So, I have to ask: Are there going to be more Sky stories? And why doesn’t that plan including calling the fourth book Thief’s Sky?”
McCarthy’s answer is newsworthy, especially to LFS members and other fans eager to read the next novel in his award-winning series.
“Well, OK, first of all, Thief’s Sky is a terrible name for a book, and second, I haven’t started outlining a fourth book for the series yet,” McCarthy told Semel.
“But I do have some ideas about the direction things are heading. So yes, there will be at least one more book. Right now I’m working on something else, though, which I’d like to keep a bit secret, except to say it’s a comedy, quite different than the Rich Man’s Sky series.”
McCarthy discussed how Beggar’s Sky, like its predecessor, mixes elements of hard science fiction, space opera and political spy thrillers.
“All of the above, yes, plus first contact with an alien species. The Beings are really alien, though, so some parts of the book may seem a bit psychedelic or supersciencey as well. There were elements of that in Rich Man’s Sky, too, but only really in the background. Here it’s often front and center,” he said.
Intriguingly, McCarthy reveals in much more detail his vision of the mysterious aliens finally encountered directly in Beggar’s Sky, which is substantially centered on an alien first-contact story.
“The Beings communicate in something close to pure math — specifically, set theory — and they are powered by quantum gravity, so the biggest influence here comes from talking with mathematicians and physicists about what that would really be like. The contact is told through a dozen different points of view, so really the new influences were real people and real theories, more than literature,” he said.
Although The Beings are briefly evoked and hinted at in the first and second novels in the Sky series, by the end of Beggar’s Sky, it seems likely and logical to expect the fourth novel to center them far more.
“The Beings make an appearance of sorts in Rich Man’s Sky, as the drug-induced hallucinations of a possibly crazy trillionaire, and later on of people coming out of cryogenic suspension. But I knew before I started the trilogy that The Beings were real, and that contact with them was inevitable,” McCarthy tells Semel.
“Regarding The Beings in particular, I’ve always been fascinated with this idea that people on a drug called DMT consistently report the same hallucination of being contacted by otherworldly entities, sometimes referred to as “machine elves.” So right from the beginning, my thought has been, wow, what if that were true? It’s a fascinating idea.”
As always – including in his three-part Prometheus Blog interview after winning the Prometheus Award – McCarthy remains cagey and district about whether any of his fictional characters are inspired to any extent by the mega-billionaires often in the news today, such as Bill Gates or Elon Musk.
Semel asks: “And how about the real billionaire space race? Have any of those guys done anything in recent years that prompted you to add something, or remove something, from Beggar’s Sky?”
McCarthy’s terse response: “Ahem. This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to real people, living or dead, is purely coincidental. Next question!”
THE AMAZING STORIES INTERVIEW WITH MCCARTHY
Amazing Stories magazine and website also did an interesting interview with McCarthy, conducted by Griffin Barber. Right off the bat, Barber introduces McCarthy with a bio that prominently mentions his Prometheus award.
“Aerospace engineer/startup founder Wil McCarthy, formerly of WIRED and the SyFy channel, has won the Prometheus award once and the AnLab award twice. He’s been nominated for the Nebula, Locus, Seiun, Sturgeon and Philip K. Dick awards, and Discover Magazine rated his world of “P2/Sorrow” one of the 10 best fictional planets of all time. He has appeared in Analog and Asimov’s, and his bestselling novels include New York Times Notable Bloom, Amazon.com “Best of Y2K” The Collapsium and most recently, Beggar’s Sky. He has also written for TV and video games, and published copious nonfiction. McCarthy holds 31 issued U.S. patents.”
The interview, titled “Unexpected Questions with Wil McCarthy,” does ask quite a few unexpected questions.
Here’s just two, to whet your appetite to read the full interview:
Q: “If you could alter any one single natural law, what would it be and how would you change it?”
A: “Not a law per se, but I would dearly love to swap the positions of Mars and Venus in the Solar System. This would not immediately make either planet habitable, but it would make the terraforming job about a hundred times easier. If I actually did have the power to change natural laws, I would probably shoot myself and save the universe, because even very tiny changes would obliterate everything we know and hold dear.”
Q: Which trope of science fiction (phasers, transporters, time machines, much more) would you like to see put into our own reality? And how would you use it in a mundane way?”
