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.
