“As it says in Bible, God fights on side of heaviest artillery.”
One day in tenth grade, I walked into the chemistry classroom to find the floor littered with a dozen or so moving boxes overflowing with books. My chemistry teacher, with whom I shared a solid rapport, was getting married. His enormous sci-fi collection was not going to survive the move to the new house. He told me that if any of them were not claimed by his students over the next few days that they would be donated. Oh, what a glorious week. The first day, I picked through and selected a handful of titles by authors whose names I recognized—Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick, Ray Bradbury. At that point in my life, I had only read a few bona fide classics, having not yet quite comprehended that old things could be as good (often better) than new things. I didn’t have the context or experience to pick through the boxes with much discernment, but he pushed a few of his favorites into my hands.
It turns out that even then our society was sliding into a technological malaise wherein words on a page cease to hold any magic for the screen-addicted reader. That is to say, approximately two other people who passed through the chemistry classroom took any of the books with them. On the other hand, I spent several nights looking up authors and titles online and creating space in my room, then several free periods poring over those cardboard boxes. And each day that went by without others taking them, I took more. To this day, some ten years later, I still have unread books from his collection on my shelf. Sometimes, when I think of this moment in my life, I wish I could go back now and pick through them again. His collection was a smorgasbord of classics. And though he gave so many of them to me, I’m sure he donated just as many to the library or Goodwill. I also wouldn’t mind catching up with him.
Anyway, one of the books from his collection—can’t recall whether it was enthusiastically thrust upon me or if I dug it up from the bottom of a box—was Robert A. Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. The book, written during Heinlein’s most successful critical stretch, features a splendid sci-fi world in its own right, but doubles as a platform for the author to elucidate his libertarian belief system. In some respects, he’s subtle about imbuing his tale with ideology; but in others, it is clear that he wrote the book with the specific goal of doing so. It’s rare for an author to convincingly write about something they’re not personally invested in, so I have no problem with Heinlein using a story as an avenue to explore his personal beliefs—that ensures the writing is authentic and enhances its effectiveness. I also happen to think story is often the most effective way to internalize such things.
Reading The Moon is a Harsh Mistress as a teenager, prior to really understanding the basic beliefs of any political ideology, let alone what their “ideal states” were, I enjoyed the sci-fi elements of the story without really gleaning the underlying ideological points. I certainly understood the push for independence, framed as it is as an echo of the formation of the United States. But some of the more exotic outcroppings of such a staunchly individualistic worldview didn’t quite make sense to me. But reading it with the clarity of vision of a mid-20s desk jockey (meaning I’m still pretty dumb but not quite as dumb as I was at sixteen), I appreciate some of its finer points, and it even provided several opportunties for legitimate introspection.
Considered a classic by many and winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novel, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress tells the story of a handful of lunar colonists who launch a revolution against the distant authority on Earth in an attempt to free their planet from the shackles of a lecherous government. Written several years prior to man setting foot on the moon in real life, Heinlein’s story takes place in a future universe where mankind has begun shipping its criminals and political outcasts there so that the rest of the docile population can live under the peaceful tyranny of an authoritarian government. The “Loonies,” as the residents of Luna are called, live in underground cities and send regular shipments of hydroponic wheat back to Terra. Their forced trade with the Authority is strictly controlled in order to keep them impoverished—“not wealthy, not weeping.” There’s only a small physical government presence on the moon, led by the Warden, but aside from the regulation of commerce, the Loonies are mostly left to their own devices. It is within this self-regulating culture that Heinlein’s revolution is conceived by an aged professor, a computer technician, and a spitfire political agitator. Oh, and a sentient computer named Mycroft who is described as “the weirdest mixture of unsophisticated baby and wise old man.”
