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The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress is a 1966 science fiction novel by Robert A. Heinlein about a lunar penal colony's revolt against rule from Earth. It received the Hugo Award for best novel.
Plot summary
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress is similar to Stranger in a Strange Land (1961) in that both describe social upheavals, and both contain a strong streak of irony. In The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, the irony is that although the lunar colony is, at the beginning of the story, theoretically a kind of prison ruled by a tyrannical Warden, in reality the Warden, other than setting price controls, seldom interferes in lunar society, which is portrayed as a kind of libertarian utopia. When the revolution succeeds, the new lunar government succumbs to its own worst instincts to regulate society to the hilt.
The novel is notable stylistically for its use of an invented Lunar dialect consisting predominantly of English words but strongly influenced by Russian grammar (cf. Nadsat slang from Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess). The Russian influence comes apparently from large number of deportees to the Moon from the Soviet Union.
The narrator is Manuel Garcia O'Kelly Davis (Mannie), a one-armed computer technician who accidentally discovers that the Lunar Authority's own computer has become self-aware. He names the computer Mike (after Mycroft Holmes, brother of Sherlock Holmes), the official name of the computer being HOLMES IV, where HOLMES stands for High Optional Logical Multi-Evaluating Supervisor.
Mike is able to simulate either a male (Mike) or a female (Michelle) sexual identity (cf. the inspiration for the Turing test), and is mainly interested in learning to understand the human sense of humor. The revolution has no chance until Mike is convinced that it would be a fun game to play, and begins helping behind the scenes.
Mannie, along with the wise Professor Bernardo de la Paz, and the beautiful rabble-rousing Wyoming Knott, form the top-level cell. The Professor has long studied Revolution - he was shipped to Luna for agitating in Peru - and is a firm believer in the three-person cell, as "more than three people can't even agree on where to eat, let alone how to plan a revolt". Wyoming, aka Wyoh, hates the Authority because she, as a young girl, was kept out on the Lunar surface during a solar storm after being shipped to Luna, almost certainly causing some of her eggs to be damaged and her first child to be born a "monster", which was immediately killed. Manny is indifferent at first, but he trusts his friends. Mike becomes the de facto Chairman, Secretary etc.
Professor Bernardo de La Paz is one of the four main characters in the novel. Sometimes called "Prof", he earns his living by tutoring people on the Moon, one of them being the novel's protagonist, Manny. De La Paz describes himself as a "Rational Anarchist" in the book. This term appears to be first used in this book. Some believe Rational Anarchism to be a form of Libertarianism. Rational Anarchism is a type of Anarchism that is often associated with and linked to anarcho-capitalism. Rational Anarchists believe that the concepts of State, Society and Government have no existence but for the “acts of self-responsible individuals". The Rational part of the term Rational Anarchist comes from the acknowledgment that other people do not believe in Rational Anarchism and/or Anarchism itself. Knowing this fact, a Rational Anarchist “tries to live perfectly in an imperfect world".
As in Stranger in a Strange Land, we have a band of social revolutionaries forming a secretive and hierarchical organization. In this respect, the revolution is more reminiscent of the Bolshevik October revolution than of the American one, and this similarity is reinforced by the Russian flavor of the dialect, and the Russian place names, such as Novy Leningrad.
Luna consists of a series of settlements, such as Luna City (apparently Western), Churchill Upper (probably British), Novy Leningrad (Soviet), and Hong Kong Luna, which is the only settlement not directly controlled by the Lunar Authority. It is economically independent and has the only hard currency, the Hong Kong Dollar. In contrast, the Authority Dollar is a currency prone to inflation as it is printed to meet the needs of bureaucrats. Colonists who have been exiled to the Moon include criminals, political exiles (especially from Soviet Union and China) and victims of ethnic purges by China during the last world war, including the Japanese, Australians, and inhabitants of (currently) Russian Far East.
As the novel opens, there is a rebel organization operating in the open, and heavily infiltrated by Authority spies. The main reason for discontent is that the Authority keeps the prices paid to hydroponic farmers artificially low, and in Authority dollars at that. Manny is thrown together with his future co-conspirators when a rebel meeting is attacked by Authority guards and people flee for their lives. The real and pressing reason for the rebellion is economic necessity: Luna is exporting so many goods to Earth, particularly grain grown by Luna's hydroponic farmers, that its resources will soon be exhausted, resulting in disaster. Earth sits at the bottom of a deep gravity well, the only feasible solution is one of engineering; a key plot point is the development of a method of shipping material to Luna that is not prohibitively expensive.
The method proposed is an "escape speed induction catapult" or mass driver, which is the way Luna already exports goods to Earth. Since escape speed is a scalar quantity not a vector quantity, the track of the mass driver could point horizontally, but do so at a height where the atmosphere is thin. The resulting design is similar in principle to the Space Pier designed by J. Storrs Hall.
