Sequels are increasingly popular these days – especially within the fantastical or speculative genres of science fiction and fantasy.
Among this year’s recently announced five Prometheus Best Novel finalists are two sequels: Alliance Unbound and Beggar’s Sky.
Of the 11 2024 SF/fantasy novels nominated for this year’s 45th Best Novel award, four are sequels – including Shadow of the Smoking Mountain and Machine Vendetta.
Each sequel navigates a tricky balance between the fresh and the familiar.
Each can be enjoyed by newcomers as a stand-alone book. Yet, each is enriched by previous world-building and continuing characters that makes them rewarding for the author’s ongoing fans.
How each novel builds on its predecessors, or in some cases departs from them, varies in ways that help illuminate the appeal of sequels and their challenges.
ALLIANCE UNBOUND
Alliance Unbound, by C.J. Cherryh and Jane S. Fancher, is the direct sequel to Alliance Rising, their 2020 Best Novel winner.
Alliance Unbound is also Book 2 in their projected Hinder Stars trilogy – itself adding more about the early history of Cherryh’s vast Alliance-Union interstellar future-history series.
Building on Alliance Rising, the sequel continues to dramatize the development of a shaky but growing alliance of free traders as Earth’s former colonies strive to preserve their independence and freedom amid machinations and threats of aggression from an arrogant Earth.
Merchanters face challenges and uncertainties in the human colonies about the game-changing possibility of new jump points opening up a faster-than-light route from Earth – which would more directly threaten their independence by making it much easier for Earth forces to take over various colonies and orbiting stations.
Like its predecessor, Alliance Unbound offers sympathetic characters and a suspenseful story that sheds light on how the ethics and benefits of voluntary cooperation and free thought advance merchanter culture, while revealing the authoritarian and dysfunctional tendencies within bureaucracies, military commands and other coercive systems.
For more about this sequel, read William H. Stoddard’s recent Prometheus Blog review.
BEGGAR’S SKY
Beggar’s Sky, by Wil McCarthy (Baen Books), is a sequel to Poor Man’s Sky (2023) and Rich Man’s Sky, the 2022 Prometheus Best Novel winner.
Unlike many sequels or trilogies, which tend to develop one primary story and theme with continuing characters over several books, McCarthy seems to be making great efforts to go in very different directions with each successive novel in his series.
All the more impressive for its kaleidoscopic focus on four billionaires pursuing thrilling, high-risk ventures beyond Earth to envision space exploration, colonization and industrialization, Rich Man’s Sky sets up several different but interconnected plot lines, each based in different parts of our solar system.
Poor Man’s Sky, its direct sequel and mostly set on the Moon, offers an ingenious murder mystery with broader geopolitical implications. (It’s an intelligent and absorbing SF mystery, and rewarding for fans of Rich Man’s Sky, but wasn’t nominated for the Prometheus Award in 2023 because it doesn’t have strong and central libertarian or anti-authoritarian themes.)
Beggar’s Sky, meanwhile, does explore such themes while taking an entirely different tack as a far-flung and especially inventive alien first contact story.
Like Rich Man’s Sky, this sequel shows how cooperation through free markets can be successful in a future space race embodied in various wildly expensive and high-risk projects, such as a floating Venus station and perhaps the most expensive and important scientific exploration/discovery in history.
A wealthy and visionary entrepreneur – perhaps the most admirable of the billionaires dubbed the Four Horsemen, each taking turns at the shifting center of the first novel – employs private enterprise to construct a star ship and take 100 humans, including himself, to meet non-corporeal aliens far from our sun.
Each human, with the help of psychedelic drugs, interprets their contact in drastically different ways, sparking further mysteries and philosophical questions.
Although the human-alien encounters don’t directly involve any issues of individual liberty, the broader context of this novel does. Showing rather than telling (one mark of a good storyteller), and avoiding any didactic ideology, McCarthy insightfully contrasts two types of “power” – voluntary socioeconomic cooperation in business versus coercive State authority.
For more about McCarthy’s sequel, read Rick Triplett’s Prometheus Blog review.
One speculative prediction: Given that the titles of these novels parallel the nursery-rhyme phrase “Rich Man, Poor Man, Beggar Man, Thief,” one wonders if McCarthy is planning to complete his imaginative and impressively varied series with a fourth novel.
If so, would its ideal title be Thief’s Sky (or maybe Thieves’ Sky)? Or, given where the series appears to be heading after the initial alien contact and resultant mysteries dramatized so fascinatingly in Beggar’s Sky, might the presumed final novel in this series be better titled Alien’s Sky?
