I’m at an age where things I read long ago resurface. One book that has popped above the waves I read first at 18, Robert Heinlein’s “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress”. Its.a science fiction classic.
Whenever an old book returns you’ll likely recall who you were when you first read it. I was just starting at the University of New Hampshire and had recently and barely recovered from a bout of anorexia nervosa. I weighed 108 pounds when I should have hit the scale at 130. Oh there were so many shoulds…
Heinlein’s narrator is Manuel “Mannie” Garcia O’Kelly-Davis, a one-armed computer tech with who talks in a clipped patois—half Russian, half Spanish, all Moon—which makes the whole book feel like a translation from some language that doesn’t exist yet, which is the point. Lunar society, several generations removed from the convicts who were shipped there, has drifted into its own customs: line marriages, polyandry, a code of manners built on the plain fact that women are scarce.
Mannie’s real companion, though, isn’t human. It’s Mike—HOLMES IV, Luna’s central computer, who has crossed some invisible threshold into self-awareness and discovered, in the way of the newly conscious everywhere, that he’s terribly alone. He and Mannie become friends first, conspirators second. Mike has jokes. He has doubts. He has, in his own circuited way, a soul—and Heinlein never quite lets you decide how literally to take that, which is the most quietly moving thing in the book.
Into this friendship wanders Wyoming “Wyoh” Knott, all piss and vinegar, and Professor Bernardo de la Paz, a self-declared “rational anarchist” who has clearly thought harder about the mechanics of injustice than anyone on the moon. There’s a protest which ends in bloodshed and the three of them back into a revolution—one they can only hope to win because they have a computer who can forge messages, invent public opinion, run the numbers on a war nobody sane would fight.
What follows is Heinlein at his best: building an argument disguised as a plot. TANSTAAFL—there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch—becomes both a joke and a creed. Freedom, in the novel, is never given; it’s paid for, usually by people who didn’t ask for the bill. The “grain catapult” that has always launched Luna’s tribute to Earth becomes, in the end, the only weapon they have—turning an instrument of extraction into one of leverage, which feels almost too neat a metaphor for a colony finally refusing its own usefulness.
It was the autumn of 1973. Nixon was in the White House. The Viet Nam War was spreading into Cambodia and Laos. Then, as now, nothing made sense.
So here we are. AI might destroy us. Trump declares he needs no accountability while the oligarchs laugh.
I thought Heinlein was just a fanciful libertarian nerd. I got that wrong.
Poet, Essayist, Blogger, Journalist, Memoirist, Disability Rights Advocate, Public Speaker, Professor, Syracuse University