However, as Prof. de la Paz tells Manny late in the book, the Earth catapult is just a political token, intended to grease the transition and give Earth governments an excuse not to crush the revolt outright, which they could easily do with a few nuclear bombs. Although the catapults will doubtless succeed at some level, the Prof. sees Luna's future as the crossroads of the Solar System, not just an economic vassal of Earth. Although the revolution succeeds in averting the pending economic disaster, the narrator decries the antilibertarian instincts of many of his fellow Loonies. ("Rules, laws — always for * other fellow.") This theme is echoed elsewhere in Heinlein's works — that real, albeit temporary, liberty is to be found among the libertarian pioneer societies out along the advancing frontier, but the regimentation and legalism that inevitably follow also bring restraints that chafe true individualists. (We learn both in the first and final page of the novel, and in the later novel The Cat Who Walks Through Walls that this is just what happens to Luna.)
Conditions in the lunar colony, and the reaction of the colonists to troops sent from Earth to enforce the Warden's edicts, have strong parallels to the situation in Boston under British military occupation in the years leading up to the American Revolution. The lunar action takes place in Mare Crisium and the novel makes accurate references to such nearby locales as Crater Peirce.
Mike, the computer, leads the revolution, adopting the persona Adam Selene. Since he controls the phone system, he can route calls between conspirators, frustrate attempts to trace calls, and simulate various characters by voice synthesis. After the Revolution he is even able to simulate Adam Selene visually for video, although as he says, "it'll take just about everything I've got." Adam is eventually "killed" during the attack by Earth forces.
In the interim elections, held in Mannie's absence, the revolutionary organization and its allies win a majority. Upon hearing this, Mannie surmises, almost certainly correctly, that the election was fixed by Mike. Democracy is rarely viewed favorably in Heinlein's works, and in this novel, there are a number of incidents and statements which deprecate the "mob rule" of democracy.
Continuing Heinlein's speculation about unorthodox social and family structures, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress introduces the idea of a line marriage. Mannie is part of a century-old line marriage; spouses are opted in by mutual consent at regular intervals so that the marriage never comes to an end. It is a very stable arrangement in which divorce is rare, as it takes a unanimous decision of all the wives to divorce a husband. Such a marriage only gets stronger as it continues, as the senior wives teach the junior wives how to run the family; it also gives financial security and ensures that the children will never be orphaned. Children marry outside of the line marriage.
The social structure of the lunar society features complete racial integration, which becomes a vehicle for social commentary when Mannie, visiting the Southern U.S., is arrested for polygamy after he innocently shows a picture of his multiracial family to reporters. He later learns that the "...range of color in Davis family was what got judge angry enough..." to have him arrested. The novel was published during the period of the American Civil Rights Movement.
Political setup on Earth and recent history
The novel indicates that Earth has experienced a nuclear world war in the past century, although no significant traces of devastation are apparent today. Probably as a result, there was a good deal of political consolidation, e.g. unification of the entire North American continent under a successor government to the United States, and political unification of South America, Europe, and Africa into fellow mega-states. On a more prominent note, the Soviet Union seems to have lost the land east of the Urals to China, and China has conquered all of East Asia, Southeast Asia, eastern Australia and New Zealand (deporting lots of unwanted people to the Moon along the way). This Chinese aggrandizement is similar to that described in Tunnel in the Sky novel. The militarily dominant nations seem to be North America and China.
While on their diplomatic trip, the characters get a little exposure to the politics on Earth. It is suggested that the Western nations, including North America, have become corrupt and authoritarian, while holding on to the vestiges of the pre-war democratic idealism in propaganda and popular culture. The Lunar Authority itself seems to be run by Westerners and is portrayed as corrupt and despotic while covering up for that with glib propaganda. China, on the other hand, is portrayed as plainly and unabashedly despotic, but probably no less technically advanced than the West. Curiously, the Soviet Union does not even come up on the radar.
Cultural influence
The book first publicized the acronym TANSTAAFL ("There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch"), and helped popularize the constructed language Loglan, which is mentioned in the story as being used for precise human-computer interaction.
The setting of the novel was re-used much later by Heinlein for his late-period novel, The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, as was the character Hazel Stone, who appeared as a minor character (literally) in the Lunar revolution, and a key character in Heinlein's earlier book, The Rolling Stones aka Space Family Stone (1952). She makes references to how oppressive the moon has become.
The character Professor Bernardo de la Paz was based on the real-life Libertarian scholar and philosopher Robert LeFevre, who was a neighbor of the Heinleins in Colorado Springs.
Other cultural references
Screenwriter Tim Minear is currently working on a screenplay based on the novel. However, as with most successful novels, the promise of a screenplay has been in the offing almost since the day of publication.
In 1974 the songwriter Jimmy Webb used the phrase as a song title although its lyric eschewed the sociological aspects of the novel. It was subsequently recorded by Joan Baez, Glen Campbell, Joe Cocker, Linda Ronstadt and many others including the songwriter himself.
External links
1966 novels | Novels by Robert A. Heinlein | Science fiction novels | Hugo Award winning works
La luna es una cruel amante | Révolte sur la Lune | עריצה היא הלבנה | La Luna è una severa maestra | Revolt mot jorden
"The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress"