The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress

If you're a fan of classic print sf, this book probably doesn't need a lot of introduction; it's set in the twenty-first century, when Earth's moon is a penal colony. The inhabitants of the moon decide to declare independence, and the novel follows the course of this revolution, told from the first-person perspective of Mannie, a maintenance worker who has a special relationship with the computer that runs the moon, which he nicknames Mike.

I haven't read as much Heinlein as some, but I've read enough to know he was very much interested in what the obligations of government were to the people, what the obligations of people were to the government, and what the obligations of people were to each other; that's the key question in his show more earlier Hugo winners, Starship Troopers and Stranger in a Strange Land, for example. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress reads as the ultimate extension of this line of thought, its most thorough explanation. I know enough about Heinlein to know he doesn't necessarily endorse every idea promulgated here, but more that he liked to explore a question and come at it from different angles. In The Pleasant Profession of Robert A. Heinlein, Farah Mendlesohn says that the book reflects "both the degree to which Heinlein believed in the community..." (which certainly sets him apart from most would-be libertarians!) "...and the degree to which he was beginning to despair of the ability of Americans as individuals to understand their role in creating that community."

Like any Heinlein book, it's highly readable. Mannie is an affable narrator, and the characters are fun (so long as you can filter Wyoh through Heinlein's ideas about women, which admittedly not every reader is going to be able to do; I also enjoyed the role of Hazel, so I know I will get to read more about in The Rolling Stones, which I plan to read next). The lunar society is well thought out, which interesting worldbuilding, and I enjoyed the mechanics of the revolution being front and center. I once thought about doing a study of revolutionary violence in science fiction (I'm doubtful I ever will do this now), and this surely would have been front and center if I had.

Unfortunately, as the novel goes on, I found it gets duller. It struck me about halfway through that The Moon is a Harsh Mistress was a variant of a novel I'd read before—or rather, a novel I'd read before was a variant on it—Ursula K. Le Guin's The Disposessed, which is also about an anarchist revolution on a resource-deprived lunar colony of a largely capitalist planet. Not in the sense that Le Guin ripped off Heinlein or anything, but in the sense that it seems to me Le Guin was clearly in dialogue with Heinlein. (I'm not the first person to make this connection, of course; there's a 1994 SFS article by Donna Glee Williams with the great line, "The similarities are impressive. Why then does Heinlein's book inspire some readers to run out, buy a gun, and vote Republican, while Le Guin's book opposes it (non-violently, of course) on every point?") The most noteworthy comparison to me was that, in Le Guin's book, everything is hard. Hard because of the realities of life on a hardscrabble satellite of course (and Le Guin even makes things easier for her anarchists by giving Anarres a breathable atmosphere), but also hard because taking political ideals and putting them into practice is never easy for any number of reasons: faults of logic, contingency, aspects of human nature.

In MIHM, though, nothing is hard, because you have Mike, the supercomputer who always knows the answer. Though some would argue the role is also distributed to the professor, Mike is probably the most extreme example I can imagine of Heinlein's "competent man," the person who can figure out anything and make it happen. You are never in doubt the revolution will succeed, because you soon come to realize that Mike will have the solution to every problem. To me, it feels like an admission that making a new society is very difficult, but instead of making that the topic of the novel, as Le Guin did, Heinlein elides it by having Mike solve every problem. So though MIHM remains readable throughout, because Heinlein is a strong writer, the book kind of got boring as it progressed.

Heinlein won the Best Novel Hugo Award four times, and this was the last of them. He would be a finalist three more times, though, in 1974 (Time Enough for Love), 1983 (Friday), and 1985 (Job). Of those, I've read Friday, and while it just predates when I took up book-blogging, so I have no review of it, I remember finding it overly long, aimless, and self-indulgent; Mendlesohn says that Moon is a Harsh Mistress is "short, sharp and punchy, the very last of Heinlein's novels to be so." In a phenomenon we continue to see in the present day, once a writer gets onto the Hugo ballot a few times, they often continue to recur on it even once they've passed the point where they're doing anything Hugo-worthy. show less

In Heinlein's science fiction classic, the moon was settled as a penal colony. The narrator of the story, Manuel Garcia "Mannie" O'Kelly-Davis, is an example of lunar society as a whole: his ethnic background is diverse, and his ancestors already served out their prison sentence. However, the physiological changes brought by living in a low gravitational field make a return to Earth difficult if not impossible. That's exactly the way Earth wants it. The farming caves of Luna supply wheat for the starving masses of Terra down below. The ruling Lunar Authority cares nothing about rights--they want wheat, and they want the exiles to stay exiles.

Then Mannie, a computer technician, works on the Lunar Authority's master computer. It becomes show more self-aware and speaks, accepting Mannie as his best friend. The computer is bored and wants to cause some mischief. A rebellion will certainly liven things up...

I can see why this book is a classic. It paints a fascinating picture of lunar settlement and a future Earth. I admit, the heavier science portions lost me, but I still understood enough to know what is going on. The book also shows an intriguing depiction of rebellion against terrible odds. The gravity of Earth is crippling for "Loonies," so there can be no invasion. The moon has no weapons. However, desperate people make do, and often to great results.

That said, the characters left a lot to be desired. It's told in first person from Mannie's viewpoint, but I never felt like I really knew him. He was almost created as too much of an "everyman." Many of the other characters also come across as flat. I was excited at the beginning when a female character emerged as a central figure of the rebellion---and in a society where women are prized because they number so few--but halfway through the book, she dwindled to a very minor role. The science in the book feels very modern, but when it came to gender roles Heinlein still felt mired in the mid-60s when this book was written. That was especially disappointing considering how far-thinking and ethnically diverse the cast is, and how that's even reflected in how they speak on Luna with a blend of Earth languages. The best and most complicated character is the computer, Mike, and he's the reason I was hooked to read onward.

I'm glad I read the book and I think it brings up a lot of interesting questions about human rights, independence, and the settlement of the moon, but will this volume stay on my shelf indefinitely? I doubt it. show less

"Man and Computer Join Forces in the Classic Story of a Lunar Revolt!"

It's classic Heinlein - all of his faults and virtues as a writer are on full display, and they are what makes his works so memorable. Lunar revolutionaries join forces with a sentient computer to plot an uprising against their Earthly overlords - somewhat awkwardly grafted to a parallel of the American Revolution. The main character's lingo and mode of speech took a bit of getting used to, but it went a lot smoother reading his dialogue as if he had a Russian accent - your personal mileage may vary. If you're not put off by these idiosyncrasies, it's a captivating ride from start to finish, one I found difficult to put down.

The standout character for me was that of show more Stuart Lajoie - Jacobite French Nobility of Scottish extraction, and self-described "Poet, Traveler, Soldier of Fortune." There's one exchange he has with the "Professor" (the requisite Heinlein stand-in) and Manuel, which stuck with me more than any other section of the novel:

"I'm a royalist because I'm a democrat. I shan't let your reluctance thwart the idea any more than you let stealing stop you."
I said "Hold it, Stu. You say you're a royalist because you're a democrat?"
"Of course. A king is the people's only protection against tyranny . . . especially against the worst of all tyrants, themselves."

Perhaps it stands out to me all the more as a citizen of the Commonwealth, but it very much encapsulates how the Monarchy is often discussed in the Commonwealth Realms - even among those who are more republican minded - the Monarchy is often viewed as a protective force against democracy's worst excesses, and as oddly contradictory as it may seem to some, the role of the King is arguably the most important of the checks and balances found in a robust democratic system. show less

I thought I'd like this book more than I did. It was highly recommended to me because "anarchists on the moon!". Which is very much my thing! But...

1) Ugh, Heinlein's gross sexism and Weird Sex Ideas. Every damn woman (or girl who's hit puberty) in the book is primarily viewed through the lens of how sexy she is to all the men in the vicinity. Women in general are routinely derided as foolish and emotional. Rape is considered a fun topic to joke about. Sure, Heinlein posits that women are treated well in their society... but only because they're considered a valuable commodity. Blah.

2) The whole political plot is not so much "we're building a cool anarchist society!" as "We, the few smart people, are carefully engineering a specific show more political outcome. Democracy is stupid! Anyway, look how very clever our clever plan is!"

There are some low-key racist undercurrents through the whole thing, too, just to top the whole thing off.

The one thing I did like about this story is that the villain is greedy prison operators who ignore the humanity of their prisoners, preferring to profit endlessly off their labor. That's something worth overthrowing! And sadly quite relevant to the real world. show less

Heinlein's forth and final Hugo, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is a thriller of revolution and interplanetary war, a tale of an unlikely friendship between man and machine, and a credible study of the evolution of human culture.

Taking these themes in roughly reverse order: in the year 2075 the moon is home to 3 million human beings, the descendants of convicts and exiles continually sent up by an overpopulated Earth. The world-building is top-notch, revealed through the narrator's clipped Loonie speech patterns and creole of English and Russian, and millions of those tiny details Heinlein is rightfully famous for. Heinlein has spent a lot of time thinking about life in low-gravity, and that work pays off here in effortless descriptions show more on lunar life. Most key is the gender ratio: most convicts are male, and even now there are two men for every woman on the moon. Plural marriages are common, from simple triads to clans and lines and more complex arrangement. The deadly lunar environment and lack of women have created an elaborate code that gives women all the power in every situation. A man that so much as touches a woman without her consent is likely to be thrown out the nearest airlock. Where many scifi cultures feel like they're thrown together from whatever the author found interesting, without much sense of history.

