The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

"Robert A Heinlein is, quite seriously, the creator of modern science fiction, in the way that Jane Austen is sometimes said to be the creator of the modern novel. Where Austen gave us the third-person viewpoint with deep penetration into the mind of a single character – which is now the overwhelming standard for all English-language fiction – Heinlein taught us how to handle the expository burden that is inherent in speculative fiction . Sci-fi and fantasy take place in a world other than our own, and it is essential to explain exactly how things differ from our familiar reality. It used to be done with expository lumps: “As you know, Dr Smith, the ergonuclear flux in the argyle drive requires a steady flow of harmonized eta rays.” But these explanations stopped things cold. Heinlein pioneered and demonstrated the method we all use today, of effortlessly dropping in details and clues that help the alert reader learn just how the world of the story differs from their own. For example: “Marcus stepped onto the slidewalk and manoeuvred up to the fast lanes – he wasn’t getting off for a long time, and he needed the 60-mile-per-hour speeds if he was going to get there in time.” No explanation of moving sidewalks. The word “slidewalk” is self-explanatory. The idea that there are lanes sliding along at 60 miles an hour does the rest. The character doesn’t notice or comment on this unusual thing, because it’s not unusual to him. He simply uses it. I first encountered Heinlein with his juveniles, and one at least rewards rereading: Citizen of the Galaxy . But the book I’m going to point you towards, which I think of as his best, is The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress . This account of a revolutionary struggle between lunar colonists – many of whom came there (or their parents did) as exiles and prisoners – and the exploitative government agency that controls their lives is, like Foundation , a working out of historical forces. But Heinlein sticks with a cast of a few main characters and, with a charmingly colloquial writing style, makes us care about them all."

"Heinlein does two kinds of books. One is political and the other is weird sex. I thought he was a political activist because I was introduced to him through The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. It compares the flawed statist world to the freedom of the anarchist, utopian moon. So it has both utopia and dystopia available to you. It puts it into the distant future and it suggests progress and people gravitating towards liberty. There’s more liberty in the future – as opposed to the Marxist idea that we’re all inevitably moving to statism. I have read his other book, where everyone has to be a soldier to vote and they fight the bugs, Starship Troopers. That one is also political. It doesn’t have the line in it, but Heinlein is famous for the quote, ‘An armed society is a polite society’– you know, people don’t spit at other people. Yes. It’s obviously a radical vision, but it has the theme that in a free society, volunteerism works. Remember, there are two kinds of science fiction. There’s the one that Asimov and Heinlein do, that is high-tech and in the future science fiction/the science of the future will make you more free. Then there is the other vision that is Brave New World, science in the service of the state, that it will make you a slave. So this is a counter to the idea that science in the hands of the state will lead to serfdom. Science in the hands of individuals will lead to freedom. I like this book because it does both – here’s the future that doesn’t work, the earth, here’s the future that does work, the moon. Similar to Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, but it’s a different venue and therefore you don’t have to read turgid tracts… It’s conservative in that the revolution on the moon takes place on 4 July 2076. I think there are many doors into modern Reagan Republican conservatism and this is a sort of a radical utopia, Atlas Shrugged kind of future. There are these people who argued, ‘Oh yeah, well, in the old days life was simpler, but now that life is more complicated the government has to run it all.’ Farmers could be free but not people who work in factories. I always thought it was a BS argument, but you heard it all the time, I remember hearing this from schoolteachers. So here was a future that was a utopian, free future, an optimistic future. I remember the Libertarian Party convention in 1980 wanted to have a science-fiction award for the person who uses science fiction to promote liberty most effectively. And there was this counter from the [Murray] Rothbard libertarian types who argued that bug-eaters have rights too. That we shouldn’t project the future as a high-tech future because some people may choose to live in caves. And I thought to myself, ‘For crying out loud! Yes of course people can live in caves if they want but that is probably not the future that most people would choose for themselves if there are other options.’"

"This is one is the most science fiction-y of all my choices. In the book, people who live on the moon are called Loonies. Their bodies have adapted to the lack of gravity and they have lighter bones. It’s basically a penal colony, because once you spend too long there, you can’t go back to Earth. This is also comes up in a book series called The Expanse . If you’re out in the asteroids too long, the gravity’s too hard on the body, and you can’t really survive. I just like the idea of the adaptation in the biology of humans to different gravities and things like that which I’m sure would happen if people were growing up or living on the moon or on Mars. In the book, it actually becomes an advantage. At some point, the moon wants to have its own independent government. It’s very much a colony, with minerals being extracted, et cetera. They can’t survive and they rebel. Then, when the Earth army sends people to attack the moon, they don’t know how to handle the 1/6 gravity, so they all get slaughtered. I also liked the book because it’s interesting about the need for autonomy and the recognition that people want to form their own governments. It’s something we should be aware of from the get-go. It’s happened again and again throughout human history and I don’t know why anyone would think it won’t happen this time. We should plan, in advance, for the moon to have its own government. Most things went back to normal, but some are still changing. We’re still taking blood samples from him routinely. We won’t know how much it’s a function of his spaceflight until we get more astronaut studies. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter For his clonal hematopoiesis, he had fewer visible mutations in his blood in space, but when he got back to Earth they were higher than before the mission. Was that just normal? Or was that because of radiation or stress? We don’t know. The immune signature seems like it mostly recovered, but did it prime the immune system in any other way? Will he be more or less likely to get infections? We just don’t know, at this point. Overall I’d say that of the genes that were changing in flight, 93% of them came back to normal, but 7% didn’t. We’re still keeping an eye on him. Yes, it was a boost but it didn’t last. As soon as he got back to Earth he got smooshed down again. I want people to come away with a sense that this is something that they can do and that they can care about. It’s your birthright, as a human being with a consciousness , to think as far ahead as you want. Usually, there is no reason to think that far ahead and you don’t have to. But it is an extraordinary exercise. You can think in a more cogent capacity about what you want to accomplish, not just as a person, but as a species. In an ecosystem, you have producers, consumers and decomposers. I try to make the case in the book that we also need guardians who will keep all of it going. Because if you don’t have anyone keeping track, all of this will go away, which I just find sad. People talk about AI and that maybe machines will come and take us over I think it’s possible. What if the machines became self-aware and maybe became guardians? What if they had a sense of duty towards life as well as inorganic life? That’s my hope, anyway. I don’t know. It depends who programmed the machines. We’ll find out. It’s a bit far in the future, but we’ll see."