'The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress' by Robert A. Heinlein
'The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress' by Robert A. Heinlein

The good

  • Fun premise: the moon is being used as a penal colony by earth, and the residents of the moon (“Loonies”) start a revolution to fight for independence.

  • It’s interesting to see a group of people plotting a revolution, creating secret cells, overthrowing a government, working to establish a new state, and trying to earn recognition from other states. None of it feels particularly realistic, but it does make for entertaining reading.

  • Lots of exploration of ideas that feel futuristic today, and must have seen much more so when this book came out in the 60s, including: line marriage, a form of polygamy where families can choose to “opt in” new husbands and wives, growing families larger and larger over time; a self-aware artificial intelligence named Mike (short for Mycroft Holmes); throwing rocks from space using an electromagnetic catapult as a weapon; Rational Anarchists, whose beliefs are best explained via a direct quote: “In terms of morals there is no such thing as a ‘state’. Just men. Individuals. Each responsible for his own acts. I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free, because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything that I do.”

  • A few interesting characters, especially Manuel, the Professor, and Mike.

The not so good

  • The core political ideas, including how these colonists on the moon all manage to establish a lovely libertarian society, feel vastly simplified and utterly unrealistic. It feels like the kind of naïve narrative you get about someone pitching an ideal communist society: the ideas sound good in theory, but fall apart horribly in practice.

  • The treatment of women in this story is… not great. In theory, they have lots of power in this society, but in the actual story, the women spend most of their time as comfort / pleasure objects for the men. The vast majority of the characters are men, and when the one woman in the story of any consequence, Wyoming, does end up in a scene, most of the time is spent telling us about how pretty she is, or how nice of a body she has, or how she’s passionately kissing the men in the story. Also, the idea that in a penal colony, where the ratio of men to women is 2:1, that libertarian ideals would lead to women having all the power and no sexual abuse or rape is just… Nonsense.

Rating: 4 stars