While I have read Robert Heinlein’s entire oeuvre, I keep about a dozen on hand for periodic re-reading. This summer I re-read The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, which concerns a revolution of a large convict colony of the Moon from Earth.
TMIAHM, published in 1965, is a good entry to Heinlein for an adult who’s never read him before, and a more than reasonable argument exists that it’s his best book. The author surrogate, Professor de La Paz, is less intrusive, especially since Manny, the narrator, handles the more cultural exposition, and Heinlein’s ideas are so numerous, creative, and rapidly introduced by a fast-moving plot that an occasional lecture or anecdote isn’t out of place, and even welcome as a breather.
Science fiction is a literature of ideas, it’s said, and Heinlein’s big idea through his career could be summarized as technology drives culture. Some examples:
AI: “Mike” or “Mycroft” is depicted as a trickster baby with limitless knowledge that needs to learn behavior and morals from humans – and he learns a solid set from a bunch of heart-of-gold convicts on the Moon. Not only that, but a transgender AI that is occasionally “Michelle” when talking to Wyoming (who insists “her” sense of humor means she is definitely a “she.”) On top of running seemingly every computational need for the Moon colony, the AI is capable of rapid, accurate, and convincing text generation, including poetry, as well as voice and video impersonation. The passages where Mike generates his first video persona could have been written today. Also, while Manny is the narrator, Mike could be considered the book’s protagonist. Without him, the revolution wouldn’t have succeeded, and it’s left ambiguous as how much he directed its implementation as opposed to being a friendly technological asset. Either way, only the Loonies recognize and appreciate his sentience.
Matriarchal society: A lack of females on the moon and a relative scarcity of wealth has led the convicts there to form a matriarchal society with line marriages providing stability and capital retention. The narrator, Manny, is a relatively new husband in the Moon’s oldest line, and he is quite aware (and leans into) the notion that Mimi, the senior wife, runs things and has veto power over the family, including the revolution he’s stumbled into running. Manny vets new recruits to the revolution by bringing them home for dinner to be approved by Mimi, which over the course of the novel nets a new wife (Wyoming), daughter (Hazel), and co-husband (Stu).
Libertarianism > Communism/Democracy: The Lunar revolution has Marxist trappings, but the governmental philosophies that de la Paz attempts (and largely fails) to push the Loonies toward are mostly libertarian. Heinlein creates a frontier society where a lack of laws and structure is beneficial to survival and growth. The aforementioned line marriages are an example of adaptability that Earth societies don’t have (when Manny visits Earth late in the book, he is arrested for polygamy, which outrages everyone on the Moon, especially the women). Heinlein assumes cultural innovations (themselves a kind of technology) happen in response to technological pressure (in this case, the extremes of colonizing and surviving on the Moon), and while this also implies the Moon has a superior culture than Earth, the later attempts of the Loonies to write a constitution suggests that they will end up just like Earth eventually. de la Paz’s brass cannon story summarizes, humorously, this innate tragedy. If the essential Western plot is the decline of the West, this is the beginning of the end for Luna’s unique culture; they won the revolution, and now they get to decline into committee work.
The revolution has a cell structure that benefits both from the technological assistance of Mike and the relative incompetence of Earth’s governor, as well as de la Paz’s Alinsky-style strategizing: he knows, and at one point states explicitly, that it is easier to get people to hate something than love something. These huge advantages are largely played for comedy, such as Mike’s incessant Spock-like recalculating of their exact odds of success, but this also reinforces the strengths of Luna’s value set. For example, instead of just using Mike to keep the lights running as Earth does, his sentience and worth are quickly apparent to Manny, Wyoming, and de la Paz, and they help him become the secret figurehead of a libertarian revolution – or vice versa.
Realistic Luna: The gravity is light, but if you stick around too long, you’ll have to stay, and that means underground. It’s great for growing wheat underground, though, and given its orbit over a gravity well, it’s cheap to catapult that wheat back to Earth – and, accordingly, easier for the Moon to hurl rocks at Earth than vice versa, which ultimately allows for their independence. de la Paz manipulates an Earth company into developing a horizontal rail launcher many kilometers long in India that will eventually be able to duplicate this ease (why haven’t we built this yet IRL, by the way?)
Anachronisms: As wildly creative as Heinlein was, the limits of writing science fiction in 1965 are apparent. Fusion reactors seem to exist, but Manny’s extended family only has one “line” installed for communication purposes (it can handle video, though). Mike is an extremely powerful and sentient AI, but no other computing devices seem to exist, handheld, laptop, refrigerator-sized or otherwise – much less an internet or even intranet. Luna is able to bombard Earth with impunity, suggesting no extraterrestrial missile defenses were ever invented (we could shoot down satellites in the 1980s).
Closing thoughts. Mistress is one of his best, and I like reading Heinlein, but had I ever met him, I probably would have found him as insufferable as Ayn Rand. His books at least allow a slow digestion of his ideas without immediate regurgitation. His greatest weaknesses from the hindsight of 2023 are his reliance on author surrogates that act out his apparent harem fantasies and the inevitable expository mansplaining that calls attention to itself.
However, Heinlein was self-aware. Each surrogate is unique. Stranger In A Strange Land‘s Jubal Harshaw is the prime example of brazenness, but it’s also the reverse: Jubal’s incessant bossing and lecturing ultimately do not save him from existential despair and suicide, and he undergoes a Pauline transformation. Tunnel in the Sky‘s Dr. Matson only bookends matters and benefits from being aloof, and his cryptic advice turns out to be not as useful as his wife’s bring-two-knives practicality. In Starship Troopers, Johnny Rico’s Moral Philosophy teacher, Mr. Dubois, only appears in flashback and shares some duties with the present-tense Sergeant Zim, which reinforces how deeply the MI’s values run.
Mistress‘s de la Paz gets an operatic Hero of the Revolution death, which I’ve suspected is as fake as Mike’s, but it tells me that Heinlein knew what he was known for, and delivered it without complaint and with a wink.