A lot of classic science fiction falls flat for me and doesn't stand up to the test of time, but this was excellent and exceeded my expectations. In fact, in terms of pure science fiction this might be the best book I've ever read. (I don't count books like '1984' or 'Slaughterhouse Five' as pure sci fi even though they technically fall into that category.) I really liked Heinlein's extended parallel of the American Revolution (and in a smaller context, the foundation of Australia) as the basis for a story detailing the moon's inhabitants wanting to govern themselves. Really well done in almost every regard.

Fantastic! I won't be able to do this book justice in a review, but it really is one of the best I've ever read.

The language is brilliant and makes you feel that you really are living on the moon. The Loonies are interesting and the plot kept me completely absorbed and desperate to hear what happened next throughout.

One of the best revolutions I've ever had the pleasure to read. Highly recommended!

This is a classic SF story of the moon fighting for its independence from Earth, with a lot of parallels to the American Revolution. Heinlein has a political conversation with himself here, definitely coming down on the side of Libertarianism, but also acknowledges & points out the holes in his arguments himself. I've read some rants about Heinlein pushing his politics & I disagree with them. I think he's doing more questioning than pushing & that leads to some fun with the characters, especially Prof.

Prof is the Heinlein wise elder character while Manny is the middle aged incarnation. Hazel (who shows up as the grandmother in The Rolling Stones) is the youthful, female version. Yes, Heinlein only has 1 main character, he just changes age & sex to suit the situation. I don't consider this a horrible flaw in his books, though. They're more situational, so a steady character actually helps them out.

Prof has a wonderful political philosophy. He's a Rational Anarchist. Actually, that seems to pretty much be his take on life & I dare say it's more honest than most. He'll accept any laws you think you need & obey those he can, when he can, otherwise ignore them, but will pay up if caught. (Come to think of it, that's pretty much how I go through life.) His remarks to the new Lunar Congress on how to pay for government & what laws to make are well worth thinking about & certainly does point out the perennial problem they all have. One suggestion was they start by making laws of what the government could never do. Another was a house devoted to repealing poor laws.

Stu's observations on governing were more amusing. He wants to name Prof king because that would protect people from their biggest enemy, themselves. How true! The woman with the list of proscribed items in the early Congress is a perfect example. Anyone with half a brain can't help but make the comparisons to our own society & the creeping repressiveness as we democratically vote away our rights.

Heinlein points out another fallacy in government, one that he never explicitly states: What works for a small group often won't for a large one & that needs change over time. He makes this argument as a thread throughout the book: Manny's reflections from the future when Luna is much more populated & his other comments on its early days. The justice system of Terra versus that of Luna of Manny's time. It's important to note that Heinlein offers up no concrete answers, just a lot of questions, & he is pointing them out through a first person narrator. Manny is fairly reliable, but he's human & thus comfortable in the society he knows. There are multiple examples of how poorly this fits others - many of whom wind up paying the ultimate penalty.

The language of the book is notable. Sentences are clipped with a lot of polyglot slang & - possibly most important - he popularized the word n  tanstaafln: "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch". The link is to the Wikipedia article on it. I wish people would use & think of it more.

Racial, religious, & national slang names are commonly used & are now considered politically incorrect, but they are used in such a way that no prejudice can possibly be attached. The moon is such a mix that such designations are merely descriptive. Marriage is another institution that receives a thorough cleansing of preconceptions & homosexuality is also briefly addressed. IOW, Heinlein has a lot of fun with Civil Rights. Since this book was originally published in 1966, that's not surprising, especially given his views on the matter, but this book was well before he almost died & he hasn't gone overboard yet.

The Downside

Heinlein attempted to give women a bigger role, but they were just homemakers in too many ways. Still, he deserves a nod for trying pretty hard.

The story is quite dated as far as technology goes, but that didn't hurt it much. There are tape recorders, wall phones, & computer punch cards, but the overall experience of the moon is well done. Mike, the self-aware computer is fun, too. Not particularly realistic, but enjoyable & played his part well.

Read by Lloyd James, downloaded from my public library. James does Manny with a horrible accent, but I lived with it, although the teary Manny voice is even worse. I liked Mike's & the rest are pretty good except Stu. He had such a thick French accent that I couldn't understand him sometimes, especially when he's pronouncing Russian or other languages. This is definitely a case of the reader acting too much. Worse, he pronounces some words & names in ways I wouldn't. He pronounces 'Prof' as 'Proof'. Yuck.

All in all, it's a must-read for anyone exploring SF. It is a classic & is a hell of a lot of fun, but gives plenty of food for thought, too. Just what an SF classic is supposed to do.
Wikipedia has a so-so write up on it here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moon...

