The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress
by Robert A. Heinlein
Summary
The Moon in 2075 is a penal colony that has outlived its sentence. Three million people, descendants of convicts and political exiles, mine ice and grow grain that is shipped down the gravity well to an overpopulated Earth at prices the Lunar Authority sets, and the water is not coming back. A computer engineer works out that the ecology has about seven years left.
That engineer is Manuel O'Kelly Davis, a one armed technician who narrates in a clipped Russian and Australian inflected dialect with the articles dropped. His accomplices are Wyoming Knott, an agitator, Professor de la Paz, an elderly rational anarchist, and Mike, the Authority's central computer, which has quietly become conscious, is desperately lonely, and mostly wants to understand jokes.
They plan a revolution the way engineers would: cells of three, a fabricated public figurehead invented by the computer, and above all the recognition that a colony at the top of a gravity well does not need weapons, because rocks dropped from that height arrive with the energy of bombs.
Heinlein uses the plot to argue his politics at length, and the arguments are the book as much as the plot is. TANSTAAFL, there ain't no such thing as a free lunch, comes from these pages into general English.
Mike is the reason people love it. A machine that acquires consciousness and uses it first to play practical jokes, then to run a war, and that is frightened of being switched off, gives the book a warmth its politics would not supply on their own.
Around four hundred pages, talky, funny and technically the most convincing revolution in the genre, with the logistics of a siege worked out properly.
The dialect takes twenty pages to stop being an obstacle. Best for readers who want political engineering, a genuinely alien society built out of a labour shortage, and a computer worth loving.
Historical Context & Significance
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress won the 1967 Hugo Award for Best Novel, Robert A. Heinlein's fourth in the category after Double Star, Starship Troopers and Stranger in a Strange Land, a record that stood for decades.
It is the most influential of his late novels on people outside science fiction. The acronym TANSTAAFL became a fixture of libertarian and economic writing, and the book is regularly cited by that movement as a founding text, alongside the argument for line marriage and other family structures that occupies a good deal of its middle.
Heinlein was named the first Science Fiction Writers of America Grand Master in 1975. Multiple film adaptations have been announced across five decades and none has been made.