Welcome back to Glass Half Full, and thanks for reading! We’re continuing with a series of character profiles from my satirical novel, Ship of Fools. Today we’re taking a look at rocket tycoon Lonnie Ester. If you haven’t met Lonnie and the other characters yet, you can check out the Introduction or jump right in with the Prologue.
Biographical details
Age: mid-40s
Birthplace: unknown, due to the subject’s secretive nature
Degrees: same as above
Occupation: entrepreneur and head of several companies
Relationship profile: straight, currently single, noted for dating Hollywood actresses
Hobbies: obsessing over the fate of humanity, working out the details of a space colony along the lines of an O’Neill cylinder
Of all the characters in Ship of Fools, even the flat-earthers like Sarge and Clive, Lonnie Ester has been the most problematic to write. Not only is he a member of the billionaire class, a group with more than its fair share of loathsome people, but his name might invoke a very particular billionaire who seems bent on converting himself from Iron Man to Bond Villain in the public imagination.
Here I’ll just repeat the novel’s disclaimer: Any similarities between the characters found herein and persons living, dead, or inhabiting an alternate universe, are either coincidences or the product of the reader’s over-active, pattern-seeking neocortex. Also, the novel describes another rocket tycoon, this one obsessed with colonizing Mars, as having prematurely blasted off for that planet, never to be heard from again. Lonnie’s rocket company, SpaceOut, has done well as it moved into the space vacated by that other unnamed billionaire. Make of that what you will!
While Lonnie might remind readers of one or another real-life billionaire with an interest in space, I had a completely different model in mind: Hubertus Bigend from William Gibson’s Blue Ant trilogy. A powerful man, not to be trusted, probably with nefarious and narcissistic motives, but who also is decent enough to occasionally do a good turn. That will become important by the novel’s climax (I hope I’m not giving too much away here). If Lonnie were completely loathsome, then the reader might not tolerate even the few chapters devoted to him and might not find his actions believable.
At the same time, I wanted to portray the “I alone can save it” mentality of many of these tech types. I take this as a serious motive or self-belief, if a deluded one, and not the sham that many on my side of the political aisle take it for.12 Slim, for his part, sees through Lonnie’s narcissism when the billionaire describes his ambitions to the cowboy-turned-detective. Lonnie’s motives might be sincere, but he’s just getting a mite too big for his britches, in Slim’s view. When Lonnie does take what seems like a selfless action, maybe it’s just that he’s trying to live up to his own personal mythology. Or maybe it’s that he’s seen a profit angle.
Lonnie also plays a couple of other roles in the novel. As the head of a rocket company that regularly launches ships into orbit or to the moon, he knows better than anyone that the flat-earthers are wrong. Thus he becomes one of the voices for rationality and science, though there are a few hints of his own anti-science beliefs in other areas. As the de facto head of the US-EU-SpaceOut lunar settlement effort, he also becomes the voice for human space settlement and for moving industry and mining into space, preserving the home planet. In upcoming chapters, beginning this weekend, he’ll make that case, while others from CAOS and No Exit make the case against it. As with everything else here at Glass Half Full, these represent my own mixed and often conflicting views on the subject.
Or maybe Sarge is right, and Lonnie is just a shill for the dominant round-Earth paradigm, creating elaborate productions of “space theatre.” You’ll have to decide as you keep reading the novel.
Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this character profile, please give it a like, a share, a restack, or a comment. And if you really enjoyed it, I hope you’ll buy me a coffee or upgrade to a paid subscription.
Come back on Friday for Chapter 35 of Ship of Fools, “In the Belly of the Beast,” in which Sarge, Liz, and Dawa set off from the South Pole in search of… well, Liz isn’t quite sure, and Dawa is being coy about the goal of their ski trek.
The idea that any of these billionaires, except maybe Musk, are going to rocket off to Mars or a space colony, leaving the rest of us behind, is just nonsensical. Humanity’s first years in space or on another planet, if they happen at all, are going to be no picnic. If self-preservation is the motive, much easier to just buy a private island with lots of high ground. If we do migrate our society into space, it’s going to look a lot like the one we have now. The billionaires will still need miners, janitors, cooks, plumbers, you name it. I’m betting that the space future, if it happens, will look a lot like the one in The Expanse (though without the protomolecule, we can only hope).
On the other hand, I’m probably not cynical enough. When playing Horizon Zero Dawn (spoilers incoming), I believed the Odyssey’s founders’ claims that the project wasn’t merely an escape hatch for themselves. I thought the writers were providing a surprisingly nuanced view of billionaires. In Horizon Forbidden West, I discovered that, nah, these billionaires, most of them at least, were just as greedy and self-obsessed as any cartoon caricature would have us believe.