This gets 4 stars only because of the reader. Otherwise, as I point out in my review of the paperback, it's a 5 star read.

I listened to the audio, narrated by Lloyd James, and thoroughly enjoyed it. Lloyd James brought this story to life. His voice for Manuel was perfect and he gave each character a personality.

I thoroughly enjoyed this sci-fi retelling of the American Revolution featuring an AI sentient computer, rocks, the harsh environment of the Moon and some interesting look at a new civilization that has morphed into something the Earth never thought it would.

Humorous and entertaining. This isn't a deep book. The plot is obvious but it's so well narrated and humorously entertaining that the lack of tension isn't an issue (or it wasn't for me).

I will miss Mike.

It didn’t take me long to understand why this book received such acclaim and is still regarded as a classic. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is an emblem of political science fiction. Robert Heinlein manages to take the idea of a penal colony on the moon and turn it into a romantic story of political revolution. This is an idea that has been explored repeatedly since this novel was published, but those stories almost all owe a debt to this one.

Manuel/Manny/Man O’Kelly-Davis is a computer repair technician. He was born on Luna to transported parents. He’s also the only person, Loonie or Terran, who knows that the central lunar computer is sentient. He calls it Mike. And along with an old exiled professor and a political firebrand from Hong Kong Luna called Wyoming, Mike and Manuel plan and launch a revolution against the Terran-controlled Lunar Authority that runs their lives.

Manuel isn’t actually all that interested in revolting, at least not at first. (Truthfully he probably gets into it because he wants to “bundle” with Wyoming, and he knows the Prof.) He is a self-described apolitical, like, he tells us, most Loonies. (We could have a conversation about unreliable narrators and whether Manuel tells us the truth. Frankly, though, I don’t think Heinlein was interested in that level of deconstructionism. It would have gotten in the way of his fantasy.) Initially, Manuel is happy enough with the status quo: when Mike breaks, or just tries something it thinks is a joke, Manuel gets called in to fix it, and gets paid to do so. Life is actually pretty good.

But it’s all an illusion, because everyone is going to starve and die in seven years unless they take over the joint! Or at least, that’s what Mike tells them. And Mike wouldn’t lie to them just because he thinks it’s funny, would he? Mike totally isn’t into pull practical jokes … oh, shit.

The “character” of Mike is my favourite thing about The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Heinlein has written here one of the earliest representations of classical strong AI (this predates HAL 9000 by a couple of years). Yet this book is decidedly not about AI in the sense that cyberpunk and Singularity fiction focuses on AI. Mike is merely a plot device, as well as part of Heinlein’s extended political metaphor. However, the fact that Heinlein relies on the abilities of a networked central computer to make the lunar revolution successful probably says a lot about the extent to which he viewed such a revolution as possible in contemporary terms. As Manuel reflects at one point, Mike is their ace in the hole: a shadowy, unseen figure whose presence is nevertheless always felt. Without Mike, everyone would be out of luck.

Mike evolves throughout the story too, as portrayed through its increasingly adept grasp of language, tone, and voice. Some of this evolution is directed by Manuel, but much of it is an organic consequence of Mike’s role in the revolution and its portrayal of “Adam Selene.” Maybe it’s my background with Singularity fiction, but I kept waiting for Mike to turn on our poor revolutionaries.

It’s important to remember, too, that this book was written before we ever visited the Moon. We had some grainy pictures, and we had managed a couple of low-Earth orbits and a spacewalk—and most of that was courtesy the Soviets. (Although the Soviet-inspired dialect that the Loonies use and other Soviet influences on the setting provide a convenient way to allude to revolutionary Russia, I can’t help but feel like Heinlein is also reflecting the zeitgeist. Up until the end of the 1960s, it must have felt like the Russians were dominating the Space Race, and Heinlein’s future reflects that.) But we didn’t really know what it was like to travel through space, much less live in it.

Heinlein makes much of the idea that the 1/6th-g gravity of the moon means we couldn’t live there long before permanently adapting to it, preventing us from returning to Earth. Turns out we can live in microgravity for at least a year without permanent ill effects (though one must convalesce and rebuild muscle after coming back). But Heinlein didn’t know that. Interestingly, a great deal of Luna’s economy revolves around the harvesting of ice, and in that respect Heinlein was a little prescient: the presence of ice, while proposed and perhaps suspected in his time, has only been confirmed much more recently.

So working within the bounds of what he knew at the time, and some speculation, Heinlein creates a fascinating vision for what a lunar colony might be like. Although he employs technology like laser guns, he also invokes more realistic—and, in my opinion, more frightening—weapons, such as using rocks accelerated down Earth’s gravity well as ballistic missiles. Heinlein shows that science is often cooler than science fiction.