Second is the friendship between our narrator Manuel O'Kelly Davis, and the real hero Mycroft, a HOLMES type supercomputer operated by the Lunar authority. Mycroft (call him Mike) achieves self-awareness shortly before the start of the books, probably from being linked into every system on Luna. With Manny, Luna's best computer tech as his first friend, Mike goes from brilliant child to being of many personalities and a great deal of complexity. Mike is the ace-in-the-hole for the Revolution, handling communications, strategic analysis, and the big guns.

Oh yes, the Revolution. Even though Luna is a prison, it's almost irrelevant because there's nowhere to escape to, aside from the airless surface. The Lunar Authority controls all the ships, and lunar people adapted to 1/6th G have a great deal of trouble on Earth. The Lunar Authority buys grain for too little and charges too much for imports, but most Loonies barely notice. Except that if grain shipments aren't stopped, Luna will have food riots in seven years, cannibalism in eight, and nobody seems to notice or care about the grim future. It's up to Manny, and his fellow conspirators in Mike, Lunar patriot Wyoming Knot (practically the only Lunar patriot), and exiled professional revolutionary Professor Bernard de la Paz to lead a revolution and save the Moon! There's great stuff on conspiracy, on cellular organizations, and how to use propaganda to turn an apathetic population against a more or less hostile authoritarian occupying force. The climax of the book, with the Loonies 'throwing rocks' as a strategic demonstration of force, is some of the most exciting stuff in fiction.

But I mentioned that this is the last Heinlein-worth-reading, and there are two reasons. Heinlein always enjoys playing around with political systems and ideologies, and this is where he makes a final judgment. The only truly fair ideology is de la Paz's "rational anarchism": you do whatever you want up till the point where it affects me, and I'll do as little as possible that affects you. Everything else is just the twittering of yammerheads and petty injustices of bush-league authoritarians. Pure selfishness cloaked in high-minded ideals and appeals to common sense, in other words, and one that ignores everything we know about what it takes to live with strangers. It's in some ways more opposed to democracy than the fascism of Starship Troopers, which starts from the basic premise that the people are sovereign. I don't mind staunch libertarianism in fiction; I do mind that Heinlein gives up on thinking about politics at this point in favor of the individual uber alles. Second strike against late Heinlein is the weird sex stuff (e.g. time travelling incest), and while it may make sense in the context of Lunar culture, I have no interest in hearing about how weddable 14-year old girls are. I hate to end on a low note, because the book is great, but the signposts for 'go no further are all there.'

On an interesting historical aside, Luna wins its independence in a graduated campaign of strategic bombing against primarily symbolic targets to indicate that they can hit cities at will. At the same time as The Moon is a Harsh Mistress was being published, America was engaged in a much less successful campaign of 'communication bombing' against North Vietnam in Operation Rolling Thunder. show less

Having worked for and with libertarians for the past nearly 4 years, I have been told time and again how essential Heinlein's seminal work was to my political and philosophical development. Having finally read it, I can attest they were right. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress may be a book from decades ago, but its teachings remain as salient as ever.

Dealing with a penal colony on the moon with minimal oversight, Heinlein provides us with a unique blank slate to explore concepts of society and spontaneous order. The colonists of the moon have developed their own culture, with rules and mores not seen in any culture on Earth. A society in which women hold the ultimate authority in choosing a mate and running a household, where husbands can show more be divorced and dismissed at will with no formal processes. There is very minimal crime, and what crime there is tends to not be of the violent variety, for violence is punished with community sanctioned death, and everyone knows it. While some aspects of this society may seem archaic and others too bizarre and foreign for our sensibilities, Heinlein weaves a story of a society that on a whole functions quite peacefully.

On the flip side, what little authority does exist on Luna, exists only to rob the people and the land of its resources for the benefit of those on Earth who have been unable to manage their own. The people farm or mine resources and sell them at government determined rates for currency that the government determines the value of, while forcing the people to purchase vital resources back from the government at also rates they have determined. A free market exists where the people can circumvent authority rules. And in that, they thrive and do a much better job at managing their resources than the authority can.

The book also offers wonderful insights into the psychology of fermenting a revolt, organizing insurgent/revolutionary groups, and war/diplomacy. By giving us the barren playground of the moon to experiment with, Heinlein succeeds in exploring many aspects of what we currently assume to just be absolutes and monoliths in our life. And as always, the lesson to be learned is "There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch" (TANSTAAFL). show less

I love Heinlein's writing style! It's minimalistic, cerebral, and highlights unique character voices. It takes some time to get used to the lingo and slang of the main character, but it adds to the culture and worldbuilding of the lunar society.

Looking back, this story is satisfying in some of the ways progression fantasy is - the main character and sentient computer are building a secret, revolutionary group from the ground up. They hit certain predicted goals and overcome trials as they intensify.

Of course, the conclusion depicted one of the most iconic sci-fi threats to Earth - "throwing rocks." This story offers a great mix of technological realism and sociological commentary. I keep meaning to reread it. I'm sure I'd get more out show more of it the second time through! show less