In this bi-weekly series reviewing classic science fiction and fantasy books, Alan Brown looks at the front lines and frontiers of the field; books about soldiers and spacers, scientists and engineers, explorers and adventurers. Stories full of what Shakespeare used to refer to as “alarums and excursions”: battles, chases, clashes, and the stuff of excitement.
For good reason, Robert A. Heinlein is often called the Dean of Science Fiction Writers, having written so many excellent books on such a wide variety of topics… which can make it hard to pick a favorite. If you like military adventure, you have Starship Troopers. If you want a story centered around quasi-religious mysteries, you have Stranger in a Strange Land. Fans of agriculture (or Boy Scouts) have Farmer in the Sky. Fans of the theater have Double Star. Fans of dragons and swordplay have Glory Road. Fans of recursive and self-referential fiction have The Number of the Beast… and so it goes. My own favorite Heinlein novel, after much reflection, turns out to be The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, probably because of my interest in political science—and because it is simply such a well-constructed tale.
Preparing this column gives me a chance to look at works from two different perspectives. First, looking back from the point of view of a young reader, new to the world, and new to science fiction. And the second involves rereading these stories from the viewpoint of an older, more experienced reader, who has seen a lot, both of fiction and of life.
As a youngster, what drew me to The Moon is a Harsh Mistress was the strangeness and adventure of it all. While I recognized the obvious parallels to the American Revolution, it was also chock-full of new ideas. There were political philosophies, like libertarianism, that I had not been exposed to, references to history I was unaware of, and all manner of new ideas and technology, all combined in new and different ways. The characters were exotic and unusual, and the plot galloped right along. It was not as accessible as the Heinlein juveniles that I was also reading at the time, but it was perfect for a young teenager who wanted to read more ‘grown-up’ stories.
Approaching the book again, with most of a lifetime between these two reading experiences, I was even more appreciative of Heinlein’s accomplishment. While there are naturally some predictions about technology that haven’t come to pass in the intervening years, the setting feels real and lived-in. The characters are still compelling. But the element that really shines is the politics. During my life I’ve gained a lot of knowledge on that topic, and I sometimes find that knowledge works against my suspension of belief when reading fiction. But when Heinlein describes the workings of the lunar government, the intrigue amongst the Federated Nations, and when he details the various military actions that take place in the book, I find myself appreciating his broad knowledge and his talent. This book effortlessly convinces the reader that things could happen that way, with each event flowing logically and realistically into the next one. Books containing this much adventure sometimes feel awkward when they move from the tactical to the strategic level—that’s never the case with The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.
About the Author
I have reviewed works by Robert A. Heinlein (1907-1988) before, and you can find biographical information in my columns on Starship Troopers and Have Spacesuit Will Travel. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress was serialized in If magazine from December 1965 to April 1966, and then released as a novel. This work dates from the period at which Heinlein was at the height of his popularity—and, some would argue, at the height of his abilities. It was nominated for a Nebula Award in 1966, and won the Hugo Award in 1967. Freed from the heavy hands of his juvenile series editors and from the meddling of Analog’s John Campbell, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress represents an unfettered author, able to express himself however he wished. Heinlein was recognized as one of the leading voices in science fiction by this point in time, and because of the popularity of 1961’s Stranger in a Strange Land, was known even outside of the insular world of science fiction fandom. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress was widely anticipated, and widely respected, and even after over five decades, remains in print and popular to this day.
If Magazine
During the 1940s, Astounding Science Fiction was the most influential magazine in the field. But in the post-war era, Astounding’s dominance began to wane, and new magazines such as Galaxy Science Fiction and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction began to compete for readers, and started to attract the best writing talent.
If magazine was another of these competitors, founded in 1952. After surviving some early challenges, If was sold to Galaxy Publishing in 1959. In 1961, Frederik Pohl, editor of Galaxy Science Fiction, became the editor of If as well, and continued in that role until 1969, when the magazine was bought by new owners. Under Pohl’s leadership, If found its greatest success, winning three Hugo Awards for Best Magazine. Galaxy featured more established writers, while If published newer authors and more experimental works. After Pohl’s departure, the magazine began to decline and eventually merged with Galaxy in 1975. During its heyday, If published some major works, including James Blish’s “A Case of Conscience,” Harlan Ellison’s “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream,” Arthur C. Clarke’s “The Songs of Distant Earth,” Larry Niven’s first story, “The Coldest Place” and his acclaimed short story “Neutron Star,” as well as popular series that included Keith Laumer’s Retief stories and Fred Saberhagen’s Berserker stories. In addition, If also first published serial versions of Robert A. Heinlein’s novels Podkayne of Mars and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
There are a number of reasons why this novel is so compelling. The first is its realistic setting and politics. The story takes place on the moon in the late 21st Century, when Earth has established a penal colony that produces wheat for a growing and increasingly hungry population. The convicts—political dissidents and displaced people cast off by Earth—have been dumped on the moon, left to their own devices, and are ignored by the authorities as long as they produce the required foodstuffs, which are grown in tunnels under the surface using ice mined from those same tunnels. The Lunar Authority sells basic utilities and supplies to the colony, paying for the food they produce, and ships the food back to Earth via a magnetic catapult. They control prices, and are constantly squeezing everything they can out of the colonists.
Echoing some of the practices Britain used in Botany Bay and other Australian penal colonies, this rationale for a lunar colony feels as real as any other rationale I have ever seen for a lunar colony (although, if I am not mistaken, it would require more water to be found on the moon than we currently think is available). It also gives Heinlein an opportunity to create a libertarian society that he can hold up to our own world like a mirror. While I have my doubts about the viability of such a laissez-faire society in the real world, Heinlein goes a long way toward making the idea appealing, at least in theory. The term “There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch!” existed before he wrote the book, but I believe that he coined the acronym “TANSTAAFL,” which became a favorite term in the libertarian community.
His view of the political situation on the Earth is far darker by comparison, displaying his deep pessimism toward human nature and governmental systems. He depicts larger and larger states becoming more and more repressive and totalitarian in nature, and his Federated Nations manifest all the flaws seen in modern extra-national organizations, and then some. Heinlein takes the Malthusian view, running through many of his works (including many of his juveniles), that populations will always increase to outstrip food supplies and governments will always become more oppressive, until those trends are stopped by war, catastrophe, or the opening of new frontiers. I don’t agree with his optimism about libertarianism, or his pessimism toward the human condition, but I have to admit that his conclusions are rooted in broad knowledge and some well-reasoned speculation.
The second reason for this novel’s strength is its core cast of characters, who the plot brings together very quickly. This quartet, among the most appealing of Heinlein’s fictional creations, are the engine that drives the story, and are a major reason that this book ranks among his best. We meet our first two main characters when Manuel O’Kelly Davis (called Manny), a freelance computer technician, is called to repair the master computer of the Authority, the organization that runs the Earth’s lunar penal colony. Unknown to the Authority, the computer, which Manny nicknames Mike (after Mycroft Holmes from the Sherlock Holmes stories), has become self-aware. Mike is experimenting with humor, and Manny offers to review jokes for him to help educate him on what is funny. Mike asks Manny to record a political rally he can’t monitor and is curious about.
Stopping by the rally on his way home, Manny meets Wyoming Knott, a radical from the Hong Kong lunar colony. She is one of the invited speakers, along with Manny’s old professor, Bernardo de la Paz. The Professor points out that if the moon keeps using its limited water resources to ship wheat to Earth, there will be famine and collapse within a decade. Authority guards attack the assembly, and Manny and Wyoh hide in a local hotel, where they are joined by the Professor. The two of them enlist Manny into their conspiracy to overthrow the Authority and stave off this impending collapse. When they explain revolutionary tactics to Manny, he realizes that Mike would be a vital asset to any conspiracy. So they contact Mike, and he agrees to help their efforts.
Manny is the straight man of the bunch, one of many Heinlein characters who fit into the stock role of the “competent man”–a type that will be familiar to anyone who has read much of Heinlein’s work or that of his contemporaries from the glory days of Astounding Science Fiction. At the same time, it’s Manny’s first-person perspective that really makes the book shine. Heinlein does a great job of getting into Manny’s head, understanding what he would know and not know and articulating his opinions on the world. In particular, the patois Manny uses, with its Russian-influenced lack of articles, and words from a broad range of languages, helps the reader feel more fully immersed in his culture. After reading for while, is hard for self not to think Loonie talk like Manny…
The Prof represents another character type who frequently appears in Heinlein’s work: the older, wiser man who often speaks as the author’s surrogate. What sets the Prof apart, however, is his wit and charm. He has a wry sense of humor that comes through loud and clear, and makes him much more appealing than some of the other old-and-wise characters in Heinlein’s work. And while he has very strong opinions and ideals, he is simultaneously very pragmatic about how the real world works.