Are there uncomfortable libertarian politics that threaten to overwhelm the story? Yes. It took me most of a week to read this book, despite it not being very long, because it is on the dry side. Between Manuel, the Prof, and Wyoming, we get enough political theory sandwiched between the action to fill a slim textbook. Regardless, I soldiered on, because I wanted to know where we ended up. After the revolution succeeded, would heads roll?

Similar to his politics, Heinlein’s portrayal of gender roles is dubious at best. Though women like Wyoming, or Manuel’s senior wife, Mimi, are presented as capable and having agency, they are nevertheless always subject to the male gaze. Heinlein explores alternatives to conventional marriage—namely, polyandrous arrangements like the idea of the line marriage Manuel is involved in—and depicts slightly different sexual mores. Yet any credit he might deserve for such things is diminished by the fact that his particular brand of 1960s sexual liberation is little more than a smokescreen for male fantasies of women as sexual objects. Heinlein tries to explain that the imbalance of genders in lunar society means women have the “power” to choose men. In actuality, this means women are always presented in the novel as objects of sexual desire who frustrate or reward men capriciously. I’m trying and failing to come up with a woman character who isn’t defined somehow by a relationship to a man—Hazel comes close, but ultimately gets pigeonholed into being a sexual object for Slim as well as the “mother” figure to the Baker Street Irregulars. But no, there are no women judges, no women politicians, nothing like that.

So, ultimately, Heinlein’s diverting sexual politics here just go to show that, when you get right down to it, you can have all the weird gender stuff you want, but it doesn’t matter if you forget that women are people too. The default in this book is still very much “heterosexual male,” and that’s what makes it problematic.

With these two things in mind, I can see why some don’t enjoy The Moon is a Harsh Mistress at all, and I didn’t enjoy it unreservedly. Rather, I appreciate Heinlein’s artistry and skill at science fiction as a setting and as a vehicle for political storytelling (even if I find the actual politics somewhat strange). There’s a curious mixture of intelligence and romance here, so it’s capable of grabbing at both head and heart. The tension between these two modes, however, results in a story that vacillates most disharmoniously even as it impresses with the scope of its ambition.

n  n

I've read this several times over the years; this was the first time on audio. Pretty decent job by the narrator.

I have two audio critics: minor one is that Manny, our 1st person POV calls his compatriot Professor de la Paz, "Prof" (and I'm pretty sure that is how it was spelled in the text). In my head, that has always been "Proff" rhymes with "off". Now that I know a little Spanish, it might be "Proaf" rhymes with "oaf" or "loaf".
Of course, the audio narrator says "Proof". Oof.

The major critique is Stu, from Earth. I don't recall that he was supposed to have a French accent, but he does. On the one hand, it makes him seem more like his Revolutionary model, Lafayette. On the other hand, he doesn't sound right in my head.
=====
I read this in 2020/2021 for pleasure, and because it was available from my audio library. Totally forgot I was supposed to be on the lookout for misogynistic elements, so I didn't see them.

...that is a terrible note to wrap on, but I am late for work so I'll amplify that thought shortly.

My favorite Heinlein novel - a great revolution story, a great AI story, and a great Hard Sci-Fi, if the science in question is political.

What I learned from this book:
1. History bends and melts over time.
2. The first AI we meet might not be intentional.
3. Throwing rocks can get serious over interplanetary distances.
4. There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.

DNFed it at 55 % or so. I can't believe that this difficult to read and difficult to follow story is so highly rated on Goodreads.

The story is so painstakingly revealed, yet there are more questions than answers. The coup prepared by the oppressed moon dwellers seems to take forever.

Each successful book has its own audience, or should I say, readership. Maybe only the hardcore sci-fi crowd rated this beast of a book.

Maybe the usual romance reading housewives had a hand in rating this book 4 or 5 stars, but I can't see this happening. I'm amazed that I lasted that long.

TANSTAAFL = There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.

My three favorite books of all time are (in no order) Heart of Darkness, The Dispossessed, and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.

When I first read this years ago I loved it, I could not put it down. As Stranger in a Strange Land was a Robert A. Heinlein vehicle for theology, so is Moon is a Harsh Mistress to ideology. And just as The Fountainhead is the better, though less epic, of the pair with Atlas Shrugged, so is Moon is a Harsh Mistress, the more focused and simple of the two, better than Stranger in a Strange Land. I liked the setting, the use of libertarian principles and of course the brilliant work of the Grandmaster himself.