The future remains uncertain – one thing that makes the futures envisioned in so many SF/fantasy novels so fascinating and exciting to envision.
We’ll have to wait awhile to see what novel emerges next from McCarthy’s ingenious and fertile mind.
OTHER NOMINATED SEQUELS
In addition to the two sequels described above that have been recognized as Best Novel finalists, other nominated sequels this year include Howard Andrew Jones’ Shadow of the Smoking Mountain and Alastair Reynolds’ Machine Vendetta.
SHADOW OF THE SMOKING MOUNTAIN
Jones’ novel, a sequel to the 2024 Best Novel finalist Lord of a Shattered Land, is the third book in the Chronicles of Hanuvar, an episodic and highly enjoyable sword-and-sorcery fantasy series.
All three Jones books, which includes The City of Marble and Blood as the middle novel in the trilogy, are set in a fictionalized and supernatural ancient-history saga of Hanuvar’s continuing adventures, loosely inspired by the ancient rivalry between Rome and Carthage’s general Hannibal.
Hanuvar, an admirably ethical former general and anti-slavery abolitionist determined to free the remnants of his vanquished and enslaved people, is at the heroic center of the picaresque series.
Sadly, Jones reportedly had hoped to finish writing this as a five-novel saga before he died in early 2025.
Now, its future remains in doubt – although the possibility exists that Baen Books may find another writer to flesh out and finish Jones’ projected series.
MACHINE VENDETTA
Like Cherryh and Fancher’s Alliance Unbound and Jones’ Shadow of a Smoking Mountain, Reynolds’ Machine Vendetta continues and extends a familiar ongoing story within his far-flung Revelation Space series.
Yet, like McCarthy’s Beggar’s Sky, Reynolds’ sequel also aims to tell its own story within that context, in this case blending space opera with a new detective-driven murder mystery.
With brief references to previous events and relationships providing sufficient context to enjoy as a stand-alone novel, Machine Vendetta offers a powerful conclusion to the Prefect Dreyfus Emergencies trilogy, launched with Aurora Rising and continuing with Elysium Fire.
Enjoyable for readers who haven’t read anything else in Reynolds’ series and billed by Reynolds as “a sort of universe within a universe,” the trilogy takes place mostly within the highly civilized Glitter Band of 10,000 city states and space habitats orbiting the planet Yellowstone around the star Epsilon Eridani.
As Dreyfus investigates the strange death of a fellow agent of Panoply, the Glitter Band’s sole system-wide authority enforcing what Locus magazine in its positive review described as a loosely “volunteerist-libertarian legal framework,” connections are gradually made to uncover deeper machinations and ongoing mysteries involving a hidden broader threat to humanity’s independence and freedom.
THE BENEFITS AND CHALLENGES OF SEQUELS
Just from describing these four Best Novel nominees, the potential benefits of sequels seem obvious.
If a novel is successful and its characters appealing, then why not write another story about them? After all, such sequels are likely to generate more success, since they have previously attracted a built-in audience of fans.
Even better for science fiction and fantasy, sequels can take advantage of the complex world-building required to make SF/fantasy plausible and interesting.
Why not use the same broad fictional universe or future history, once it’s been carefully thought out and engineered for both scientific and literary plausibility? (Or, in the case of fantasy, structured to make its assumptions and settings similarly consistent and plausible.)
And who knows? Perhaps some sequels, if well-conceived and well-written, can deepen or even transcend previous stories in the same imagined world.
While fans appreciate authors who return to familiar worlds and favorite characters, readers also savor stories that reveal more dimensions and different perspectives than previously known.
Thus, writing sequels can be tricky.
If they’re too familiar, and too closely repeat the initial formula, readers can end up disappointed. Yet, if they stray too far from the elements that made the first novel so captivating, fans can feel let down in other ways.
That’s why it will be interesting to see how this year’s sequels end up in the Prometheus Awards.
And why many Libertarian Futurist Society members will be looking forward to reading any more sequels that might emerge to these stimulating and entertaining works.
ABOUT THE PROMETHEUS AWARDS AND THE LFS:
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* Watch videos of past Prometheus Awards ceremonies, Libertarian Futurist Society panel discussions with noted sf authors and leading libertarian writers, and other LFS programs on the Prometheus Blog’s Video page.
* Read “The Libertarian History of Science Fiction,” an essay in the international magazine Quillette that favorably highlights the Prometheus Awards, the Libertarian Futurist Society and the significant element of libertarian sf/fantasy in the evolution of the modern genre.
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