Wyoh, like many of Heinlein’s female characters, is constructed to be pleasing to what is called the “male gaze.” She also fills much more than that narrow function in the book, however—Wyoh is a dedicated and pragmatic politician. Her personal backstory is touched with tragedy, which gives the character more depth. Her relationship with Manny shows the reader the nature of marriage and romance on the lunar colony, but she also exercises agency and plays a real role in the political decisions throughout the story.
Mike is the character who learns the most in the story, representing a type most common in Heinlein’s juveniles, but not always confined to those books. Mike’s efforts to become more human are charming. While he is anthropomorphized in a way that is probably not realistic (if and when self-aware artificial intelligence arises, I doubt it will present itself in a way that would be recognizably human), this portrayal gives him a lot of appeal. In fact, as a naïve but unusually powerful character, he is like another Mike in Heinlein’s work: Valentine Michael Smith in Stranger in a Strange Land.
A third reason for the strength of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is the science. Heinlein fills the story with a lot of interesting technological and scientific extrapolation. Of course, like most writers of the time, he got a few things wrong, including a rather timid extrapolation of computer and communications technology (everyone reads paper printouts, the telephones are centrally switched landlines, computers are big and centralized, sounds are recorded in analog formats, and people still use typewriters). But he does give us an interesting view of artificial intelligence, and certainly does portray the mayhem that a machine could cause if its aims diverged from those of its owners/creators. Heinlein also projects prosthetics so useful and advanced that Manny considers his artificial arms superior to the natural arm he lost.
Buy the Book
A Memory Called Empire
Moreover, Heinlein has clearly thought out the implications and technical challenges of using magnetic catapults both on the moon and back on Earth, and the orbital mechanics of both the catapult loads and the ships in the story are impressively realistic. The underground warrens that the lunar colonists live in feel plausible, although in reality, there doesn’t appear to be much available on the moon that makes it worth descending into its gravity well. The use of nuclear-weapon-tipped interceptors has been abandoned as a cure that is worse than the disease, and there are a whole host of things Heinlein does here with manned ships that would probably have been done with autonomous drones, but his military extrapolation is solid, with the military interventions on the moon feeling like realistic responses, and playing out in a way consistent with real-world operations—the impact of the moon’s weaker gravity on attacking personnel is an especially intriguing insight. I can see military commanders making some of the same decisions he describes, and using the same tactics.
And finally, the book is extremely well-plotted. The characters are introduced quickly, and feel like real people from the start, despite the strangeness of their society and environment. The action, kicked off by the attack on the political rally, continues at a rapid pace throughout. Some events are caused directly by the characters, while others happen by chance, and still others are driven by unseen antagonists, which is the way real life works. As in any book about revolution, there is a lot of political discussion, but it never feels like it gets in the way of the action. By the end, you care deeply for the characters and are invested in their situation, and the novel ends on a very poignant emotional note. This is a book that excites you, makes you think, and makes you feel—on a first read, or again upon rereading.
Final Thoughts
So, there you have it—my case for The Moon is a Harsh Mistress being Heinlein’s greatest work. It has all the hallmarks of his most celebrated novels, and the best of science fiction: solid extrapolation of technological and political trends, a well-reasoned and realistic setting, a plot that keeps you turning the pages, and compelling characters.
Now that I’ve had my say, it’s your turn. What are your thoughts on The Moon is a Harsh Mistress? Is it your personal favorite from Heinlein’s work? And if not, what books do you prefer, and why?
Alan Brown has been a science fiction fan for over five decades, especially fiction that deals with science, military matters, exploration and adventure.
I find it hilarious that even staunchly Libertarian Heinlein couldn’t construct a plausible Libertarian society without having it enabled at every turn by a godlike supercomputer running the show.
It’s my favorite of his adult books, and probably his best; as far as personal all-time favorite, it would probably be one of the juvies — Red Planet, Space Cadet, Starman Jones and Citizen of the Galaxy are all jostling for the top spot.
Read The Cat Who Walks Through Walls recently, which has a number of the same characters, and was just turned off of him in general by his apparent horniness for teens and incest.
@2 I don’t know if I’d call it his best, per se, probably deferring to Stranger for the cultural impact if nothing else, but Citizen of the Galaxy was certainly the book that made the biggest emotional impact on me as a kid reading it.
I enjoyed MiaHM, but nowhere near as much as other people seemed to. It didn’t take very long to get tired of having the idea that a utopian society is best exemplified by every man for himself scarcity shoved down my throat to get old even then.
Moon is the last of his good novels. Time Enough For Love was where he started to let his freak flag fly, to the detriment of his writing.
Moon addresses racism through a plot device that was otbe’d by, probably, 1990 at the very latest, leaving later readers wondering just what he was talking about. It wasn’t the first time he made a non-white character the lead, and Manny was one of the first explicitly multi-racial characters I encountered. Although H Beam Piper had several of them. (Piper did a better job addressing the failure modes of libertarianism, too.)
@3 Some of Heinlein’s later works are unfortunately marred by some creepy attitudes on sexual issues.
I love Moon because I am a total sucker for complex, created societies and the Loonies are definitely that. Wyoh is not that well developed a character IMO but Mum certainly is. And Hazel Meade gets some prominence too. I’ve always been sorry we didn’t see more of Michelle but it makes sense since the book is from Mannie’s POV and Michelle was Wyoh’s friend.
As for the sex issue, Heinlein clearly belonged to the ‘sex for everybody would be terrific’ generation of sexual liberation. It took the fall out from that for many to realize that boundaries are not Bad.
Based solely on this being the one that always brings out the libertarian fanboys, I’ll call it his worst and chuck it on the mulch pile with the Ayn Rand stuff.
@7 — Not just “sex FOR everybody” but “sex WITH everybody”. Well, within some fairly heteronormative boundaries, I’m pretty sure.
Any time I see discussion about TMIaHM it mostly focuses on Heinlein’s supposed advocacy for libertarianism and that doesn’t quite ring true for me here. Going out to the frontiers where there are fewer rules is certainly a theme that runs through his fiction, but in this novel it feels like the “libertarians” are misguided. They only succeed because they are able to make use of surveillance apparatus, falsified media and propaganda, and weapons of mass destruction which would be the envy of any tin pot dictator or fascist regime. And we know that Heinlein was aware of what a society without working public institutions might be like as he published Coventry way back in the 1940s.
I don’t know how to evaluate “best”, but my favourite Heinlein novel to read is probably The Puppet Masters. The plot moves briskly along, there is more action than is usual in a Heinlein novel, and there are no romances with too-young-women.
You did miss two things in your introduction, regarding why RAH was the preeminent writer of his time (Asimov and Clarke are spoken of in similar breaths, and are both close seconds, I’d say).
1) Until the advent of Cyberpunk, Heinlein wrote what was pretty much THE archetype, quintessential story for every major subgenre of SF. Others wrote better stories, perhaps, but HE wrote the first solid story of that genre to create the baseline.
2) As a Futurist, as with many such, he often got the key details of a story wrong, but unlike most, in writing a story, he often identified critical secondary and tertiary IMPLICATIONS of a technology correct.
For BLOWUPS HAPPEN, he wrote about the concerns of nuclear power not just in early days, BUT BEFORE FERMI EVEN CONSTRUCTED his first Pile.
For SOLUTION UNSATISFACTORY, he gotbthe entire basis for the weapon wrong… But predicted Mutually Assured Destruction in 1941!!
For THE ROADS MUST ROLL, he got the tech utterly wrong, but described the Interstate Highway System — and its implications for businesses on older highways — Spot On accurate.
The only other futurist with such amazing “sideways” prescience was perhaps Vannevar Bush, who, in 1945 in Atlantic Monthly, produced “As We May Think”… which descibed the internet to a T… with utterly the wrong tech.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/
Heinlein’s writing is certainly dated. Some of the tech and knowledge (Swamp Venus) is exceedingly dated. But he was not just cutting edge, he was the city planner who built modern SF by hacking it out of the jungle single-handedly…
Wiredog:
RAH did this far far more than most realize. Probably his first was Rod in Tunnel In The Sky. One of the major chars in Starbeast. Rico in Starship Troopers. Eunice in I Will Fear No Evil, and, most hilariously given Michael Whelan’s cover, the titular heroine of Friday. He did it right, esp. for the time, a casual reference to it that would not set any bigots off.