This is a virtuoso science fiction futuristic re-telling of the American Revolution. Told from the first person recollection of a computer technician (with thick Russian accent) and of the birth and progress of the Lunar independence.

The Moon (Luna to it’s residents – who call themselves Loonies) has been a penal colony for decades. It is the perfect prison, get outside the underground warrens and beyond the air locks and you’re on the moon. Without a pressure suit, you’re dead. There are very little rules and no real laws, so a hardscrabble anarchy has created a loose but tough and resilient populace who want freedom.

Certainly this libertarian paradise could have become an anarchistic hell, but in Heinlein’s hard loving hands, his creation is the Free State of Luna. This story tracks with the American Revolution with unfair and distant landowners, inept and uncaring provisional governors (the warden) and even a declaration of independence on the fourth of July. Students of revolutionary movements will also see an allegory for “throwing rocks” as a statement about the earliest stages of discontent and reaction.

First published in 1966, this was written at the zenith of his considerable powers and stands as a true classic of the genre. I just re-read this (one the very few books that I have read more than once) and may re-read it again – it’s that good.

** 2018 addendum - it is a testament to great literature that a reader recalls the work years later and this is a book about which I frequently think. A friend commented about Heinlein books and I realized as we talked that when I think about Heinlein, my mind automatically defaults to this book. When I read SF I project this on that book and I wonder if that author read and was inspired. This is on my short list of all-time favorites and I think this should be on a very short list of greatest SF books of all time.

*** 2021 reread

Of the hundreds of books I’ve read (as I type this in January 2021 over 1700) I have listed eight as my all time favorites: Heart of Darkness, Dune, The Dispossessed, Forever War, American Gods, Neuromancer, Breakfast of Champions – and Heinlein’s magnificent The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.

This may be my favorite.

I like science fiction. I like Heinlein’s writing. I also like history and political science and ideology. RAH has combined all this into a year 2076 retelling of the American Revolution except from the perspective of the Free State of Luna and of their winning independence from the tyranny of Earth.

Central to this story is also a computer that developed consciousness, and in 1966 the idea of an AI was state of the market SF.

On every page is Heinlein’s homely personality and his affinity for characterization and dialogue. Modern readers may see this writer (born more than a hundred years ago in 1907) as sexist or racist, but his ideas were socially progressive for his time and he explores themes of sexuality, family, and inclusiveness. His description of open marriages, of multiple partner relationships, and of a line marriage – where husbands and wives can be opted in and can last hundreds of years, was thought provoking.

*** 2023 reread -

I LOVE this book. On a very short list of my favorite books of all time. You know it’s a book for you when you smile just reading, like a visit from a very close friend.

This time around I played close attention to the wonderful characters and their interactions revolving around the revolution of the Free State of Luna. Manny O’Kelly, Wyoh Knott (but don’t call her Why Not) and Professor de la Paz are the central - human - players in this magnificent drama that has it all - action, political and legal thrills, romance, humor, love, death and a very early AI presence in Mycroft Holmes.

In the past I have been an apologist for Heinlein, responding to critics spoiling his work as racist or sexist with admonitions that he was actually very progressive for his time. I now want to point out how very progressive this was, with a population of Luna that is not only tolerant but welcoming of just about anything that works. Heinlein’s description of line and clan marriages and poking fun of bigots in North America was some of the best scenes in the book.

Heinlein’s championing of libertarian ideals was also again very fun to read. Yes, I know, it’s a rough justice and a due process quagmire but it’s science fiction, have some fun.

Brilliant.

Perhaps my all-time favourite Heinlein, mature and sharp-witted, with a wonderful sense of justice and tension. Certainly no Heinlein book after this one was better.

(Note: it's full of 1960s misogyny, sadly)

$1.99 Kindle sale, May 3, 2020. Robert Heinlein's books too often don't age well, but this one is one of my favorites and is still a fascinating SF novel, if you like hard SF. This one won the Hugo Award (and was nominated for the Nebula) back in 1966.

It's the story of a human colony on the Moon, which Earth has used as a penal colony as well as a source of wheat. The main character, Manuel or "Mannie," is a computer technician who discovers that the Moon's master computer has become sentient and even has begun developing a sense of humor (it's pretty juvenile at first, but grows in sophistication). Mannie calls the computer "Mike" (a tribute to Sherlock Holmes' brother Mycroft).

The "Loonies" who live on the Moon begin to realize that their society will break down completely if they keep sending food and supplies to Earth, so they decide to declare their independence (appropriately, in 2076). Mike the self-aware computer becomes a key component of their plans and the war against Earth.

