panguitch's Full Review: Robert A. Heinlein - Moon Is a Harsh Mistress
It's a simple formula really, and Robert A. Heinlein's The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress embodies it perfectly:
Science (political, social, and physical) -plus- Story (fascinating characters and spaceships blowing up) -equals- Science Fiction
"Men without women don't care whether they stay alive or not."
By 2075 the Moon has been a penal colony for several generations. Trouble is, while you're serving your sentence the low gravity alters your physiology. So there are three million "Loonies" with little choice but to keep raising food for a Malthusian Earth they can never return to. Not that they want to. The frontier lifestyle suits them. The only thing that chafes is the humorless bureaucracy of the Lunar Authority and the price fixing the Federated Nations uses to exploit Earth's satellite.
If The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress was written today it would carry a lot more post-colonialist freight, but Heinlein's 1966 masterpiece is instead most often labeled libertarian. Outside of the Warden's concerns and the economic pressures of the Federated Nations, Lunar society is decentralized and principally lawless. But the harshness of conditions enforces strict social norms--miscreants don't live long on Luna.
This civilized anarchy is presented in utopic terms. Items of particular interest include the informal legal system in which parties select their own judge who arbitrates using common sense, and the origins of Loonie society as a penal colony are reflected in a disproportionate number of males compared to females. Marriage customs are driven by economic necessities, and the Loonies explore the gamut, from basic bigamy to complex line marriages spanning generations. It's some truly interesting anthropological speculation, much more compelling than the free love Heinlein portrayed earlier in Stranger in a Strange Land.
"Do it, Mike, throw rocks at 'em! Damn it, big rocks!"
But not all is well in paradise. Subversives and revolutionaries fester in myriad schools of thought, all aspiring to overthrow the chains of Earth. Manuel Garcia O'Kelly Davis doesn't intend to become a radical. He's just an engineer, the only one competent to maintain the Moon's supercomputer. But he has a secret: the supercomputer is his friend. No one else knows that "Mike" is awake.
Mike is curious, so he asks Mannie to attend a rally and record it for him. When rally becomes riot Mannie escapes with his old friend Professor Bernardo de la Paz and the beautiful agitator Wyoming "Wyoh" Knott. Since Mike is desperate to meet and befriend more not-stupid people, introductions are made. The Prof and Wyoh's hobby of sedition engages Mike's curiosity and after some calculations he confirms Prof's theory that the Loonies, by shipping wheat to Earth, are depleting their resources at a rate that will result in starvation within a decade. Their only hope is embargo and revolution.
Mike calculates their chances at 1 in 7. It's not promising, but Loonies are expert at winning against long odds. So Mannie finds himself enlisted, and with Mike's assistance the three begin plotting their revolution. The underground organization they develop is a tetrahedral matrix of networked three-person cells, able to communicate through preset channels, but secure from betrayal because of each cell's anonymity.
It's a brilliant solution to the age old trade-off between communication and security that all conspiracies wrestle with. It provided inspiration for the counterculture and bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the terror cells employed by folks like al-Qaida. Less sophisticated in concept, though elegant in its application of physics, is the weapon the Loonies will use to defend themselves against Earth's retaliatory invasion. A better example of the military importance of holding the high ground was never imagined.
"Man, my only friend"
Though the least discussed aspect of the novel, Heinlein's characters are quite serviceable. As a simple, upright everyman, Mannie takes the reader with him as he becomes embroiled in the revolution. His concerns are always close to home: his family, friends, and independence. He never becomes larger than life, he doesn't lead the charge, or even take part in every engagement. Even when he does extraordinary things he never becomes more than an ordinary person himself.
That most extraordinary of characters, Mike the self-aware computer, is also the most sympathetic. His endeavors to understand humor are endearing even if Spock and Data have rehashed this ground ad nauseam. More poignant is his loneliness, his eagerness to make friends, and the sympathy he shows them. But there is something disturbing about the amount of power Mike obtains and his willingness to harm others since his motivations, beyond friendship, are unclear.
Wyoh and the other female characters are at their best when exemplifying the Loonies' familial relationships. Otherwise they can feel thin, and Heinlein exhibits an admiration for the female that carries the mark of his era. It is gallant--"are no ugly women. Some more beautiful than others"--and protective--Loonies lynch anyone who even touches a woman without her permission. At the same time women enjoy unparalleled self-determination and near-matriarchal authority. Secure in their position, women bask in whistles and catcalls which become a benign expression of respect. There's meat enough here for a feminist treatment.
"The more impediments to legislation the better."
Prof falls into a class of mentor characters common to Heinlein's novels, like Jubal Harshaw in Stranger in a Strange Land and both Dubois and Zim in Starship Troopers. A self-described "rational anarchist," Prof provides the philosophy behind the Loonie revolution, and does his best to keep the Loonies from replacing their Terran overseers with a tyrannical government of their own.
Among the many concepts he propounds are the notion that scope creep in government should be limited by requiring officials to fund the government out of their own pockets. He also raises the question of whether the state's interests should ever be elevated over the interests of any individual, and argues that the state has no moral standing--that all moral accountability must rest with individuals.
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress may as well be libertarian scripture, but it can provide inspiration for revolutionaries of all stripes. Less partisan readers should still find the concepts intriguing, and Heinlein covers these topics in a less chunky style than in many of this other books. A different impediment to readability may be the Loonies' pidgin dialect, riddled with transliterated Russian words and frequently lacking articles (a, an, the). This is less pronounced than in Burgess's A Clockwork Orange and adds an interesting element after you become accustomed to it.
There may be some gaps in the reasoning--Could it ever make economic sense to feed the Earth with food grown on the Moon? If caverns are the solution to limited acreage, why not carve them in the Earth? --and the computers may show their age--10 gigabytes for a supercomputer!--but The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress still feels current. Whether that's because modern terrorists employ similar cell structures or because the economic recession has triggered reactionary government expansion, it's clear that Heinlein's relevance has not faded.
Oh, and it's a good story too.
- Panguitch
"Mike, would you like to talk with a girl?" "Girls are not-stupid?" "Some girls are very not-stupid, Mike." "I would like to talk with a not-stupid girl, Man."
The Hugo Award-winning classic that helped launch modern libertarianism, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress is Heinlein s unforgettable tale of a Lunar revo...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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