Sci-fi and Heroic Fantasy discussion

This is the discussion topic for our chosen August, 2013, Classic SF/F Novel read and discussion:


The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein
(1966)

This is an old favorite that has held up very well over the years, better than most of his other adult novels, IMO. The technology is old, but the main theme is perfect for today.

I listened to it as an audio book not long ago. My review probably has some spoilers in it, so if this is your first read of the book, avoid it until you're done.
http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...

MIAHM is one of the first and great AI novels. Everybody loves Mike.

I just finished rereading The Moon is a Harsh Mistress a couple of days ago, and I found it held up really well (both my old 60's paperback copy and the story inside! :)

Award trivia: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress was originally published in 1966 as a magazine serial, the same year as Dune. Coincidentally it was also the first year of the SFWA's Nebula Award. Dune won both the Hugo and Nebula awards. TMiaHM was nominated for a Hugo Award again next year (the excuse being its first "book" publication), and this time it won.

I think this is my favorite Heinlein book.

First time reading this book I am about 80 pages in and so far I like it. The writing took a bit to get used to I notice the word the is never used among other words. Is that because it takes place in the future and language has changed slightly? Story reminds me of Total Recall with Arnie. Also Mike is a cool dude.

Alexander wrote: "The writing took a bit to get used to I notice the word the is never used among other words. Is that because it takes place in the future and language has changed slightly?..."

The narrator language does take some getting used to. I think it slowed my reading speed down quite a bit for the first couple of chapters.

I think it's just Manny's verbal style. Since he's also the narrator, it suffuses the novel. I think it's intended to show he's a straightforward, no-nonsense, uncomplicated workingman. He rarely uses the first-person pronoun "I" or "the", or much else in the way of adverbs. He's very terse and compact.

I thought the other character's speech was fairly normal, though. Prof is a bit more flowery in his speech than Wyoming (or Mike), but they seem to use "I" and "the" normally.

The Loonie language has added some new words and a few new euphemisms. A lot of loony speech seems to be peppered with Russian. That probably reflects the era. In 1966, only the US and Soviet Union had space programs, and it was pretty common to assume space's future would be either a continuation of Cold War competition or American/USSR collaboration. If writing today, Heinlein might have sprinkled in some Chinese, too, à la Firefly.

I loved the terse way that Manny spoke & sped through it. I loved the Loonie language & thought it lent a lot of veracity to the story. They would tend to share words &, while this might not have been exactly accurate, worked well to set the mood & background for me.

TANSTAAFL is the most famous acronym to come out of the book with the possible exception of Mike's name, of course (High-Optional, Logical, Multi-Evaluating Supervisor = Holmes). Wikipedia has a good article on it here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_ai...

Wikipedia's write up on this book is good, too. Don't read it until you've finished the book, though. Lots of spoilers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moon...

RAH was into politics...he worked on Upton Sinclar's campaign when he ran for governor of Calaifornia (yes, THAT Sinclar...he ran a far left campain and nearly won). Many years later RAH worked for Goldwater when he ran for prez (he helped raise money under the Gold for Goldwater banner). He supported the war in 'nam, signing a petition to the effect that ran in Analog, along with the names of 49 other SF authors (a counter petition against the war ran along side it, also signed by 50 SF authors, among them Isaac Asimov).

i will post more later.

as you can see, RAH's political ideas underwent a ratical change through the years. Upton Sinclar wrote The Jungle, a blistering commentary on capitalism (also it is one of the most misunderstood books of all time). US was running for the governor of California under the slogan "end poverty now in California". As i said, RAH worked for his election, and US just missed winning. Sinclair was very much a "were all in this together" kind of guy.

Compare to Goldwater, who famously said "extremism in defence of democracy is no vice"....now this is personal opinion on my part, but anytime someone like a Goldwater says the word "democracy" it is interchange able with the word "capitalism" .

Take a step futher, "there's no such thing as a free lunch"...it's not far from TNSTAAFL to the implication of the modern Tea Party politics, "you're on your own."

more to come

now, i am sorry to 1) get all political on this board, and 2) go all lit-crit on ya. However, my whole point in suggesting we read these 3 books together is i belive they form the backbone of RAH's outlook on the world later in life, polital and otherwise. i have much more to say, but for now i will let you chew on what i have said so far.

more later

I'd really rather not see this discussion get into current politics. I consider them a matter of faith making about as much sense as religion. Another of Heinlein's sayings was that one man's religion is another's belly laugh. While I don't think it's original to him, I wish it was accurate. Unfortunately, most people just seem to get upset about such irrational beliefs.