You! You’re a wheat farmer—going broke. Do you know how much a Hindu housewife pays for a kilo of flour made from your wheat? How much a tonne of your wheat fetches in Bombay? How little it costs the Authority to get it from catapult head to Indian Ocean? Downhill all the way! Just solid-fuel retros to brake it—and where do those come from? Right here! And what do you get in return? A few shiploads of fancy goods, owned by the Authority and priced high because it’s importado. Importado, importado!—I never touch importado! If we don’t make it in Hong Kong, I don’t use it. What else do you get for wheat? The privilege of selling Lunar ice to Lunar Authority, buying it back as washing water, then giving it to the Authority—then buying it back a second time as flushing water—then giving it again to the Authority with valuable solids added—then buying it a third time at still higher price for farming—then you sell that wheat to the Authority at their price—and buy power from the Authority to grow it, again at their price! Lunar power—not one kilowatt up from Terra. It comes from Lunar ice and Lunar steel, or sunshine spilled on Luna’s soil—all put together by loonies! Oh, you rockheads, you deserve to starve!
“I’m glad I joined. What have I joined?” says Manuel Garcia O’Kelly-Davis when he unwittingly enlists himself in the conspiracy to overthrow the government. Brought into the fold via smooch by Wyoming Knott—which, according to Mannie, is a more definite experience than being married to your run-of-the-mill woman—Mannie does not see himself as a revolutionary. He’s a computer technician, one of the best, in fact, due to his series of electromechanical prosthetic arms that allow him to perform precision work. The novel begins with Mannie visiting Mike, a Frankenstiein computer system that was gradually built into such a sophisticated blend of memory banks, hardware components, and neural nets that he became essentially conscious (though Mannie debates whether Mike is alive or not several times).
It is here that Heinlein employs his largest contrivance. Mike is hooked up to virtually every electronic system on Luna. He can control the air supply in the Warden’s bedroom, listen to all phones, and process information in milliseconds—and he can do all this while holding dozens of conversations simultaneously. Heinlein smartly introduces us to Mike using humor, literally. Before Mannie has even rigged up Mike’s voice box, Mannie spends time explaining to Mike how some jokes are always funny, while others are only funny the first time—for example, Mannie was brought in to take a look at Mike’s innards because Mike had caused the Authority to pay a low-level employee ten billion dollars. It was Mike attempting a joke, and Manny tells him it was a good one, but of the variety that is only funny once. The two develop a special relationship, and by virtue of being Mike’s first and only friend, Mannie begins the story with a huge tactical advantage over his eventual adversaries.
Once Mannie’s secret friend becomes known to Wyoming and Professor Benardo de la Paz—the true revolutionaries—things quickly gain steam, accelerated by a deadly encounter with Authority forces at a secret anti-Authority meeting. Prof describes himself as a rational anarchist, while Wyoming is more emotionally driven, having been damaged by radiation as a young girl due to government ineptitude and lack of humanity. With the realization of how much of a leg up Mike’s extreme capabilities give them, the trio hatch a plan for Luna’s freedom.
A rational anarchist believes that concepts such as ‘state’ and ‘society’ and ‘government’ have no existence save as physically exemplified in the acts of self-responsible individuals. He believes that it is impossible to shift blame, share blame, distribute blame… as blame, guilt, responsibility are matters taking place inside human beings singly and nowhere else. But being rational, he knows that not all individuals hold his evaluations, so he tries to live perfectly in an imperfect world… aware that his effort will be less than perfect yet undismayed by self-knowledge of self failure.
One of the strengths of Harsh Mistress is that Heinlein does a really solid job of making the future world feel lived-in. Ice mines, pressure suits, low-gravity; the utilization of Russian slang and Mannie’s interestingly economical use of the English language; the exotic family arrangements that have developed on the moon where there is a 2-to-1 ratio of men to women. Heinlein only occasionally elaborates on these things. Instead, he includes enough repeated references that you come to understand the lay of the land by reading about them in different contexts. From the perspective of a literary snob, maybe it’s a little simplistic. But it’s adequate to make the moon feel like a dangerous yet alluring frontier.