Heinlein developed an interesting (if a little dated after 50+ years) lunar society here. But Mike is a great character, and ahead of its time. It's definitely worth the read if you like older, hard SF.

Robert Heinlein’s works have not aged very well, and reading this book almost 60 years after it was written (1966) can quickly offend any modern sensibilities (as  John Scalzi put it once, “[…] he is a product of his time, of course, and that his time is not ours”), especially when it comes to sexism. The depiction of women, their roles and their worth, the source of their empowerment and contrasts between them and male characters are sufficiently eyeroll-inducing to strain even the strongest eye muscles. So I feel like I’m supposed to dislike it.

(While I’m at it, it’s clear that Heinlein doesn’t actually dislike women. He’s just unfortunately assigns pretty reductionist roles to them, despite presenting that as a bit progressive. It’s very jarring, though.)

But. But but but. I really *don’t* dislike it at all, even when cringing periodically. I can and do disagree with quite a few things in it, but I’m still fascinated by interesting worldbuilding, concepts — and, most delightfully, the language.

This story is written so well in Slavic-ish accent, and yet it was subtle enough for me to not fully realize it for the first few pages. Not a single occurrence of that silly definite article “the” (seriously, it’s just word filler, really) in Mannie’s speech, and very efficient economy of largely useless words, if you think about it, as well as skipping pronouns where you don’t actually need them for context. I love this sentence to bits, really: “But matters whether you get answer in microsecond rather than millisecond as long as correct?” Sounds right, love it.

n

The story is set on the Moon - Luna - where the “native” population is descended from convicts as it served as Earth’s penal colony — like what Britain did in Australia. There’s a mixture of Anglo-American and Russian language and culture, and we know of Chinese colonies as well. Luna is a colony world, made to be exploited by the Earth powers, drained of resources, without the current and ex-convict population having much say in the affairs there. And the place is a “harsh mistress” indeed, with people living in underground tunnels, paying for air (a hot commodity on an airless world) and adjusted to low gravity to the point where they really cannot leave the place even if they wanted to. And this world develops its own distinct culture — supposed power of women from their scarcity resulting in respectability of catcalling (“supposed” because really, that power does not exist besides being wives, mothers, prostitutes and pretty set decorations - and as more female children are born, the scarcity of women will disappear, taking the only bargaining chip with it), line marriages (which I found to be a pretty fascinating idea), the emphasis on self-sufficiency and mistrust of the government, vigilante justice as a norm, etc. I suppose this to a point may be a libertarian anarchist paradise*, just as Le Guin’s The Dispossessed can be viewed by some as a treatise on communal anarchism.

n  * “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.”

“I will accept any rules that you feel necessary to your freedom. 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 I do.”

“Comrades, I beg you – do not resort to compulsory taxation. 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.” n

n

Not liking the economic exploitation by the Lunar Authority, a small band of our characters aided by a supercomputer AI that likes to play games carry out a revolution while we learn the principle of TANSTAAFL (“there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch”). Our computer AI “Mike” makes this step-by-step revolution against the more powerful foe easy and the outcome inevitable, so the fun of the story lies not in danger of doubts about the outcome but in seeing Heinlein develop his libertarian society, self-reliance and interesting family structures ideas, regardless whether you happen to agree or disagree with him. It reminds me (although with significantly less impact, admittedly) of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed as a vehicle to portray ideas about a particular ideology of a society different from our own, and utopian in the way that is unlikely to really work anywhere but the book it’s set in.

n  “Thing that got me was not her list of things she hated, since she was obviously crazy as a Cyborg, but fact that always somebody agreed with her prohibitions. Must be a yearning deep in human heart to stop other people from doing as they please. Rules, laws — always for other fellow. A murky part of us, something we had before we came down out of trees, and failed to shuck when we stood up. Because not one of those people said: "Please pass this so that I won't be able to do something I know I should stop." Nyet, tovarishchee, was always something they hated to see neighbors doing. Stop them "for their own good" — not because speaker claimed to be harmed by it.” n

It’s a rules book of a revolution that can only succeed when you have a secret supercomputer running things, so take that with a grain of salt, you future Lunar dissidents. Political meetings, propaganda, sleeper cells, subtle political manipulation by a few people in charge. It’s exposition run wild, but that’s the entire point - although all the “talk-talk” (to borrow Lunar slang) is funny given how much he rattles against that in the book. Also, why don’t we just throw some rocks at our enemies? That works.

It’s a book of exposition written in the ideology of decades past, with enough cringing and eye rolling to strain my eye muscles — and yet something about it remains fascinating to me. Sometimes it surprised me to see what I don’t dislike. Oh well…

3 stars.

——————

Also posted on my blog.