Heinlein was doing lots of cool things here. The new social structure of the Moon colony. The computer thing. The revolution plot. It's as full of cool bits as a fruitcake is of nuts.

Jim. i dont mean to get into politics, but I think politics are at the core of these 3 books...for example, in TMHM, the social structure we see on the moon is a libertian one, that is little to no government...as RAHs personal politics evolved he became more and more libertian...SIASL shows another side of libertian thought...libertians have never held power here in the USA (the Tea Party has some elements of libertian thought, the Republicans to a lesser extent).

I honestly dont want to start a political flame-war, but if you don't bring RAHs politics into the conversation I think you'll miss out on some of the sub-text here (i normaly dont go for the lit-crit stuff, but i belive RAH really was TRYING to say something in these three books, not just tell some damn good stories).

Politics & specific issues are fine & I agree that this book is about them, so they should be - must be - discussed. Current politics & labels are not, IMO. The Tea Party wasn't around, so have no part in the conversation. Worse, such things are completely misleading when mentioned without the proper background information.

Heinlein supported Upton Sinclair in 1934. He was in CA & saw people starving during the Great Depression. Heinlein was in his 20's then & later tried to distance himself from this. He was married to a 'flaming liberal' & was one himself at the time according to Asimov. How many of us have made huge changes from our early idealistic thinking to our mature, generally more conservative ideals? Most, I'll bet. Also, times & circumstances changed a lot over the 30 years when he was supporting Goldwater, a man who was known for sticking to his strong viewpoints, which Heinlein admires in all his books. (Right or wrong, have an opinion.)

Goldwater is often held up as an icon for conservative politics, yet he voted for the Civil Rights & the Alaska Mental Health acts which hurt him politically. He later broke with his party, vehemently opposed the religious right over abortion & gay rights way. He believed in Capitalism & opposed Communism. So did Heinlein. In the mid 60's, the Soviets invaded Czechoslovokia & Mao started his 'cultural revolution', so the Communist menace was going strong & was plain scary. People being slaughtered by the thousands might seem a tad more important than many other issues at the time.

No political party or person is an exact fit, just a matter of which high points did they support that he liked. For instance, believing in personal responsibility & noninterference or support by the gov't generally gets people labeled as Libertarians. Ayn Rand was often called such & denied it. I've been labeled one & read several books by those who say they are. I think many of their arguments are fatally flawed. Insisting we stick to the gold standard shows a lack of ability to do even simple math. Most I've read want no laws regarding prostitution, drugs, & gambling while I think some gov't oversight & taxation makes sense. Still, because I think that legalizing them is a good idea means I get stamped as a Libertarian.

So I think we should look at Heinlein's beliefs, not his political party or candidate allegiance. It just confuses the issue & raises the faith-based specter of current political faiths. Again, my opinion. I'm not a moderator of this group, so it's just that.

One of the things I liked best about this book was it showed how imperfect politics are. While Prof espouses his rational anarchy, he creates a representative gov't that goes on to ignore most of his opinions. Of course, he never tells people what he really wants, just asks them questions - questions that are really tough to answer. "How do we pay for all this?" was an interesting one.

I'm not sure but I think it shows that while being libertarian RAH wasn't dogmatic about it. He recognized the possible detrimental effect of a strong state on individual liberty, while at the same time was also aware that some problems, e.g. management of natural resources, do require a state that has power beyond the minimum.

now you guys are thinking. :)

yes, earily in life RHA was married to a liberial...later he re-married a conservative. His outlook seemed to change accordingly. im not saying they changed for good or ill, just that they changed.

Brenda wrote: "Heinlein was doing lots of cool things here. The new social structure of the Moon colony. The computer thing. The revolution plot. It's as full of cool bits as a fruitcake is of nuts."

The social structure was neat, but the 'throwing rocks' might have been my favorite part. That sort of thing was what I always liked best about Heinlein's writing, especially in his juveniles. He made physics understandable & interesting. A lot that is old hat now wasn't when he was writing them & it still stands up pretty well - very well considering we hadn't so much as a satellite in orbit when he wrote many of them.

I was born in 1959 & lived on a farm, so most of my early life was well behind technologically. For instance, we didn't get our first color TV until I was 13 & had a party line until I was 8. A lot of Heinlein's concepts were brand new & quite shiny. My boys, both around 30, liked his books, but they were also raised on a farm & while technology was starting to boom, they were almost teens before they got their first computer & cell phones became common.

