Beggars in Spain by Nancy Kress

read by Cassandra Campbell

Beggars in Spain is Methuselah’s Children for the new millennium. 

If you don’t know what I mean by that, I forgive you. But also, I will have to ask you to bear with me while I try to explain myself. It’s a very specific reference, but also huge and dense with information that you kind of had to be there for (“Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra,” anyone?). I’ll do my best, though. Here goes:

Methuselah’s Children is a Heinlein novel, one of his most sweeping and important. It is, of course, a massively ripping yarn. But moreover, it establishes two of the three major themes that characterize his body of work throughout his career and it sets the stage for his Future History stories. It tells us how the Howard Families got their start, and what effect that start, and the very existence of the Howards, had on the course of human history.

The short version: a wealthy man named Ira Howard has a genetic disorder that causes him to die of old age in his forties. Before he dies he decides, as his legacy, to increase human longevity. So he sets up a foundation that financially encourages folks with long-lived grandparents to have kids with each other. 

Within just a few generations, this scheme succeeds so wildly that the Howard Families, as they become known, live much longer than the folks around them. They start having to go on the lam, witness-protection-plan-style, because they don’t age like other folks and they don’t want to arouse envy or suspicion. They worry about the possibility of discrimination and even violence if ordinary people become aware of their advantages.

Eventually they do get outed, of course. And of course it turns out they were right to worry. Folks at large want to know what the “secret” to their longevity is and refuse to believe that there isn’t one, beyond good genes. The Howards race against time (and overreaching government) and manage a seat-of-their pants escape from Earth in a spaceship, and proceed to Have Adventures and Learn Lessons. 

A few years later they return to Earth—but due to Einsteinian time dilation, it’s been much longer than that back home. And the folks here, having been “cheated” of the “secret” to longevity, have had no recourse but to find it on their own—which they do, in the form of numerous therapies. 

Throw in a bunch of thinly-veiled (and sometimes buck nekkid) lectures on the benefits of eugenics and libertarianism, and you’ve got Methuselah’s Children in a nutshell.

Why is all of that so important? Well, to begin with, Heinlein wasn’t called “the dean of science fiction writers” for nothing. His writing career spanned five decades, during which he published 32 novels and 59 short stories in 16 collections (as well as numerous essays and a screenplay). His work has been adapted into numerous movies, TV series, and at least one board game, and his influence on other writers and on popular culture at large can’t be overstated. He invented the waldo, foresaw the Internet, coined the word “grok,” and gave comfort and encouragement to generations of free-love hippies and other sexual deviants.

And then there’s the Future History timeline. It’s just one of a sheaf of timelines in Heinlen’s World As Myth multiverse, but it’s the one nearly all of his early adult work is set in and, in my opinion, the vast majority of his most-important later work takes place there as well. (Sorry-not-sorry to any Heinlein scholars who disagree either about the timeline or the importance—and yes, there’s plenty of heartfelt and very vocal disagreement out there. That’s how important this guy’s work is.) 

Even outside of this timeline, Heinlein’s major themes of the excellence and longevity of humans being determined by eugenics and of the sacred importance of individual responsibility and the dignity of labor (slightly strange bedfellows when you think about it) are set up and thoroughly established here. The only major Heinleinian theme missing from this book is his rejection of contemporary sexual mores.

So then. We have a major work by a major author that lays out his major themes. How does it relate to Beggars in Spain, the book I’m actually reviewing here? Well:

Beggars begins in 2019 (which must have felt comfortably far in the future back in 1993 when it was written—or maybe 1991 or 1996, depending on how you count it) with a wealthy man strong-arming a geneticist into using a new and unproven genetic manipulation technique to give his as-yet-unconceived child the advantage of never having to sleep. He reasons that if his offspring doesn’t have to essentially waste 30% of its life being unconscious and therefore unproductive, that child will be able to accomplish 30% more than its peers. 

