Wil McCarthy’s novel Beggar’s Sky is a first-contact story.
The actual contact, though, is more picturesque than philosophical in this sequel to Poor Man’s Sky, itself the sequel to Rich Man’s Sky, McCarthy’s 2022 Prometheus winner for Best Novel.
The 2024 sequel – which has been nominated for the next Prometheus Award for Best Novel – takes place within the larger context of an ongoing space race sparked by four Earth billionaires pushing to expand space industry and humanity to new frontiers beyond our solar system.
FANTASTIC FRONTIERS
We learn almost nothing about the aliens from Beggar’s Sky – certainly no political/ethical views for us to chew over – but instead are entertained by fantastic, almost psychedelic impressions, partly couched in the author’s considerable awareness of developments on the frontiers of science and math.
Somehow the aliens have gained our attention but with the proviso that contact would require meeting far from our sun. So the wealthy entrepreneur Igbal Renz constructs a star ship and takes 100 humans (including himself) toward “the dark between the stars” – specifically, 1700 AU toward Proxima Centauri.
There, the ship stopped, and the eight crew members brought the remaining 92 out of their two year hibernation. After the encounter, the crew members returned the others to hibernation for the return trip.
A FIVE-PART FOCUS
The bulk of the novel has two focal points: the impressions later recounted by several of the people who took the journey; and narratives of the daily goings on of five interesting groups of people. These five groups are:
* The crew (and briefly the passengers) of the contact ship: the two principal people are Ignal Renz (owner) and Michael Jablonski (sort of a chaplain)
* Grigory Orlov, a rich man residing in cislunar space at the Clementine Earth-Moon Lagrange Point 1
* Igbal Renz’s distant staff on Shade Station, at Earth-Sun Lagrange Point 1
* The small population of Thalia Buoyant Island, including Frédéric, a 15-year-old with his family and a few dozen others, homesteading a floating island they created in the atmosphere of Venus
* Lawrence Killian, a rich man retiring in the Second Dawn Retirement Community on the Lunar South Pole
The storyline moves through these five locations and the people there who are of central interest. This builds our understanding of these characters and their motivations.
ECONOMIC VS. POLITICAL POWER
Notably, McCarthy illuminates and explores the characters’ personal qualities and especially how these people handle “power.”
By power I mean economic: their resources and productive capabilities. This helps readers distinguish it from political power, which is control via the use of force.
McCarthy’s novel frequently mentions the “four Horsemen” (as in the Biblical apocalypse), who are the apogees of power at that time. These four are Renz, Orlov, and Killian supplemented – as best as I can tell – by The Cartel (gangsters with high tech and low morals).
This distinction in kinds of power is jarring to most people on the “left,” but is important when you consider the advantage to clear thinking it makes possible. The four horsemen are trillionaires, which paints them as not just suspect but dangerous to humanity in the common view.
But very much as in Rich Man’s Sky, McCarthy portrays three that are quite admirable, seeking only to achieve, discover, and produce; and one (The Cartel) which has no compunction about killing and coercing. This is the sort of food for thought that can be quite constructive in today’s socio-political-cultural environment.
COMMUNING WITH THE ALIENS
One aspect of the story construction that I found problematic was the use of drugs to “properly” commune with the aliens. Why obfuscate our one chance in a million to perceive this contact as best we can?
McCarthy’s justification is that chemical enhancement (DMT, Ketamine, and MDMA) will enable openness to communication rather than obfuscate it. We are expected to suspend disbelief in the enjoyment of fiction, and that’s fine with me; it’s just a bit hard to swallow. I suspect that McCarthy has respect for psychedelics that are neither common nor easily rationalized; but the novel requires this, so I went along with it.
The other problematic aspect is frustrating: Contact with aliens is important to the story, yet almost nothing is learned from this contact. Even if McCarthy intended this, it still seems a little disappointing.
INSIGHTFUL INTERACTIONS
Many insights can be gained from the interactions of the characters in Beggar’s Sky.
A good example (from Chapter 5.3) is a brief conversation on Thalia, Venus. Tohias, the leader, points out the bravery of their residents in venturing to expand into a new world and the dishonesty at the base of their lack of continued support from Earth:
“People are crap, Frédéric. Not all of them, but too many.”
Frédéric, only 15, finds a way to enlist both support and financing from the people of Earth. Through imagination and entrepreneurial zeal this 15-year-old outperforms the great Tohias.
Another good example (from Chapter 3.3) is when Michael is speaking to Thenbecca:
“Kindness and self-interest are not at odds, unless you define your self-interest very narrowly. Which is a phenomenally stupid thing to do.”
AN ILLUMINATING STATEMENT ABOUT ENTREPRENEURSHIP
Perhaps my favorite, most illuminating and positive vignette comes midway through the novel (in Chapter 3.9), when billionaire entrepreneurIqbal Renz is reflecting on his career:
“Igbal knew what people thought of him: that he was a robber baron, that he’d gotten rich off the sweat of millions of other people’s brows. That he was an asshole who didn’t care about the world, or the plight of the poor.
“All of that was, of course, bullshit. Igbal had been fortunate enough to be born with a brain that thought up exciting ideas. And those ideas, well, they excited people, and the rest of it kind of followed naturally. They came to work for him. They helped him build the stuff he dreamed up, because it was their dream, too.
“Governments and corporations hurled money at him, because he could solve their problems and relieve their pain. That’s what people paid for; that’s what made the world go ’round. That and dreams — nothing else.
“And what better way to care for the world than to build a grander future for it? To enhance the capabilities of the human species, while reducing its waste? As for the plight of the poor, men like Igbal made the whole world richer. Provably, measurably.
“And he paid good wages, too — wages that flowed down to grocers and plumbers and auto mechanics. Wages that sent people’s children to college and cared for their elderly parents. Was that really less noble than if he worked forty hours a week at a soup kitchen? Seriously.
“Also, what exactly was he supposed to do for the poor? He didn’t even have money in the usual sense; he had a multinational corporation. Was he supposed to give that to the poor? How would that even work? No, these criticisms were all madness and noise, and he had learned long ago that his critics could not be reasoned with …
“Fact was, Igbal had made this whole thing happen — this incredible thing, that would change the course of history even if the Beings didn’t deign to speak. So yeah, he was damn well going to meet with the people he’d brought out here with him.”
These are potent observations – about the positive aspects of business and innovation in a free society with free markets.
Personally, I’d prefer McCarthy emphasize these themes even more in Beggar’s Sky, but I’m not a novelist. Yet, if he chooses to slip the good stuff in on the sly within the story, that’s fine with me. In the 1970s, we called this tactic “guerrilla capitalism.”
My other hope when beginning a novel is that it be well-written, and Beggar’s Sky definitely is. Prose that distracts from the storytelling is all too common; and story construction that leaves readers confused is also common. But Wil McCarthy scores high on both counts and leaves me smiling.
* Check out the Prometheus Blog Appreciation review-essay of Wil McCarthy’s Rich Man’s Sky, the 2022 Prometheus Best Novel winner.
Reviewer’s bio: This is LFS Emeritus member Rick Triplett’s first review for the Prometheus Blog, but not his first for Prometheus, our former print quarterly.
Over the decades, Triplett has reviewed many novels for Prometheus, most of them works that went on to be nominated for our award.
Among the novels he’s reviewed, still available to read on the LFS website’s newsletter index page, are Robert Heinlein and Spider Robinson’s Variable Star, L. Neil Smith’s uncensored and revised 2005 edition of his Best Novel finalist Tom Paine Maru, Michael Z. Williamson’s The Weapon, F. Paul Wilson’s Repairman Jack novel Infernal, Orson Scott Card’s Empire, Claire Wolf and Aaron Zelman’s Rebelfire: Out of the Grey Zone, Walter Mosley’s 47, and Tobias Buckell’s Ragamuffin.
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