It’s an interesting sort of libertarian utopia: there’s a huge amount of infrastructure provided by the prison authority; rent appears to be paid back to the prison authority, as well as power and water costs. I’d call that a mercantilist colony with a combined military-civil governor. I suppose that the parts of the economy that were being neglected by the government can be called libertarian in the same sense that the rule of force supplemented with a code duello counts as libertarian.
At the end, Luna Free State certainly isn’t particularly libertarian; it looks like a parliamentary republic.
The libertarian philosophy was espoused by The Prof, and (to some extent) practiced by the inhabitants of the Moon. However, there are a couple of caveats.
First, the practice on the Moon was at least partially due to The Lunar Authority not allowing any competitors to exist. If the locals had the ability to create government, they probably would have.
Second, and more importantly, Heinlein came back to the Lunar society in later books. And what he described was hardly a libertarian paradise. In fact, it was as bureaucratic as any other nation/state. So while Heinlein used libertarianism as a motive for the revolution, it doesn’t seem to have lasted long beyond it.
Which is also the historical precedent of the United States. A comparison of the current government and society of the United States with what the Founding Fathers claimed to have wanted shows how quickly a free society becomes tangled in their own government.
Heinlein has always been my favorite for 55 years. Later works flawed by brain tumor, MOON has stood as his best work , showing grasp of writing craft, breath of imagination, and depth of ideas. Sure, he didn’t see ubiquitous computer power, made some social assumptions that look weak in hindsight, and stuck to his favorite tropes. Nevertheless, it still holds up for me. Only Citizen of the Galaxy gives me better feelings upon rereading. The details of Heinlein’s libertarianism can be debated, but as a call for change and progress, I would cry… “TANSTAAFL!”
This and Citizen of the Galaxy switch back and forth as my favorite; depending on my mood.
This is pretty much the only one of his books that I’ll still reread at this point – some I burned out on, some I can’t overlook the weirdness anymore, and some I’ve just outgrown, but there are so many things about this one I still love and I read it the first time at just the right time in my teens. I was blown away by the loonie-speak, by the line marriages, by the computer learning humor (I still try to explain joke reactions to my kids in the terms of funny-once and funny-always), and by dropping rocks down the gravity well as weapons. I got super excited when I realized Hazel Meade was the grandmother in The Rolling Stones. All these things have been done other times, and beautifully, and sometimes better, but it was the first I’d come across them, and all in one book. I don’t know that I ever bought all the politics, but I believed in the characters and I wanted them to succeed.
“Probably his first was Rod in Tunnel In The Sky”
And that is incredibly subtle… the only clue is in the final chapter when Rod is talking to his sister about his friend Caroline and says “and she looks a little like you, too”. Caroline Mshiyeni, we know, is black…
This is by far my favorite Heinlein, so happy to see it getting such positive attention at Tor! I love this book for all the reasons you mention. The very first time I read this, it was love at first page in that early scene where Manny is trying to teach Mike about jokes and humor, and they have to have the “funny once” conversation.
I always cry at the end. I’ve the read book enough times that the end is no where near a surprise, and I think since I know what’s coming, that makes it even more tragic for me. :(
It’s been probably four years since I read this? Defintely time for a reread! (and crying at the end)
I’ve always considered Moon to be probably Heinlein’s best single work — and my reactions were pretty close to SPC’s. I loved Mannie’s language, the analysis of humor was both insightful and funny, the characters were well-fleshed-out and their relationships admirable — et cetera.
I was never quite as obsessed with the libertarian angle as some readers seem to have been; Mannie makes it clear at the end of the book that the liberated Loonie colony is just as susceptible as any other polity to bureaucratization and other human failings, so it never read to me like unqualified praise of “rational anarchy.” And in case there was any doubt, in The Cat Who Walks Through Walls Heinlein deliberately deconstructs the whole lunar culture, as fcoulter points out above.
Still an enjoyable and distinctive story.
Rick
Just how much tunnel space would have to be under cultivation on the Moon to have the slightest impact on the Malthusian situation that is described on Earth?
And again, I wonder how anyone can see a right-libertarian society to be compatible with survival in a very hostile environment. Past frontiers on Earth were a lot more forgiving. How long would a libertarian Antarctic colony last? And at least there, you have access to breathable air and fresh water.
Having read only Heinlein’s highlights (Moon, Stranger, Troopers etc.), I have to say Moon is my favorite though I may not be qualified to opine. But I can say that I find Heinlein enduringly interesting. From every mention of dropping a rock down the well in The Expanse, to debates here on Terra over issues such as marriage, to the endless politically ideological quicksand we find ourselves in up to our necks as a matter of course. In just the half-dozen or so works of his I have looked at, he has done quite a bit to enrich my observations of my fellow humans. He seems to really open up for me the difficult dynamics of differentiating between the behaviors that one can apply to oneself and the ones that can rightly be applied to others. A lot of writers do that but I think of him in particular the most. At least in fiction. So Moon is my favorite so far but I am thinking that the body of his work may end up being most important to me personally
One of the things I like about Moon is that the ending doesn’t seem rushed. Quite a lot of the time with his work I get the feeling that Heinlein, having built his world and set it in motion then got bored with it and just wrapped the tale up as quickly as possible.
HAVE SPACESUIT WILL TRAVEL was the first sci-fi I ever read, at the age of 11, then I consumed every RH book I could get my hands on, along with every sci-fi my school libarian found for me. As others here have commented, CoG runs a close second, but I also enjoyed FARHAM’S FREEHOLD. What finally turned me away from RH was the way he portrayed the women in his writing, and his approach to incest. And I must say, I dislike his politics, and always skipped over that page(s), especially in STARSHIP TROOPERS. GLORY ROAD fueled my later RP gaming love affair, and DOOR INTO SUMMER pointed out some truths on being owned by a cat. But, back to the subject, no, I don’t think Moon is his best book.
@21/Raskos: “how much tunnel space would have to be under cultivation on the Moon”
BOTE time!
According to the USDA NASS, in 2017 there were 82 million acres of corn harvested in the U.S. — that’s 332,000 square kilometers, or a square 580 km on a side.
The moon’s surface area is 1/16 that of Earth, or 38 million square kilometers. Assuming a tunnel 10 meters wide and a boring rate of 1 km per day, you’d need 3.3e7 km of tunnel and 3.3e7 machine-days of effort; with a thousand machines, 3.3e4 days or 90 years. Excavating domed spaces (or erecting domes and then covering them with regolith, or inflating domes and then spraying the interior with lunar gunite) might be more efficient than literal tunnels.
Does Heinlein say how the tunnels are illuminated? (I haven’t read this one in 20 years.) Direct sunlight, piped sunlight, artificial light powered by total-conversion reactors? (IIRC that’s a thing in Farmer in the Sky, which also has beamed power.)
@14 Even before the sequels, we already knew that independent Luna didn’t wind up as Libertopia from the first line of Moon: “I see in Lunaya Pravda that Luna City Council has passed on first reading a bill to examine, license, inspect– and tax– public food vendors operating inside municipal pressure.”
A few years back, I was interested to discover a page with a 1955 letter from Heinlein to Ted Sturgeon, where he’s fairly dismissive of a local anarchist whose approach to state authority is basically Prof’s:
“We have an anarchist running a newspaper in this town, who is opposed to public roads, public schools, public anything—he maintains that it is not ethical for a majority to do anything collectively which each individual did not already have the right to do as an individual. This is an explosive notion; a corollary is that all taxation is wrong, all zoning laws are wrong, all compulsory education is wrong, all punishment by courts is wrong. In the mean time he lives in a well-policed society, his own considerable wealth protected by all these things he deplores.”
http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/10/help-from-heinlein.html
@@@@@#15, Chris Hoppe, RAH was never diagnosed with a brain tumor. He had left and right carotid arterial blockages too high for surgery. They were treated with bypass.