How does the technology stand up for you younger folks? Does it bug you that phones were corded, computers used punch cards & such?

Spooky1947 wrote: "yes, earily in life RHA was married to a liberial...later he re-married a conservative. His outlook seemed to change accordingly. im not saying they changed for goo..."

It might be a chicken-egg thing. From what I've read, Heinlein's 2d wife certainly had a lot of influence over him, but I still think the times had more to do with his politics. There's a huge difference in the way a person thinks, their priorities, between bread lines on local corners & Cold War fears. He wasn't exactly well-to-do when he was medically discharged during the Depression, but was financially secure during the Cold War.

The world changed drastically & faster over his life. It had become much smaller. The daring barn stormers had been replaced by prosaic airlines. FDR's projects had brought electric & phones out to most rural areas. Eisenhower pushed Civil Defense & the Interstate system. It was designed to have bomb shelters built into the base every overpass. Cross country travel by car was sped up immensely. Scattered radios became pervasive TVs. Conspicuous consumption really got going. Suddenly standard brands were 'new & improved', renamed, or suddenly gone. Remember Lux soap?

I'd be surprised if such huge societal changes hadn't made him more conservative. My younger grandmother & father-in-law were about Heinlein's age. They were born in 1913, he 1907. She was born in a cold water walkup in Brooklyn before WWI. My FIL didn't have electric or plumbing on the farm in WI nor did my older grandmother when she was born 15 years earlier out on Long Island. My older grandmother died in the mid-80's, the other 2 about Y2K. They all lived to see a man walk on the moon, color TV's, & microwaves.

Each time I think about this book, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy comes into my mind. They have similar writing styles (in my mind of course). Maybe it's just because I have read the "Guide" first.
Anyway one of my favorite SF books.

The other way this book is interesting is that it falls near the hinge of Heinlein's career. Before this work were the bulk of his great juveniles. After this one (which along with STARSHIP TROOPERS makes up the turning point IMO) you get more talky, risky things like I WILL FEAR NO EVIL.

I thought his writing changed the most right after his bad brain illness (1970?) until I tried to read his very first novel For Us, the Living: A Comedy of Customs - the one that Spider Robinson helped publish after his death. My take on it is the restrictions of the juveniles & as a short story writer under Campbell were the best things that could have ever happened to me. I pretty much hate don't care much his work after 1970.

He got more & more preachy. His earlier, published work had plenty of action. To Sail Beyond the Sunset was nothing but preaching, as I recall. Or was the The Cat Who Walks Through Walls? One of those 2 was the last I managed to even skim because he got so weird with all the incest. I was plain shocked when I first read The Number of the Beast. I think that's the first one where he explicitly had a father & daughter doing it, although he came pretty close in The Door Into Summer & I Will Fear No Evil.

Makes me wonder just went on at that nudist colony he & Sturgeon belonged to. The latter did a much better job of exploring this taboo in "If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let Your Sister Marry One?", a short story.

I think you'd be hard-pressed to pigeon-hole RAH into any of today's or even yesterday's political categories. It's pretty clear from his writings and speeches throughout his life that he was generally for maximum individual liberty except where it harmed the collective good to a significant degree. He clearly recognized the suicidal effect of unbridled selfishness on the species as a whole, and took a dim view of it; one of his major points in Starship Troopers was that the people who make the decisions in a society need to be the sorts of people who can accept personal sacrifice for the common good. This desire for both individual freedom and collective responsibility for the common good led to a mix of positions on economic and social issues that were unlikely to fit neatly into any party line.

I don't think that RAH meant for the concept of TANSTAAFL to promote a "you're on your own" social agenda; rather, I think it's designed to point out that there IS no such thing as a free lunch, and that everything we have and enjoy has a cost, and so we need to take those costs into account when we are making decisions, and decide whether what we would like is something we are willing to pay for ourselves. It's easy to vote yourself benefits at others' expense, especially when you operate under the illusion that they are free. It's a different matter entirely to vote someone else benefits at your expense with full knowledge of the costs.

JD, your comments bring to mind a short story, cant rember the title, i think it was a RAH story, it was set on tax day. That day everyone sat down at a computer, work out how much they had to pay, THEN they told the goverment how much of their money when to what government programs. Some people choose to give part of their taxes to the dept. of defense...others gave to the dept. of peace...others to the space program, ect. the money so given made up that dept.s total budget for the year. im not sure RAH wrote the story, but the idea strikes me as very RAH...