Why wouldn’t you buy that for your kid if you could, right? Lots of folks end up buying it for their kids. Thus begins the story of the Sleepless, a group of people who, in addition to the intended effect of never needing to sleep, also enjoy the side effects of an innately sunny disposition and—you guessed it—longevity. Plus whatever else their parents have paid to have them genetically predisposed toward, typically stuff like high intelligence and physical beauty. 

As these kids grow up, they become a group that is at once envied and reviled—discriminated against very openly, much like Jewish people in Europe in previous centuries, because they’re simultaneously seen as possessing unearned advantages and being not-quite-human. At the same time, the American economy is in a period of sunny prosperity, fueled by the invention of cold fusion technology called Y-energy by a man named Kenzo Yagai.  

Yagai is a fascinating figure, though we never spend any time with him in the book. His influence on the world isn’t limited to nearly-endless nearly-free energy and all that that implies. He’s also the founder and popularizer of a philosophy called Yagaiism, which emphasizes individual excellence and has its roots firmly in—you guessed it—libertarianism.

And so we have the two themes again, eugenics and (quasi-) libertarianism. But Kress doesn’t lecture us about them. Instead she explores them, in depth and with nuance. 

Through her characters’ eyes, we see the human effects of genetic manipulation combined with a philosophy that holds that the weak have no claim on the labor of the strong. We explore the meaning of community and the definition of humanity. We see all of this from the point of view of multiple sides and multiple generations. As a result, we ask ourselves interesting questions about them. Kress doesn’t shove the answers to these questions down our throats. But she gives us enough information to form some nuanced ideas, and start to ask questions of our own. Questions which apply to us here and now, in our current cultural, scientific, and political landscape.

Like the best literature, this is a book that can be read as lightly or deeply as you like. It can be enjoyed as an amusing walk through a plausible and interesting possible future, or an examination of what it does to a person to be “other than” or to be the one doing the “othering,” or the playing-out on a grand scale of a philosophical exercise. Whether you want to read for fun or to exercise your empathy or to sink your intellectual teeth into an intriguing idea, do read it.

Dune by Frank Herbert

This was not my first time at this rodeo. I first read Dune somewhere around age 15, and I re-read it (and its sequel, Dune Messiah, and sometimes the third book, Children of Dune, and always the then-last book in the series, Chapterhouse: Dune) many times. In fact it was something of a yearly ritual of mine, to pick up Dune and whichever sequels I chose during the holidays every year for a very satisfying re-read. I estimate that I’ve read books 1, 2, and 6 at least a dozen times each, and book 3 perhaps half a dozen times. (I only bothered with books 4 and 5 once each; they didn’t do it for me.)

However, life is short and there are so many great books out there that I will never have time to read, and over the years I became a busier person. When you only finish about a book a week, you become much more selective about what you spend your precious reading time on, and you think hard before going back to something you are already thoroughly familiar with. So, I gradually lost my annual Dune habit. In fact, when my stepson became interested in Dune earlier this year, I realized that it had been at least 15 years since I’d read it—maybe more; I think the last time was around the time the TV miniseries came out in 2000.

It was time to revisit Arrakis.

For anyone who has not read Dune (and also, I hope, not seen any of the screen adaptations—all of them so far are hugely problematic in my opinion and I would be sad to think that they were your first experience of this universe, though if you’re already a fan they’re worth watching)—for anyone not already familiar with this work, the incredible thing, the thing that impressed the hell out of everyone back in 1965 when it was originally published and still impresses new readers today, is the world-building. Nobody had attempted anything like it before, and damn few have succeeded since.

In Herbert’s universe, humanity has spread to the stars and their interstellar civilization is still recovering from a cataclysmic war, the Butlerian Jihad, which resulted in a universal ban on “thinking machines” (basically any computer at all). Humanity, partly as a result of the jihad, has attained amount and degree of diversity that is unimaginable by today’s standards. Some people, even some entire peoples, have been genetically modified and/or deeply, intensively trained to take the place of the thinking machines that previously made an interplanetary civilization possible.

All of these people are knit together in a neo-feudal empire ruled by a theoretically absolute ruler, Emperor Shaddam IV. He holds the Landsraad (a political entity composed of all the noble houses under Shaddam’s rule) and CHOAM (the Combine Honnete Ober Advancer Mercantiles, an organization that controls all above-board trade in the known universe) in his imperial pockets. However, his power is balanced by that of the Spacing Guild, who hold an absolute monopoly on all interstellar travel, and a shadowy sisterhood called the Bene Gesserit, whose motivations are hard to discern and whose members are everywhere.

All of these organizations are completely dependent on a highly addictive substance called melange, or more often, simply “spice.” Spice confers health and longevity in small doses and a variety of utterly necessary mental powers (no computers, remember? But interstellar civilization) in large doses.

And this spice, it turns out, can’t be synthesized. It can only be mined, and only on one planet: Arrakis, nicknamed “Dune” because the entire planet is a deep-desert ecosystem, aside from small habitable areas near the poles. Mining spice is incredibly dangerous; special mobile factories must be flown into the deep desert, where they face constant danger from the planet’s “wild” inhabitants, the Fremen; immense, unpredictable, and astonishingly destructive coriolis storms; and, most of all, the planet’s signature lifeform, the sandworms.

Sandworms vary in size from merely half a dozen meters to large enough to swallow an entire spice factory in one gulp. And swallow them they do, given the opportunity; the sandworms protect the spice sands. Always, without exception, a sandworm will appear at any excavation site. The question is when, and whether a given worm is sighted early enough for the mining machinery and personnel to be safely evacuated.

Arrakis, then, is existentially important to the Empire, and also extremely difficult to govern. As the story begins, Duke Leto Atreides has just won Dune as a fiefdom from his enemy, the morally and physically disgusting Baron Harkonnen. Leto, his Bene Gesserit concubine, Jessica, and their 15-year-old son, Paul, all must leave their beautiful homeworld to take possession of this incredibly tough nut. Of course it’s a trap; Leto and his family are slated for betrayal and assassination. The noble duke nevertheless does his best to successfully govern Arrakis in spite of his powerful enemy’s plots.

He fails, of course. (It would only be a mildly interesting story if he succeeded.) But his son and concubine survive, spirited away to the deep desert, which turns out to be more inhabited than anyone but the inhabitants realized—and it turns out they have plans of their own for their planet. The destiny of the entire human universe will hinge on one fifteen-year-old boy and the fallout from an evil baron’s petty machinations.

This is a book that contains a vast civilization, a carefully-thought-out planetary ecosystem, and a fascinating array of characters. For me, though, it’s a book of moments. I can thumb through these moments in my mind as easily, and almost as meaningfully, as my own memories. There’s the moment when Jessica is overseeing the unpacking in their new home and trying to decide whether she can get away with not displaying the portrait of her duke’s father and the taxidermed head of the bull that killed him in the dining room. The moment when Paul uses a compass, a few precious drops of water, and some real Boy Scout ingenuity to save his and his mother’s life when they are buried in sand. The moment when Paul and Chani meet and he recognizes her from his dreams.

There are a thousand such moments in this book. Reading it is like dipping my hand into a chest full of pearls and coming up holding a strand where one perfect orb follows another, and another, and another, each one deeply lustrous, and each following the next because how could it be otherwise? I honestly can’t tell to what degree the vividness, clarity, and (once you’ve read them) inevitability-in-retrospect of all the moments is a function of how well-written the book is, and to what degree I feel that way because I read it repeatedly at an impressionable age. I do know that inevitability is a large part of what the book is about, and that Herbert won both the Hugo and the Nebula for it in large part because he had created such a believable universe. It’s considered a classic for a reason.

If you’ve never read this book, read it. If you haven’t read it in a while, revisit it. It stands up to the test of time.