Um Nuclear-warhead tipped interceptors are the ONLY devices capable of stopping biological weapons (far deadlier than nuclear). And are already used by Russia:
https://www.businessinsider.com/video-russia-nuclear-tipped-ballistic-missile-intercpetor-a-135-2017-6
Once again, I would like to remind all of you Americans that the world does not end on the border of your country – the rest of the world still exists. Also, TANSTAAFL!
@21 and @25 The book mentions that, even the moon’s contribution, the food supply was inadequate to the Earth’s needs.
@25 Philip Thorne – thanks for running the numbers. Doesn’t seem terribly practical, does it? And of course these crops appear to grow in unreconstructed rhegolith. No soil microbiome necessary at all. Never mind the source of illumination.
@29 AlanBrown – I’m not particularly trying to beat on Heinlein here. But my suspension of disbelief throws a shoe when it runs over something like this, and I get tossed out of the story. There’s a big difference between a token effort and a serious, if inadequate, attempt to ameliorate a dire situation (I think that Philip’s rough calculations suggest that Heinlein hadn’t really thought through the logistics of this), but the whole revolution is predicated upon the disastrous long-term effects of raising grain on the Moon for transport to Earth. And if the effort’s a token, that’s one thing, but if there is a serious economic and engineering (and agronomic) case for lunar agriculture, that’s another.
@30 If you have never read Heinlein’s Farmer in the Sky, I suggest you make sure to avoid it. It is another tale of raising crops on another world to feed the hungry of Earth, in this case by terraforming Ganymede. The assumptions made in describing the terraforming process are just mind-numbingly improbable. Although what threw me right out of the story is something else; the fact that the colony relies on a single power station, and a single ground to orbit shuttle craft. As a former Emergency Manager, I just can’t overlook that lack of redundancy in systems essential to the colony’s survival.
I read all Heinlein’s stuff when I was young. I think overall the juveniles hold up better than the adult stuff. TMIAHM is a good book, possibly his best adult book, but it does point out how dated his thinking was about gender. He was perfectly willing to write kick-ass women characters, but his men are firmly locked in the mid-twentieth century paradigm. They have line marriages on the moon, and four or five women are married to a dozen or more men, but the women are still doing the dishes? No way! .
As a young girl raised on a steady diet of institutionalized sexism, RAH’s approach to women felt like a breath of fresh air. It wasn’t until many years later I realized he put women in a different box, but it was still a box full of gender assumptions. I can’t stomach Heinlein anymore but Moon is the exception, for many of the same reasons the author outlines.
You have to make allowances for a man born in the early 20th c. He was trying but his cultural conditioning kept tripping him up.
This is one of the first SF books I read and while books like Glory Road, Door into Summer and Starship Trooper have toped my list at times harsh Mistess is the one book I keep coming back to over and over again.
I don’t think “realistic engineering” was one of Heinlein’s goals for TMIAHM. Lasers are also a terrible mining tool, come to that–very energy inefficient.
@11/OBloodyHell
Well, that honor quite likely falls on H. G. Wells.
TMIAHM is one of my favorite books for so many already mentioned reasons.
One feature relating to Heinlein’s portrayal of a libertarian society that rarely if ever gets discussed, is that it isn’t workable for the current cut of humanity. The very title states that the harshness of the Lunar environment imposes inescapable discipline on the Loonies, requiring them to be co-operative and civic-minded to a degree rarely sustained in human history since the agricultural revolution.
To quote: (Could have told him several things that would stop what he pictured; he had obviously never been to Luna. As for “incorrigibles”, if really are, Luna eliminates them faster than Terra ever did. Back when I was very young, they sent us a gangster lord, from Los Angeles I believe; he arrived with a squad of stooges, his bodyguards, and was cockily ready to take over Luna, as was rumored to have taken over a prison somewhere Earthside. None lasted two weeks. Gangster boss didn’t make it to barracks; hadn’t listened when told how to wear a p-suit.)
It may be sociogenetic handwaving, but Heinlein is clearly explaining that the Loonies are a subspecies evolved under extreme selection pressure to eliminate arseholes and idiots, both of which are the flies in the ointment of every Utopian society.
I would say that:
1) MiaHM is his best novel in the sense that it was written at the height of his skills, while he was not yet in the grip of the Brain Eater (in reality, I think it wasn’t some kind of condition, it was that he just had outstripped in sales the ability for an editor to tell him no and make it stick and he started using that). And of the Grand-masters (himself, Asimov, and Clarke) he had the clearest prose (Clarke being more literary and big idea-ish) and the more relatable characters (Asimov’s failing was that most of his characters…even the NON-robots…come across as series of program instructions in service to the plot).
2) Which is NOT to say that his Libertarian Utopia was stable (@1 nailed THAT). In point of actual plot, the novel ends with Manny bemoaning the state of Luna’s Government (which had reached a point similar to 1950s America in terms of centralization and government power…the HORROR).
3) I feel like, as a futurist, Heinlein was second to Clarke, and as a plotter, secondary to Asimov (who could and frequently did out-Agatha Christie Agatha Christie for plot intricacy). But he had Hemingway’s way with prose simplicity, which made him by FAR the most popular of the three. That MiaHM is his best novel actually says something about him (and it also says something about him that Farnham’s Freehold manages to be worse than To Sail Beyond the Sunset…a feat that takes some doing…)
IIRC, and maybe I don’t, Wyoming’s “tragic backstory” was that she was a surrogate mother a few times. Manny expects this to scuttle her chances with his family, but lucky for him, his spouses don’t see it that way, and they clear the air on that issue early.
I’m not going to claim that surrogacy is a physically or emotionally easy road. The character tries to claim it was physically easy, which is an idea that makes me raise my eyebrows and snort – I don’t care how comparatively small the baby is, I have done my share of time with heartburn, and neonatal feet wedged in my ribcage, and neither of those conditions was created by ambivalence about my role as a woman or whatever BS Heinlein attributes gestational discomfort to. I can see where it would leave a mark. Manny is down a hand somehow, at least one of his wives was deported from Earth in her teens… There is a lot of tragedy to go around, and there is a lot more to Wyoming Knott.
@40
She was a surrogate because she couldn’t have her own children due to radiation damage. That was what radicalized her.
@@@@@ 40, actually Wyoh’s tragic backstory is she gave birth to a ‘monster’ due to radiation exposure when she was deported as a child. This ended her marriage and left her traumatized and adrift. She was attracted to surrogacy because it would give her the chance to have a ‘good’ baby. She may even enjoy pregnancy, secure in the knowledge that she will have a good result. She isn’t carrying now she’s become politically active because it does slow her down – she owes it to her clients to be careful. As I recall she’s explaining to Manny why it hasn’t affected her figure.
It’s not the surrogacy that worries Manny but the fact that Wyoh has had herself sterilized, reversibly, because she won’t risk another trauma. Manny thinks his family will have a problem with that. As it happens however the Wives and Wyoh have already addressed the issue the former supporting the latter when she has her tubes reopened.
Manny lost his arm in a mining accident. It was his senior wife Mum who was transported for cutting a man possibly during a sexual assault. She’s been against violence and loose living every since. Manny observes that Mum has stayed alive through worse times than he’s ever known. When she promised to defend their home from the invading Earthmen he believes her.
Embedded in Wyoh’s backstory is the fact that when “monsters” are born on Luna, they are euthanized. And something like half of the new arrivals do not survive their first year on Luna. Manny and his family may be relatively prosperous, but this libertarian “utopia” is a pretty harsh and ugly environment.
My point is that Wyoh is neither uniquely tragic nor only tragic. There is a lot more going on.
(Wyoming’s experience of surrogacy has very little in common with real-world surrogacy. Heinlein is really bad at writing women’s experiences.)
@ricevermicelli, it is said that RAH was writing a lot of his women as being Virginia Heinlein, who apparently was like that. There’s a good deal of variation in human beings.
@14:
I’d say that the libertarian practices on the Moon were entirely due to the Lunar Authority, which prohibited the Loonies from creating anything that looked like government. As soon as the Authority was overthrown, the Loonies created a standard government in spite of the efforts of Prof (one of the acknowledged leaders of the revolution, and a highly respected person even before the revolution) to maintain the previous lack of structure.
@45 I am just going to take this moment to be tired of having every complaint about the way Heinlein writes women dismissed as “he was writing Ginny all the time.” I have not complained that the character is too smart, too beautiful, too capable, or any of those things. I have complained that there is more to her than the author of this column acknowledges when he says she has a tragic past (which isn’t even a complaint about Heinlein), and that Heinlein’s attempt to write about surrogacy is terrible. Even accepting the state of play in the real world at the time Heinlein was writing, it’s terrible.
