The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Robert Heinlein’s works have not aged very well, and reading this book almost 60 years after it was written (1966) can quickly offend any modern sensibilities (as John Scalzi put it once, “[…] he is a product of his time, of course, and that his time is not ours”), especially when it comes to sexism. The depiction of women, their roles and their worth, the source of their empowerment and contrasts between them and male characters are sufficiently eyeroll-inducing to strain even the strongest eye muscles. So I feel like I’m supposed to dislike it.
(While I’m at it, it’s clear that Heinlein doesn’t actually dislike women. He’s just unfortunately assigns pretty reductionist roles to them, despite presenting that as a bit progressive. It’s very jarring, though.)
But. But but but. I really don’t dislike it at all, even when cringing periodically. I can and do disagree with quite a few things in it, but I’m still fascinated by interesting worldbuilding, concepts — and, most delightfully, the language.
This story is written so well in Slavic-ish accent, and yet it was subtle enough for me to not fully realize it for the first few pages. Not a single occurrence of that silly definite article “the” (seriously, it’s just word filler, really) in Mannie’s speech, and very efficient economy of largely useless words, if you think about it, as well as skipping pronouns where you don’t actually need them for context. I love this sentence to bits, really: “But matters whether you get answer in microsecond rather than millisecond as long as correct?” Sounds right, love it.
The story is set on the Moon – Luna – where the “native” population is descended from convicts as it served as Earth’s penal colony — like what Britain did in Australia. There’s a mixture of Anglo-American and Russian language and culture, and we know of Chinese colonies as well. Luna is a colony world, made to be exploited by the Earth powers, drained of resources, without the current and ex-convict population having much say in the affairs there. And the place is a “harsh mistress” indeed, with people living in underground tunnels, paying for air (a hot commodity on an airless world) and adjusted to low gravity to the point where they really cannot leave the place even if they wanted to. And this world develops its own distinct culture — supposed power of women from their scarcity resulting in respectability of catcalling (“supposed” because really, that power does not exist besides being wives, mothers, prostitutes and pretty set decorations – and as more female children are born, the scarcity of women will disappear, taking the only bargaining chip with it), line marriages (which I found to be a pretty fascinating idea), the emphasis on self-sufficiency and mistrust of the government, vigilante justice as a norm, etc. I suppose this to a point may be a libertarian anarchist paradise, just as Le Guin’s The Dispossessed can be viewed by some as a treatise on communal anarchism.
“There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him.”
“I will accept any rules that you feel necessary to your freedom. I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.”
“Comrades, I beg you – do not resort to compulsory taxation. There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him.”
Not liking the economic exploitation by the Lunar Authority, a small band of our characters aided by a supercomputer AI that likes to play games carry out a revolution while we learn the principle of TANSTAAFL (“there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch”). Our computer AI “Mike” makes this step-by-step revolution against the more powerful foe easy and the outcome inevitable, so the fun of the story lies not in danger of doubts about the outcome but in seeing Heinlein develop his libertarian society, self-reliance and interesting family structures ideas, regardless whether you happen to agree or disagree with him. It reminds me (although with significantly less impact, admittedly) of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed as a vehicle to portray ideas about a particular ideology of a society different from our own, and utopian in the way that is unlikely to really work anywhere but the book it’s set in.
“Thing that got me was not her list of things she hated, since she was obviously crazy as a Cyborg, but fact that always somebody agreed with her prohibitions. Must be a yearning deep in human heart to stop other people from doing as they please. Rules, laws — always for other fellow. A murky part of us, something we had before we came down out of trees, and failed to shuck when we stood up. Because not one of those people said: “Please pass this so that I won’t be able to do something I know I should stop.” Nyet, tovarishchee, was always something they hated to see neighbors doing. Stop them “for their own good” — not because speaker claimed to be harmed by it.”
It’s a rules book of a revolution that can only succeed when you have a secret supercomputer running things, so take that with a grain of salt, you future Lunar dissidents. Political meetings, propaganda, sleeper cells, subtle political manipulation by a few people in charge. It’s exposition run wild, but that’s the entire point – although all the “talk-talk” (to borrow Lunar slang) is funny given how much he rattles against that in the book. Also, why don’t we just throw some rocks at our enemies? That works.
It’s a book of exposition written in the ideology of decades past, with enough cringing and eye rolling to strain my eye muscles — and yet something about it remains fascinating to me. Sometimes it surprised me to see what I don’t dislike. Oh well…
3 stars.
books are life 