First Thoughts on “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress”

I am almost halfway through “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” by Robert A. Heinlein and I am enjoy­ing it a lot. This is one of his most famous titles, telling a story of a late XXI-century guer­rilla move­ment. The orga­ni­za­tion was cre­ated and oper­ates on the Moon which in the book is a penal colony with mil­lions of inhab­i­tants, includ­ing not only con­victs but also free immi­grants and peo­ple born there.

Heinlein por­trays a slightly anar­chis­tic soci­ety that runs itself and trades its prod­ucts with Earth like a reg­u­lar state. There are almost no prison guards and the ones that are present serve mostly as body­guards to high level rep­re­sen­ta­tives of the Authority – the admin­is­tra­tive body set up by Earth. The Authority does not involve itself in run­ning most of the mat­ters of the colony. It does, how­ever, hold monop­oly on exports as it owns the only lunar “cat­a­pult” – a huge con­struc­tion able to trans­port goods towards Earth. Apart from that, it dic­tates prices on sub­stan­tial goods and prod­ucts like water or fer­til­iz­ers and con­trols many aspects of inter­nal trade.

“Loonies”, as the colonists call them­selves, despise the Earth-imposed over­seers as many of them believe their soci­ety could attain much higher level of devel­op­ment with­out such heavy-handed approach. Unfortunately, they lack any kind of national iden­tity related to the Moon and all pre­vi­ous attempts at lib­er­a­tion proved inef­fi­cient or even sui­ci­dal. Nonetheless, things start to change when one of the ille­gal rebel meet­ings is attended by Manuel Garcia “Mannie” O’Kelly-Davis, the book’s pro­tag­o­nist and nar­ra­tor. Mannie is a free­lance com­puter tech­ni­cian who is reg­u­larly tasked with main­te­nance and repairs of the Authority’s mas­ter super­com­puter – HOLMES-IV, cen­tral to the func­tion­ing of the colony on every level, from infra­struc­ture man­age­ment to pay­roll of civil servants.

It is suf­fi­cient to say that some time before the meet­ing the com­puter became self-aware and started devel­op­ing human fea­tures. Mannie is the only per­son who knows this and also the only friend of Mike’s (as they both call HOLMES-IV). Due to some dis­turb­ing events the two get involved in the rebel­lion with Mike becom­ing the Chairman. Yes, this truly is a story about an AI-supported rev­o­lu­tion and, after read­ing Heinlein’s descrip­tions and expla­na­tions, it does not seem that ridicu­lous for a science-fiction novel. What is more, even as it was first pub­lished in 1965, it does not feel too out­dated in terms of the state of tech­nol­ogy described in it. It is believ­able, despite Loonies using tele­phones instead of some kind of lunar Internet and the lack of LCD dis­plays, iPods and sim­i­lar gad­gets Heinlein did not predict.

The only thing I find strange is that up to this point almost no casu­al­ties have been suf­fered by the rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies. Some risks, includ­ing really big ones, are taken, com­plex plots are put in motion but every­thing works out well. Too well, in fact – it is almost like in rebel’s utopia. Knowing that this state of affairs can­not last for­ever (Heinlein was a great writer and this is not a naive tale) I am already devel­op­ing anx­i­ety about what is going to hap­pen to char­ac­ters I have started to iden­tify with. I guess this is a proof of how good the book is.

I will write more about the book once I fin­ish read­ing it.