Wyoming’s career as a surrogate is just not a result you would get in a free market. Wyoming might be willing. The intended parents might be desperate. Bad surrogacy outcomes are bad for clinic business, so I’m surprised the doctors involved were willing to go ahead with it. The moon doesn’t seem undersupplied with women who would like to make some money and get ahead and are stuck waiting tables – many of them would be better risks than Knott’s first, or fifth through eighth, pregnancies.
Heinlein is really bad at writing about women’s experiences. About women themselves, he’s almost okay, if he keeps it light. But when he tries to wade into pregnancy, or menstruation, or being a girl in high school, he is terrible.
I agree Heinlein doesn’t write women well in general.
As I recall Heinlein says surrogacy is in fact a rare profession in Luna. Few Loonies can pay for it and fewer Loonie women want to do it. He doesn’t go into the matter at all, which can fairly be considered a fault, and he seems to have totally underrated the issues and problems Real Life has taught us are connected with the practice.
My (remembered) impression is that Luna in general was short of women (because most convict transportees, just like real-world Australia (or Georgia), were men. As a result, the number of potential surrogates would inevitably be low.
Yes, probably The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress is my favourite Heinlein novel. (One of them, anyway.)
Heinlein makes a supposition that a society with no laws and no government but where anyone who doesn’t work hard at survival and at getting along with everyone else is likely to die either by accident or by “accident”, and where there are far fewer women then men because (as noted above) vast majority of convicts transported are men, so for the most part the only women are the women who were family-transportees (like Wyoh) or those born in Luna – is one where the women would make all the sexual choices from first touch to divorce.
This is the biggest supposition Heinlein makes, and I generally find it wholly unbelievable. In a situation where women are regarded as “scarce resources” and men have what power there is, the result is not women getting all the choices, but men owning and controlling women. Where the biggest supply of new women isn’t convicts but girls born in Luna, men will value their daughters as useful means of trading with other men. As a class, men do not voluntarily abdicate their power over women: every surviving convict comes from an Earth culture which is (as Heinlein makes clear) still a rape culture: and the Moon is still a patriarchy: and the system which I think is most likely to result is daughters and wives bought and traded, with each man keeping his daughters compliant, uneducated, and under his control.
But: I find the situation which Heinlein stipulated for the sake of Story fascinating, and I still like reading it, even though I don’t believe it.
Manny notes at some point that a woman can of course put her man’s things outside her cubic and that’s it, marriage over – but that a woman who does this for no good reason is likely to be socially condemned, which is a big thing in a society where social condemnation is the only punishment. Manny himself is part of a line marriage where, creepily, the senior wife is “Mum” – and which goes by the (male) founder’s surname, not the woman’s. Ludmilla, the young daughter of the line marriage, is desperate to opt in to this line marriage, rather than risk life elsewhere.
And while women have sexual freedom, it’s unclear whether they get to decide for themselves how to use it: the only woman who is described as running an independent business on her own without reference to sex (several sex workers mentioned and Wyoh is professional surrogate) is Manny’s wife who runs a beauty salon. A good woman gets married and starts having kids as soon as she’s “husband-high”.
All of this would be fascinating if explored in more depth, but we rarely get the depth: Manny is as comfortable in this culture as a fish in water, and thinks about it about as much. Which is very realistic, of course. But Wyoh’s perspective might be rather different….
@50,There is certainly the real-world pattern that you describe, and I nonetheless appreciate stories that postulate the opposite, as Heinlein does – that scarcity confers power upon women. Apparently not very much power, though, because marrying at 15 is not an option terribly many women take up when there are alternatives. (When Heinlein writes about sexually active women – which I appreciate that he does – they are generally very happy. This isn’t entirely realistic either, especially given the ages at which the women in question become sexually active, the partners available to them, and the social constraints they’re dealing with, but again, I’m okay with that – when Heinlein writes about misery, removing the misery is generally a plot point.)
@50, @51— Heinlein was thinking of the settlement of the American West, from which his youth was only a few decades removed. In that context the scarcity of women was, in general, empowering. If he had grown up in Afghanistan or Siberia, he might have painted a different picture.
@40, @41, @42 — Never underestimate human variability. Astonishingly, some women report orgasms when they give birth. I’m of two minds as to whether this is an advantage — in a strictly Darwinian sense. In effect, ever since hominid females figured out their lives would be a lot more simple if they stayed away from the males, evolution has been bribing females to reproduce.
@31 — I disliked Farmer in the Sky when I read it, many years ago. However, I recently picked up a remaindered audiobook, and it was a lot better than I remembered. On the technological side, one thing that impressed me was that Heinlein presents growing your soil as the farmer’s first job.
@1 — It’s not the society, but the revolution, that needs a “godlike computer“. Heinlein may have been aware of Benjamin Franklin‘s comment, late in life, that the American Revolution was so improbable, it could not have succeeded without divine intervention. So Heinlein provided the divine intervention, in the form of Mike the computer.
But to return to the original question: I’m not sure which Heinlein novel is his greatest. However, I do think his most profound works are Beyond This Horizon, which just won the retro-Hugo Award, and Methuselah’s Children, in which we humans go out into the galaxy and discover we are no longer the big kids on the block.
@51, Apparently everybody marries young in Luna if they can. Manny was also in his teens when opted into the Davis family. He was trained as a miner by his co-husband and his spouses supported and paid for his education as an engineer, including time on Earth. Boys have a harder time finding a good marriage but girls can pick and choose. According to Manny plenty of young men end up running the corridors as Stilyagi. And there are girls who prefer running with them to marriage. Manny specifically tells Stuart LaJoie that once a girl hits fifteen or so she is her own mistress sexually speaking. She can marry pretty much where and who she likes. She can not marry and take lovers. She can sell it or she can line up a gang of boys to dance on her whims.
52: I think Heinlein is certainly thinking of an idealised version of the Western expansion of white settlers in the US. Noting that even in as airbrushed a version of this as the Little House books (and still more so in the raw material Frontier Girl) the shortage of women was really not empowering for women – not even for white women. But it seems unlikely that Heinlein had any access to any personal accounts of women who had that direct experience.
Re-reading The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress recently, it struck me especially that a teenage girl doesn’t weep and cry and beg to be kept in her family of origin, unless she has a pretty realistic idea that things could be a lot worse for her if she left this line-marriage where she was born.
Many things in TMiaHM did remind me of accounts of life for women in Kabul. especially the lack of any public role for women that isn’t directly sexual: the prohibition for men on touching a woman without her direct invitation, even if she touches him first, may work in public places, but Wyoh’s uncomfortable discussion with Manny in the hotel room makes it clear (I think) that Wyoh has encountered men who assume that once a woman’s back in the room the man’s booked, she should provide sex or she’s being unreasonable.
55: Manny specifically tells Stuart LaJoie that once a girl hits fifteen or so she is her own mistress sexually speaking. She can marry pretty much where and who she likes. She can not marry and take lovers. She can sell it or she can line up a gang of boys to dance on her whims.
But she cannot train as an engineer or a pilot or a teacher or a judge or anything that would allow her to be independent of support by a man or a group of men to whom she is providing sex. The only career mentioned that’s open to a woman who wants to have an income that isn’t earned sexually, is running a beauty salon.
I don’t know that’s ever specifically stated but we don’t seem to see any women in such professions either so you could be right. Heinlein’s subconscious preconceptions betraying him again.
I’m not sure there are any Loonie pilots and engineers seem to be uncommon, Manny is the only one we meet.
@55 — “Career … open to a woman”. Remember, this is a society without occupational licensure. All careers are open to a woman, she just has to hang up her shingle. Of course, that doesn’t guarantee she’ll find customers.
If she feels she needs training, she makes a deal with someone in whatever field she wants to enter. (In the book, the professor comments that a teacher needs to only stay one day ahead of the student.) Apprenticeship seems the likeliest option.
Heinlein didn’t need to be told women can be engineers: he was married to one. He wrote about the prejudices such women had to overcome, back in the 40s.
@54 — The greater the shortage of women, the more suitors per woman, the more choices she has. (Obviously, this assumes a Western society, in which women choose their own husbands.) And even after she’s chosen a mate, he is aware that if he mistreats her there are a lot of men ready to take her off his hands. Heinlein would certainly have known women who remembered those days.