A: Time machines would eff everything up, and phasers are not much different than the ways we kill each other already. Teleportation, though! That could radically change society, and mostly for the better, especially if there were safety protocols preventing hazardous objects or materials from being teleported. Most mundane use? Teleporting restaurant food directly to the table beside my couch, so I never have to get up at all.
THE BAEN FREE RADIO HOUR INTERVIEW – AND A RELATED MCCARTHY STORY
Baen Books also posted an interview with McCarthy on its Free Radio Hour.
The interview, conducted by Griffin Barber and available on YouTube, focuses on McCarthy’s first two novels in the series, and followed publication of Poor Man’s Sky.
Of special note: In introducing the interview, an associate Baen editor invites listeners to visit the Baen Books website to read “Xmas at ESL1,” a McCarthy short story set within the same fictional future of the Sky series and set on the ESL1 solar-shade space station owned by Igbal Renz, one of the four trillionaires dubbed the Four Horsemen who in different ways are propelling humanity’s expansion into the solar system and beyond.
To reinforce the realism and plausibility of his Sky series, especially the locked-room (actually locked airlock) moon-based murder mystery at the center of Poor Man’s Sky, McCarthy did a lot of research about treaties in space.
“The best parallel we have right now is maritime law, regarding ships at sea. But it’s complicated,” McCarthy said.
“The problem we have right now is that the treaties we have in space constrain only governments. Decades ago, it was unthinkable that any non-governmental entity would ever reach its fingers into space, but we’re rethinking that.
“The problem is that as people start to build something in space, there’s really no legal infrastructure about who owns it, who’s in charge… This is a real problem when someone gets murdered. Who has jurisdiction? Where are the police? And how does that constrain the investigation?”
MCCARTHY’S AUTHOR Q&A AT THE BOULDER BOOKSTORE
McCarthy, who lived in Boulder for five years and attended the University of Colorado, was happy to “return” to Colorado to do a video answering a set of reader’s questions provided by his favorite Boulder bookstore. As a bonus, he ends the session with a reading from his fiction.
Of special interest here, at least to the Prometheus Blog, is something you’ll immediately notice right off the bat, if you watch the video: On the wall behind McCarthy, presumably in his home office, and to the right of his bookshelves, is one plaque with a shiny coin in the middle of it.
Yes, it’s McCarthy’s Prometheus Awards plaque and gold coin for winning the Best Novel category in 2022 for Rich Man’s Sky. (Nice to see our award in a prominent place in McCarthy’s home.)
“Every writer I know has their own idiosyncratic way of doing things… I like to stretch my wings and try different things,” McCarthy said in answer to one question.
While many sf/fantasy writers write multi-volume series where one novel ends in a cliffhanger and the next novel immediately picks up from where the last one ends, McCarthy prefers a different approach – one he believes is best for him and better for his readers.
“I prefer that each book have its own story, its own beginning, middle and end,” he said.
(In fact, one strength of his Sky series is that each of the three novels he’s written so far in that series can be enjoyed and appreciated on its own, without reference to the previous books.)
McCarthy mentioned Poor Man’s Sky as an example, pointing out that it works as a stand-alone murder mystery thriller set on the moon.
Even so, each of McCarthy’s Sky novels does incorporate some teasers and hints that leave open some possibilities to develop in a sequel.
“A lot of people tell me I leave loose ends at the end of each book, which is true,” he said.
“I’m not consciously trying to tell a story in multiple books per se…. But real life is complicated, real life can be confusing for the people involved in it, and real life leaves a lot of loose ends.”
For further reading: Check out the previous Prometheus blog posts in this series about interviews and podcasts with the 2025 Best Novel finalists. Part One focuses on Lionel Shriver (and her novel Mania), and Part Two, on Danny King (and his novel Cancelled).
Coming up: Highlights of interviews and podcasts with the authors of this year’s other Best Novel finalists, including C. J. Cherryh and Jane S. Fancher (Alliance Unbound) and Michael Flynn (In the Belly of the Whale.)
Editor’s note: The Prometheus Blog strives to report widely on all Prometheus-recognized fiction and authors, especially if and when their work is referenced in the popular culture in newspapers, magazines, columns and debates.
If you know about such references, please bring them to our attention right away, so we can highlight them in a timely fashion.
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