If he did write it, I've never read it & I've read most. If you do figure out the story, please let me know. Sounds like fun.

ok. :)

it is a neet idea...i just wonder how many "public service" anoucments would be on radio and tv, government agencies asking for tax money...lol

Jim wrote: "If he did write it, I've never read it & I've read most. If you do figure out the story, please let me know. Sounds like fun."

I agree.

Probably as many as I get for charity & political calls, Spooky. We have our number on the do not call list & still get 5 or 6 every week. Worse, they're generally automated. You should have heard the one I got from the State Police last night. 3 different voices & volume levels. They seriously want my money but can't bother to ask personally?

Recorded calls, I lay gently on the kitchen counter so they can pitch it to the formica. If you don't want to talk to me, I don't want to talk to you.
Polls: I tell them that my opinion is so valuable, I charge for it. $10 a minute, and I take Paypal. They always go away. I live in a swing state and it is my hope that some pols will feel desperate enough some day to bite.
Unsolicited sales calls: it depends if I am feeling creative. It is always possible to shriek, "This is a HOUSE of MOURNING!" and slam the phone down. I am also reliably informed that replying to whatever they say with a whisper, "It's done. But there's blood everywhere" and then hanging up works well.
But the very best are political phone calls. I have been known to demand of the caller whether the candidate has served in the armed forces (and if not why not). And the very useful word 'transvaginalist' is a great one to use in my state, which is infested with them.

Spooky1947 wrote: "JD, your comments bring to mind a short story, cant rember the title, i think it was a RAH story, it was set on tax day. That day everyone sat down at a computer, work out how much they had to pay,..."

Crowd sourcing the government sounds like a great idea, not at all practical or workable but theoretically interesting. Might be an idea for a novel.

Romana, one thing I can be sure of...the budget to pay congress men's paychecks would be a big fat 0!!!

All the AIs want to be like Mike:

Unsupervised AI makes up some pretty funny jokes

Guess which of these are computer-generated:

An AI walks into a bar. The bartender asks, "What will you have?" The AI answers, "Nothing, I'm just Turing."

An AI says, "I like my relationships like I like my source code, open."

One AI says, "There are 2 types of AIs: those who use binary, and those who don't." The other AI says, "You told it wrong."

Not quite "funny once." Did Heinlein ever quote any of Mike's jokes?

One of the key plot events in "The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress" is when Manny recruits Stuart "Stu" LaJoie, a tourist from Earth who seems to have offended one of the local young ladies. After the informal "trial", the tourist seems intellectually curious about Loonie culture, and Manny makes the unilateral decision to let him in on the revolutionary plot. Stu agrees to become their earthside agent.

I always thought Manny's decision to recruit Stu was based on rather thin evidence, and have no idea what Stu's motivations are. It's one thing to have political viewpoint that a colony should be given self-determination; quite another to support a distant revolution that's going to starve and drop rocks on the homeland.

That's very typical of this kind of novel, however. Even of classic SF in general. Obi-wan and Luke just wander into a bar and happen to run into Han Solo, for instance. The idea is that everybody who joins the Rebellion or the revolution began at some point, possibly for quite dorky reasons (Princess Leia, hot!).

G33z3r wrote: "I always thought Manny's decision to recruit Stu was based on rather thin evidence, and have no idea what Stu's motivations are."

The problem is that he needed to fill lots of roles. He applied two common solutions: Finding the right person instantly (the Stu problem) and bundling several roles in one character (Manuel starting as mechanic and becoming foreign state minister, general and what-not).

G33z3r wrote: "The Loonie language has added some new words and a few new euphemisms. A lot of loony speech seems to be peppered with Russian. That probably reflects the era. In 1966, only the US and Soviet Union had space programs, and it was pretty common to assume space's future would be either a continuation of Cold War competition or American/USSR collaboration. If writing today, Heinlein might have sprinkled in some Chinese, too, à la Firefly."
I have a different opinion here:
It's true that there are many Russian loan words interleaved with (pronome and definite article lacking) Lunar dialect. But there are also lots of German foreign words interleaving and Germany was heavily involved in the cold war in 1966 but absolutely had no space program at all. On the other hand, Heinlein already noticed the future importance of China - with all the references to Dr. Chan, the (reluctant) bombing of Chinese cities etc. Russia wasn't important at all!

This novel delivers a world building saturated with social, political, philosophical, cultural (e.g. enforcing behaviour without laws, presenting different family schemes) and scientific concepts.
Some didn't state the test of time, e.g. cryptography algorithms switched to completely different mechanisms than Heinlein described broadly; but prime number crunching in DES algorithm was developed after he wrote this book and he couldn't have known (or extrapolated) that one.