But we don’t have to go back to the 19th century to see this. It’s happening right now, in the US military, where “a six becomes a ten”, because there are so many more men than women on these foreign deployments. I saw this myself, when I briefly worked at the West Point library: a notably handsome male cadet was engaged to marry a rather plain woman cadet
In Heinlein’s day, a man who assumes any woman who is alone with him has consented to sex was called a “wolf”. That’s the word Podkayne uses in Podkayne of Mars. In later years, such a man would be called a “date rapist”. And if you think that’s something that only happens in Kabul, you haven’t been paying attention to the news!
@58 That’s an odd bit of an anecdote that I don’t think amounts to data one way or the other – West Point is full of fit young things, and those are seldom unpleasant to look at, but military standards tend to suppress traditional feminine prettiness while leaving traditional masculine handaome unimpeded. And anyway, one wants character in a spouse. You really can’t tell who you want to wake up with in the morning just by looking.
Heinlein did marry an engineer. But didn’t he then forbid her to work?
@59: Virginia Gerstenfeld was a very strong personality — to be a woman chemist and engineer in those days you had to be — and Bob Heinlein “forbidding” her anything she wanted to do is a little hard for me to believe. One hint to who was the dominant personality may be the fact that, when they met, he was an FDR Democrat and she, a conservative Republican. On the other hand, they were trying to have children, as Tramp Royale poignantly records.
My West Point anecdote was merely offered as an illustration of a well-known principle that women in the military have often spoken of.
Women at West Point could dress in a feminine way if they wanted to. I vividly remember one tiny young woman who not only opted for a skirt instead of pants, but contrived to render her uniform blouse quite frilly.
One oddity I noticed when I first arrived was that, while all the young men looked quite athletic, some of the young women were obese. Old timers explained that, with the Democrats (who had controlled the House of Representatives for almost all of the last half-century at that point) standing on the Academy’s neck and demanding more women be enrolled regardless, otherwise qualified overweight women were admitted, on the understanding they would lose the excess weight.
@ricevermicelli:
I know a couple, including a close family member. Of course, you could argue that they didn’t have alternatives, but really they could have (in both cases) stayed home for several more years, they just found marriage as teenagers preferable. In one case, the woman’s family was very poor (she literally wore grain-sack dresses as a toddler, or so she told me), in another because she just plain disliked her parents. The thing is, neither found marriage to be an unpleasant prospect (and in fact both continued to think they had made the right call as middle-aged adults). As a couple of people have said, there’s a lot of variety among humans.
As I said everybody in Luna marries startlingly young, if they can. Mothers have to work to find marriages for sons and sometimes fail. What this seems to mean is people marry into family businesses and receive their training from their spouses. In Manny’s marriage further education is encouraged, that’s how Manny met Prof, and entrepreneurship is equally supported as in his wife’s beauty shop. Other families may vary in their customs. My personal feeling is a woman, married or not could do whatever she wanted but it is true Heinlein doesn’t show it..
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is undoubtedly one of Heinlein’s best books, but it is probably also one of his adult books that has “aged” the best in the years since it was published. Of the author’s other writing, many of his earlier “Future History” stories for example have long been overtaken by real life technological advancement, while others like Stranger in a Strange Land or Time Enough for Love might have been socially groundbreaking when they were published, but modern readers seem to have a harder time relating to them these days.
@9 – “Not just “sex FOR everybody” but “sex WITH everybody”. Well, within some fairly heteronormative boundaries, I’m pretty sure.”
“For its time” can become something of an excuse when discussing older fiction, but I really think its relevant in some of Heinlein’s books. For example, at the time they were written homosexuality was still viewed by many as a sickness or a character flaw. In Stranger in a Strange Land the author at least included physical affection between male/male and female/female friends (including kissing). The later Time Enough for Love included both that and at least references to previous homosexual relationships between the main character Lazarus Long and one of his friends. Quite risque stuff for the time, if rather non-eventful in today society.
I went through a serious Heinlein phase in my late teens, early 20’s, and this is definitely one of my favorites! I recently reread it, and then promptly recommended it to my son! Interesting political commentary, when read as an adult.
@63 — Between Stranger in a Strange Land (1961) and I Will Fear No Evil (1970), Heinlein’s view of homosexuality appears to have drastically changed, beating the corresponding changes in the psychiatric “bible” by a couple of years.
As best I can recall, the earlier book still shows the influence of the orthodox, Freudian/Darwinian view; what we might now call “heteronormative”.
I’ve often wondered if some friend he greatly respected, a military man probably, came out to him during the Sixties. Someone who has read the biography (as opposed to buying it and leaving it on the shelf) may have more to add.
Yes.
Let me put in a word for Stranger. I read it first in the late sixties and the last time around 2000. I thought the portrayal of earth society around 2000 (flying cars excepted) was awfully good.
Citizen of the Galaxy — truly fine and only a juvenile in a technical sense.
I like “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” because of its political science aspects. He creates a society that admits that things must be paid for and that, if we want necessary services, there must be a contribution from those who use them.
However, Heinlein points this out in many of his books — and includes service to society as part of claiming privileges. “Starship Troopers” posits a society where voting is contingent upon personal service. “Moon” and “Citizen of the Galaxy” posit worlds where general services must be paid for. In none of these do the citizens go it alone. Society has its benefits, and its costs. Heinlein recognized this.
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress has always been my favorite Heinlein novel. I read it a kid and was fascinated by a robot becoming “aware”. I also loved the picture it presented of “lobbing” rocks at the earth and how devastating that was. I imagined a grid on the earth with explosions where the rocks landed. It was sad to see Mike “die” at the end. I read every Heinlein book I could find, so he is my favorite author, with Isaac Asimov close behind.
Personally, while I loved MOON, I always felt that DOUBLE STAR, at 60k words, was his best novel.
“Moon…” is close to my favorite Heinlein, but that’s possibly due to when I read it. I had “graduated” from YA/juveniles (and at the time, didn’t care for “Citizen”, but boy howdy, have I changed my tune on that one!). And Manny, Wy, the Professor and Mike left an outsize impression on me.
I find it interesting, Alan, your reaction to Loonie-speak. You say, ” In particular, the patois Manny uses, with its Russian-influenced lack of articles, and words from a broad range of languages, helps the reader feel more fully immersed in his culture.” I, too had no problem with it, but I seem to remember that Alexei Panshin, in his, “Heinlein in Dimension” really didn’t care for that patois at all. Oh, well, ymmv, as they say.
His focus on relationships, especially “marriage” was fascinating to me, especially after, in later years, I read stuff like “The Harrad Experiment”, “Rebellion of Yale Marrat”, and some other “alternate lifestyles” tomes (and decided they weren’t really for me). I couldn’t really visualize that line marriage in “Moon” working in “real life”, but the concept to a young, impressionable mind was food for thought.
All in all, probably my second favorite Heinlein (“Citizen of the Galaxy”, even if a juvenile, is still my favorite – told you I changed my tune).
One thing that hasn’t been brought up — the line marriage concept, in late 19th century America may not have been unlikely. The Oneida Colony (not tribe — they started Oneida flatware), is somewhat similar. But, of course, many differences. It was free sex, but only consenting & no children, unless approved by the council running the colony. and not everyone was allowed to join. (the no children rule worked well, no one slipped up).
Those women, though, were freer, even in 19th c. America, than most of the women in Moon seem to have been.
This has always been my favorite of his.
Was just thinking about this book today for some reason, tonight find a TOR email in my inbox referring to “Heinlein’s best book”. Think “Don’t know about best, but TMIAHM is my favourite”. Even shows the same cover as the edition I’ve owned forever! Now to read the article.
I haven’t yet read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, but I disagree with Alan Brown’s advising people to stay away from Farmer in the Sky. I think it’s a good novel even if it has specific details that are improbable or outdated.
It makes me laugh when anyone claims Heinlein was “right wing”, “fascist”, or even “conservative” then uses that assumption as an excuse to not just not read any of his books and short stories but to proclaim all kinds of things about them that are not true at all.
To see just how far left wing he was early on, read “For Us, the Living”. It was the first book he wrote but the last one to be published. It sat around from 1938 to 2003.
I found it to have a very leftist bent, along with being not just atheist but anti-theist. In the future society, children were allowed to go to church up to a certain age, then the government would get all that nonsense out of their heads.
You’ll also find that Heinlein always had an interest in free and open sexuality, with people lounging around at home in the nude. (Probably what put the kibosh on the book getting published in 1938.)
