Book Review – The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

Sometimes you get really lucky when you’re swooping into a thrift shop, and sometimes you’re not so lucky – earlier this year I happened on a lucky day when a dozen or so hard cover books in great condition were for sale in my closest thrift shop, at a very low price.

I can only assume I was one of the first readers through the door that day.

One of the modern classic titles I snagged was Robert A. Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Touted on the front cover as a “Hugo Award-winning novel of libertarian revolution,” today I would describe it as a story about a revolution launched by convict-colonists on the moon against the economic and political control of those on Earth, somewhat conveniently assisted by what today reads as a rather suspect artificial intelligence, but in the book is described (for the most part) as a friendly super-computer that wants to help it’s friend and also wants to learn how to tell jokes. I started thinking of it as a sort of anti-HAL.

This story was first published (serialized) in 1966, and projects about a hundred years into the future from there.

Aside: As a Canadian, I couldn’t help but notice that in this (impressive) world-building-projecting of future society, Canada no longer seems to exist as a separate political entity (there is a “North America” which seems to be unified) although there is a lunar Hong Kong and some remnant of the Soviet Union is possibly still kicking around somewhere.

SPOILER ALERT: As a writer, I can’t help but feel the super-computer in this story was written as a bit of a cheat – an understandable and clever cheat, but still a cheat, allowing for a degree of handwaving – the computer figures out how to do an awful lot behind the scenes when it comes time for negotiation, warfare, communication, creation of a new government, etc., and then, just when you’re starting to wonder if this will somehow turn out to have been an early warning about letting super-computers make all of our decisions for us, before it completely takes over everything, the super-computer conveniently, mysteriously, goes silent. (Or has it? Maybe it’s still there, quietly manipulating.)

And I’m left wondering if Heinlein was concerned about where super-computing/artificial intelligence could go, and wanted to say something about that in this story, or if it’s a somewhat spooky coincidence that this factor in the story line hooked a fair amount of my attention, given that I’m living and reading this book in 2025.

(I believe I may have encountered a few Heinlein short stories in the past – or adaptions of his works – but this may be the first of his novels I’ve ever read.)

I suspect most of the attention at the time the book first came out went towards other story-world-building aspects, such as the way that the colony of the moon lives in tunnels under the surface (which I kept forgetting) and grows wheat for shipment back to Earth, and the unconventional marriages that are explained within. (There is a shortage of women on the moon, and so there are multiple-partner marriages and social conventions that, we’re told, give women the top hand in inter-personal relationships, although somehow this does not seem to translate into much political power, because, well, I guess because this story was written by a dude and mostly for dudes in the mid 1960s. Women in this world might get to choose their partners, but the main female character still has her physical/sexual attractiveness emphasized, and while some people have called this book one with strong feminist characters, today, to me, the treatment of female characters within this story in general feels a bit lame.) Okay, that is partly a when-it-was-written and also a target-audience thing. Fine. There is also (rightfully) praised social/political blindness to skin colour in this story.

And then there’s the how-what-if-to-make-a-new-government political discussion and philosophizing.

Reading this book sometimes felt dangerously close to a chore, particularly around the middle. I suspect this is partially a personal-preference thing, and some readers might be very interested in the more political/philosophical aspects of the story.

For me, I found myself disagreeing somewhat with how this author in this book seems to think people would react to certain situations, there was a point where I caught myself saying to myself “Yeah, I don’t think people actually work that way” – but, I could well be wrong.

Understanding this is an extremely well regarded and influential book, particularly within the speculative fiction/science fiction community, I was glad of the opportunity to read it, and despite finding it a bit less interesting in some places than others, even when it started to feel slightly chore-like, it was, over all, a happy chore.

The dialogue in this book is really quite something, with a sort of Russian-influenced English dialect that feels very organic and convincing.

While I, for whatever silly reason, kept forgetting that the entire lunar colony was underground, the whole set-up for it is quite likely iconic to many people, it certainly seemed unique to me – whenever I remembered it – and the use of big rocks “dropped” from the moon towards the earth as weapons, using a technology that I found sounded quite possible, stands out too.

To read my 380-ish page copy of this book, I was grabbing an hour, an hour and a half, in the early morning or late at night each day for about a week. I can understand how someone so inclined, might spend many hours more working slowly through all the creation and arguments discussed within this text.

I am not so inclined at this point in time, but I can recommend this book. I think most people will find something in it that will entertain and interest.