As I mentioned, though, the science-fiction elements are of secondary import. Heinlein’s focus is on making a case for a radical political ideology that is foreign to the average reader. He does this by making Luna a largely self-governing society that has aligned themselves with the notion of individual liberty. The looming presence of the Authority must be dealt with, of course, but in the trenches of everyday relations society functions without the need for invasive laws, regulations, and governance. In one early scene, Mannie finds himself pulled into a dispute between a Terran tourist and some teenagers, serving as impromptu judge in order to gauge the intent of the man who was unfamiliar with Luna’s norms. As a respected member of the community, Mannie’s reputation allows his fellow citizens to have confidence in his judgement. No law dictates what the man did wrong, but even he agrees that his sentence is just once a jury of real people judge his case. As Prof explains later, it is much harder to sentence a man to death if you must swing the sword.
At the core of the book, and the title of its third and final section, is the phrase “TANSTAAFL” which is a pronounceable acronym that means “there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.” It’s the idea that nothing is truly free—there is a price for everything. But crucially, lurking in the background, is the idea of Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand (see The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations). Allowing parties to bargain and negotiate on their own behalf during economic transactions will lead to a healthier society, so the theory goes. It encourages people to take responsibility and make something of themselves, rather than trying to glom off the system and force someone else to buy you lunch, so to speak. In a healthy society, those who can’t provide for themselves are cared for by family and compassionate neighbors, not the state.
A completely free market exists on Heinlein’s Luna, except in the case that one must exchange with the Authority. With the benefits of a free market evident to all Loonies, the idea of the government setting prices, regulating financial interactions, and even taxing citizens seems wrong. In the later stages of the revolution, when Mannie is negotiating with the Federated Nations (basically a single world government), they make a spiel about all the services they offer in exchange for the taxes they take from Luna. In each case, Mannie declares that the service is not needed—it’s either detrimental to Luna’s citizens, provides no benefit, or is done better by private industry. Why would they pay (and pay a bunch of extra overhead) for an inferior system?
There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him.
Another central idea is that the government, as an entity, is really a false idea. There does not exist a government that is not merely a collection of individuals. But in successfully convincing people that the inverse is true, and that the “government” can do things without an individual(s) making a decision, all sorts of shenanigans can go on without anyone to blame when things go off the rails.
Under what circumstances is it moral for a group to do that which is not moral for a member of that group to do alone?
But the novel isn’t totally black-and-white. Not at all. Because getting from where we are to the libertarian’s ideal state is a huge challenge. So while the ideas are dandy, putting into place the limited government that the protagonists desire requires them to rile up the moon’s population with propaganda and secretly manipulate a large number of people. Aside from the three initial conspirators, no one else knows of Mike’s existence—well, they hear and see video of a man named Adam Selene who is just Mike pretending to be a human. The party members wear hats and organize themselves into cells to minimize the chance of a single defector wrecking the whole enterprise. The revolutionary effort doesn’t quite meet the ideal of everyone thinking for themselves—and that’s the true crux. In a world ruled by hubristic sadists posing as saints, a united front is required to reverse the tide; but the only thing that should truly unite the resistance is that each of them wish not to be answerable to a faceless organization. Heinlein’s ability to present the ideals without shirking from the legitimate challenges of achieving them makes the book very enjoyable and memorable. Even if he gets around many of the obstacles by giving his underdogs a supercomputer.
I find it rather amusing and noteworthy that in today’s duopolis political climate, Heinlein’s novel is probably off-limits for readers on both sides of the aisle. It promotes things that the elephants approve and donkeys hate—limited government, personal responsibility, free markets—but also the opposite—polyamory, transgenderism. As a bonus, this book introduced me to the term “vacuum skull” to describe people who appear incapable or otherwise refuse to engage in critical thinking.
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress has some minor issues, such as an at-times uncertain narrative voice and some weak characterizations, but Heinlein’s comprehensively fleshed out future society, forward-thinking viewpoints, humor, wit, and rapid pacing allow the reader to take the author’s idiosyncrasies in stride and enjoy the story whether one agrees with the political ideology or not. By limiting the technological fantasies to relatively believable innovations that may occur in the near future, Heinlein is able to take a survey of human history and present us with a very human story of resistance. His imagined future world, where marriages last for generations, crime rates plummet in a lawless society, and a one-armed man trades jokes with a supercomputer, may have the feel of a pulpy romp, but it’s got quite a lot of meat to chew on.