As for how the POV character gets to the future, it’s done via a common trope of the day, he either just wakes up one day in the far future or some accident happens, then the protagonist wakes up in the future. In the case of this book it’s a car crash.
Technology wise, there are elements any user of dialup internet access, floppy disks, cassette tapes, and having separate machines for playing videos, listening to music etc in the 70’s through the early 90’s will recognize.
AFAIK the only one of the “old guard” SciFi writers who posited anything anywhere close to PDAs or smartphones was Arthur C. Clarke in “Rendezvous with Rama” published in 1973.
Finally, as with any book, READ IT BEFORE YOU DUMP ON IT. You may find your assumptions flipped over, perhaps even smashed. If you find such potentials uncomfortable, why do you even read SciFi?
57: What I actually said was; “But she cannot train as an engineer or a pilot or a teacher or a judge or anything that would allow her to be independent of support by a man or a group of men to whom she is providing sex. “
If you can show otherwise,prove that all careers were open to women in Luna by providing me with a quote from TMIAHM which mentions an engineer who’s a woman, a pilot who’s a woman, a teacher who’s a woman, a judge who’s a woman…?
When Manny finds women working shifts with men in the revolution, he instantly (and apparently correctly, at least Heinlein at no point shows him mistaken) presumes these women are there to provide sexual satisfaction to the men, not because they are equally skilled.
58: “The greater the shortage of women, the more suitors per woman, the more choices she has. (Obviously, this assumes a Western society, in which women choose their own husbands.) “
Nope. Seriously, read the Little House books. Shortage of adult women (or even “girls more or less of marriageable age”). But all men have more choices than any of the women do. The only career open to Laura is that of being a teacher or sewing – she can’t be a homesteader because women can’t claim a homestead: she can’t do skilled carpentry-work, because while Charles Ingalls can make almost anything out of wood, he won’t teach his daughters his craft. She can’t take a job working on the railroad. Her choices are limited. All she does get to choose, is who and whether to marry.
Picture of the unicorn:
“Well, I suppose you know I fancy a little piece of whisky once in a while. Before that man Volstead put his act in, a man could buy a decent bottle of whisky for about a dollar, and if he drank in a saloon, he could get himself a shot of bonded stuff in quiet refined surroundings, without any women in the bar, for ten cents. Not like this white poison they age with brown sugar and sell in fruit jars. A decent red whisky was a comfort to a man instead of an enemy. And the beer come honest out of a bung on a keg that the beer had got friendly with. It cost a nickel, and the free lunch was unlimited.”
“I never heard of a free lunch,” I said. “What was it all about?”
“Free lunch was an invention of the angels, thought up by honest bartenders to encourage the purchase of beer and to prevent drunkenness in the clients, so they could buy more beer without making a nuisance out of themselves. When I was a younker a man with two nickels could feed like a king. The bartender was a little suspicious if you dug into the grub on the strength of one beer, but when you bellied up and ordered the second, you were a guest of the house and could eat your head off.”
“What did they give you?”
The Old Man smiled wistfully, then blissfully licked his lips.
“Everything,” he said. “There would be a big glass crock of pickled pig’s feet, and a wooden pair of scissors to fish them out of the brine with. There would be a bowl of hard-boiled eggs, naturally, and another bowl of raw onions. Some barkeeps fancied hot roast beef, others liked cold tongue or cold beef, but they all competed to see who set out the best free lunch. There was usually a big loaf of salami, a bowl of mulligan, and nearly anything the Germans liked—sardines, herring, and all sorts of cheeses. A man drinking whisky could run the course. A man drinking beer had to pace himself a little, so the beer could keep up with the vittles.
“When Prohibition come, and they started making this needle beer and inventing whisky in the barn and sending people blind with the staggers, the country died. Whisky, legal, might come back some day, but I vow there won’t be any more free lunch to go with it. Thinks won’t ever be the same as they used to be.”
[Robert Ruark, The Old Man and the Boy, 1953]
@@@@@ 50, jcarnall
Heinlein makes a supposition that a society with no laws and no government but where anyone who doesn’t work hard at survival and at getting along with everyone else is likely to die either by accident or by “accident”, and where there are far fewer women then men because (as noted above) vast majority of convicts transported are men, so for the most part the only women are the women who were family-transportees (like Wyoh) or those born in Luna – is one where the women would make all the sexual choices from first touch to divorce.
This is the biggest supposition Heinlein makes, and I generally find it wholly unbelievable. In a situation where women are regarded as “scarce resources” and men have what power there is, the result is not women getting all the choices, but men owning and controlling women. Where the biggest supply of new women isn’t convicts but girls born in Luna, men will value their daughters as useful means of trading with other men. As a class, men do not voluntarily abdicate their power over women: every surviving convict comes from an Earth culture which is (as Heinlein makes clear) still a rape culture: and the Moon is still a patriarchy: and the system which I think is most likely to result is daughters and wives bought and traded, with each man keeping his daughters compliant, uneducated, and under his control.
Yes!
You saved me the trouble of posting about this.
@Rick_Katze, I loved Double Star. I think it might be less popular than others simply because it is not very science-fictional.
@74 I didn’t say everyone should avoid Farmer in the Sky, I simply gave that advice to one person who couldn’t look past some dubious math in A Moon is a Harsh Mistress. If you can overlook the improbability of terraforming Ganymede as easily as is portrayed in the book, and the fact that its value in producing food for the teeming masses of Earth would be dubious at best, it is actually a fine tale of a young boy becoming a man.
Heinlein had strong feelings about the sexual abuse and harassment of women. Whatever his other faults he never depicted such behavior as normal and accepted. He was undoubtedly a bit of an idealist on that point.
@76, you are quite right that there is no mention of female engineers, etc in ‘Moon’. However Hazel Meade is a trained and qualified engineer in The Rolling Stone and it is specifically mentioned she left the profession after hitting the glass ceiling.
81: Yes. But Hazel Meade is what, 13 at the time of the Luna Revolution? She grows up and becomes an adult when Luna is no longer primarily the society where men work and women choose which men to have sex with and whose babies to have. Even so, as Hazel notes – and this was subtle on Heinlein’s part, if deliberate – she would have hit the glass ceiling because every single man in Luna who trained as an engineer in the Luna prison-colony days, would have regarded a woman in engineering as primarily there for sex, not for work.
For almost any other writer of Heinlein’s generation, I would have seen the absence of women in Luna who are judges, pilots, engineers, teachers, doctors, as mere oversight – but Heinlein was quite accustomed to dropping a casual “The judge… her court” into a story where another writer would have made the judge by default a man. He didn’t do this in the Luna he created in TMIAHM. Women in Luna pre-Revolution called the sexual shots to an extent I find absolutely unbelievable – but they had no access to any choice of work in the professions that would keep them independent of needing a man to provide for them.
I didn’t think Hazel would count. Large numbers of women seem to work for the Authority in its complex. Doing what isn’t stated. I always assumed some variant of clerical work or data entry.
It is stated many times that women should be married, though there’s enough evidence to show should doesn’t equal must. And marriage doesn’t mean a woman can’t have a business too as Manny’s wife’s beauty shop indicates. How common that is is one of the many things we aren’t told. It would for example be interesting to know if Sidris got the beauty shop before or after she was married. Manny remember got most of his education and all his professional training after marriage.
83: “Large numbers of women seem to work for the Authority in its complex. Doing what isn’t stated. I always assumed some variant of clerical work or data entry. “
Which kind of proves my point, doesn’t it? In the men’s society in Luna outside the Authority, women don’t get those kind of jobs unless they are working for their husband or their birth family. But the Authority will employ women as clerks/data entry handlers, and pay them (scrip, but still pay).
And marriage doesn’t mean a woman can’t have a business too as Manny’s wife’s beauty shop indicates.
Yes, I thought that was tellling, too: she’s not providing sex directly, but her business is making women more attractive for sex.
Manny remember got most of his education and all his professional training after marriage.
But his sister-wives didn’t get the education or professional-training that their brother-husbands did. Their job was to have children.
Childbearing is indeed very important to the Davis family. That’s why Manny thinks Wyoh’s contraceptive tubal ligation would be a deal breaker. We don’t know if he’s right since Wyoh chooses to have her tubes reopened. It’s very probable that this is a general Loonie attitude.
As for the beauty shop there is three possibilities: Sidris built the business before marrying the Davis family; Some previous Davis wife – or even husband – built the business and Sidris took it over; or she built the business herself after marriage and with the financial and other support of her family. Any of these alternatives would tell us something about Loonie culture if we only knew which one was right.
I’ve heard it suggested that Mike/Michelle is not naive to begin with, then tragically dying, but rather, plays all the humans for what it wants, and once it gets it, stops talking. Comments?
This man and specifically this book raised me. (Along with Asimov Clarke and MZBradley). I keep on in my kindle collection to read from time to time. It can’t be characterized except to say it’s Heinlein
On the economic roles of women in Luna – if Heinlein made a conscious decision not to identify any women as judges or engineers, it may have been because he was portraying a pioneer society, modeled somewhat on the 19th C American west in which the major industries were firstly farming and then mining. (Not to downplay the influence of Heinlein’s formative years being almost a century ago now. “For it’s time” is a perfectly valid consideration when reading anything older than recent. I wouldn’t presume to read Austen, Hardy, or Maugham, and expect modern behaviors of their characters and cultures. For all it’s futurism,science fiction is no different.)
On marrying young – the current trend to getting hitched in one’s late twenties is an outlier when looking at most all of human history. In the 1860s, mid-teen marriages were common enough, and even as late as the 1960s it wasn’t an eyebrow raiser to marry at 18. And, folks marry younger in farming societies.
@76 — “[A woman] cannot train as an engineer or a pilot or a teacher or a judge … If you can show otherwise,prove that all careers were open to women in Luna by providing me with a quote from TMIAHM which mentions an engineer who’s a woman, a pilot who’s a woman, a teacher who’s a woman, a judge who’s a woman…?”
Obviously, training for an occupation and practicing an occupation are two different things.
In the society Heinlein imagines, the only thing that can prevent a woman from training for an occupation is that no one will take her money. The only thing that can prevent a woman from practicing an occupation is that no one, male or female, will hire her. There are, of course, no gender quotas because there are no coercive institutions to enforce them.
What does Heinlein really think about women’s roles? Well, just a few years earlier, in Starship Troopers, the space navy is nearly all women. I doubt he suddenly changed his views. It’s just that Moon is not a sociological study of gender relations but an adventure novel.
I had written, “the more suitors per woman, the more choices she has”. To which you replied, “Nope. … [In] the Little House books … all men have more choices than any of the women do.“ Sure; but obviously a woman is better off if she doesn’t have to take the first offer that comes along, like Charlotte Lucas in Pride and Prejudice. Study the lives of 19th Century feminists and high-achieving women and you will see what a difference a supportive husband often made.
@83 & @84 — You can’t assume that “the large numbers of women” working for the Lunar Authority are clerks, and then treat that assumption as if it were a fact, and draw conclusions from it.
88: Um, yes, but: The reason for men being the farmers in the white settler expansion into the western plains, was for one reason only.
Homesteading – growing a European-style farm from scratch on prairie land – was hard work and a single person couldn’t do it. (The most successful homestead farms were where married brothers claimed homesteads next to each other and effectively set up a family farm with multiple adults to do the work and more land.) You had to be married to be a pioneer farmer, first because it was at minimum a two-person job, second it was an isolated job, and third because in order for the farm to be an ongoing concern, there had to be young workers growing up to do their share. Laura Ingalls Wilder is a better resource for this than Robert Heinlein – he read about it, she lived it – but Heinlein clearly understood it on an intellectual level: as discussed, Farmer in the Sky, or the Happy Valley section of Time Enough For Love.
Why were there no female homesteaders in the push to dot white-owned farms all over the western plains? Not because women couldn’t do it – but because a single person couldn’t do it and the US federal government at the time didn’t recognise married women as human beings. A married woman couldn’t claim a homestead because she had no legal existance. Ma Ingalls was Pa Ingalls’s legal subsidiary, not an independent person: she could not sign contracts or hold property.
This reason could not apply in Luna under the Authority. If that was Heinlein’s reason, he was being as narrow a thinker as Asimov, who saw no problem building a Domed city with everyone using public washrooms and eating communal rations – but families living in a 1950s-style marriage of husband-wife-and-one-kid. Heinlein is more subtle a writer than Asimov, and the fact of women in Luna being depicted either in sex roles or in sexual service roles only is, I think, telling us about the men’s cutture that Manny feels so comfortable in: women in Luna can choose which man they want, but they’re not free to choose to work in roles that have nothing to do with providing sex / having children.
Speaking of Mike: what do people think of the theory that Mike-the-computer is Valentine Michael Smith the Martian, is the Archangel Michael? That is, they’re all the same character?
You know given that Loonie society has no objective existence but is a product of Heinlein’s imagination there are no right answers to anything he didn’t put down in black and white meaning we are free to use our own in fleshing it out.
The Davis family has a farm that supplies their own needs and the local market. They don’t grow wheat for Earth. Greg, and Manny before his accident, work as miners. After his accident Manny trains as an engineer with his family’s support. Sidris has her business. We have no idea what Anna does other than bearing several children but somebody has to be managing the farm and it isn’t any of the husbands. Mum of course is head of the household and in overall control.
@90 — “Why were there no female homesteaders”? Maybe not in the “Little House“ books …
Thousands of women took advantage of the Homestead Act (1862) that offered free land in the American Great Plains. Women who were single, widowed, divorced, or deserted were eligible to acquire 160 acres of federal land in their own name. … A married woman was not allowed to take land in her own name unless she was considered the head of the household.
“Women Homesteaders”, Encyclopedia of the Great Plains
http://plainshumanities.unl.edu/encyclopedia/doc/egp.gen.040
Another source estimates that 12% of homesteaders were women. The rule about married women was probably there to prevent every married couple from grabbing 320 acres.
This illustrates the principle that a novel — like The Moon is a Harsh Mistress — or even a series of novels — like “Little House on the Prairie” — will give you only a partial portrait of the society in which it is set.
You know I haven’t read ‘Moon’ in years yet I haven’t had to open it once to check my statements – though maybe I should – I’ve read it so many times it’s engraved in my gray matter :-D
#90 – In the end, we know very little about the Lunar economy, what types of jobs are available, how many of them are undesirable jobs, how much (if any) unemployment there is, what being a high tech farmer is like (no isolation as on Earth farming), the proportion of the economy controlled by large corporations (another scourge of Utopias), and most of all, how an economy is shaped without the bad actors that Heinlein has eliminated.
An interesting question might be – given an effectively unlimited number of careers available as wife helping to run a family business in a happy marriage (wide choice and no jerks in the dating pool) what proportion of women would take that choice?
Note to Taras–it’s not just women who enter the service academies overweight. My brother sweated off 30 pounds during his first plebe summer. Plus, women who are *muscular* often appear heavier than current model dimensions, and uniforms are cut to masculine styles which don’t help in displaying a woman to her best advantage. And please don’t blame the Democrats–Congress critters are the ones who nominate candidates to those academies, and Congress has been pretty Republican for a while.
About women being homesteaders in the time of Laura Ingalls Wilder…her eventual sister-in-law, Eliza Jane Wilder, had a claim in the same town as Almanzo, when Laura was in school. It was mentioned that she was also a homesteader and was teaching during the winter in order to raise money. Eliza failed at teaching, for various reasons, and gave up the claim, but she did have one in her own name for some time.
Taras is quite correct.
@96: At that time there was no shortage of male applicants for West Point; thus, no reason to lower standards for men to admit more. (I don’t think this changed in the decades since, but I could be wrong.) And I do not recall seeing any overweight men.
Nor especially muscular women; though the woman with the handsome cadet fiancé was notably lean and wiry. On the other hand, I did see a few women who strained the seams on their pants, and asked my colleagues about them.
Why did they mention Democratic pressure specifically? As of 1982, the Democrats had controlled the House for 28 years straight (and 46 of the last 50), and would continue for another 12 years. (Senate: about the same, except the Republicans had just taken control.) The pressure to increase the percentage of women at the Point was probably coming especially from the brilliant, charming, ticcy Congresswoman Patricia Schroeder, fondly remembered, the first woman ever to serve on the House Armed Services Committee. N.B.: That’s the committee that decides how much money West Point gets from the Federal government every year.
great discussion, I liked Moon- read about four decades ago. I have been re-reading a lot of his YA books, really liked CotG and Tunnel in the Sky but fondly remember all the “Torch Ship” stories and loved Stranger.