What I really loved was Mike's character development starting from a self-aware computer via practical jokes to a lying and imitating "person". He is no evil protagonist but more a kind of artificial intelligence Pinocchio.

In summary: Nebula and Hugo Awards are well deserved, I give this amazing work 5 stars!

Andreas wrote: "On the other hand, Heinlein already noticed the future importance of China - with all the references to Dr. Chan, the (reluctant) bombing of Chinese cities etc...."

Good point. Manny also spends a lot of time with the Chinese delegates at the Earthside conference talking about the mass driver on the mountain tops. (I'm really suspect of Manny's plan for that mass driver, though! :)

I'm just getting started with this one. The conversation about this book is great...I can't wait to get into it!

There is also a nice Darwinian philosophy underlaying the whole work. Manny is highly competent, because he is descended from people who, if they were not competent, immediately died in the harsh Lunar conditions. It is hinted that the earthsiders have been made soft by their cushy life.

This has always been my favourite Heinlein, although I've always also thought the society portrayed was one of those idealized ones that only works if everyone living in it thinks enough like the author!

I just started it, and I'm still getting stuck on the cat-calling at attractive women. Was this a normal action in the 60s, or is it one of Heinlein's constructs of the Lunar society?

It was not only relatively common in the '60s, it is not at all rare in this day and age.

I don't know about that. The men whistle and break out into applause. That's a lot more than what's normal today.

To clarify: just today while out on my bicycle I was honked at by a motorcyclist on a sport bike going the opposite direction, and buzzed slowly by a guy on a Harley going the same direction. So I'm not trying to say stuff like that doesn't happen.

But it's unusual, if not altogether nonexistent, for a man introduced to me in person to behave that way. This is the line in question: "I stopped three paces away to look her up and down and whistle." Nothing like that has ever happened to me during a personal introduction. The closest I've ever experienced is a bad attempt to be subtle about "elevator eyes".

So I'm wondering if that kind of greeting was acceptable in the 60s. I'm too young to know.

Sue wrote: "I just started it, and I'm still getting stuck on the cat-calling at attractive women. Was this a normal action in the 60s, or is it one of Heinlein's constructs of the Lunar society?"

No, I don't think in-your-face wolf whistles or full body scans were considered socially acceptable male behavior in the 60's. (Though I could point to a few musical comedies that might suggest otherwise. :) Rude & crude then, rude & crude now.

By 1966, Heinlein had moved into his "free love" phase (actually anticipating popular culture in some ways.) Apparently on the moon there is a new culture of total communal sharing; I think he'll eventually explain three different formats of semi-permanent Loonie 'bundling' collectives in addition to casual hookups and brothels. But his view of the sexual revolution seems to involve frank and candid admiration and proposition of complete strangers (anticipating the internet? :)

The way he had people do it, it was supposedly polite.

Thanks. If I can get over the incongruity of that kind of behavior being passed off as polite (and part of what stood out in my mind is Wyoming's response - as if this was normal and complementary), I will laugh at what a man predicted about the empowerment of women.

Did that make sense?

It did & it is worthy of a chuckle. Still, the overall point was that women were free to enjoy their sexuality, the complete opposite of the Victorian ideal.

Jim wrote: "It did & it is worthy of a chuckle. Still, the overall point was that women were free to enjoy their sexuality, the complete opposite of the Victorian ideal."

As well as establishing something about attitudes toward sex and the status of women in Lunar society, I thought a large part the point was that cultural conventions of polite behavior and etiquette are exactly that--cultural conventions of polite behavior--and that what will be considered polite and respectful can change radically depending on the society you find yourself in. It seems to me that he chose a behavior that his audience would almost universally recognize as crude, rude, and boorish, and presented it as being a cultural norm for a polite greeting to really drive home that point.

I think you're right about that, J.D.. It does drive the point home, if it doesn't fly into a prejudice. He gets preachy about certain points until I just try to skip them. Sometimes that's due to preconceptions on my part that aren't completely rational.

I've mentioned before that his sexual attitudes, specifically incest, in his later books got to me, but it was probably a similar point just done to death. As he points out, with birth control & gene mapping, the incest taboo makes less sense. He seems to be pushing this taboo's limits in this book somewhat with the line marriages, calling his senior wife 'Mum', marrying Ludmilla back in, & that sort of thing.

His ideas on sexual conventions aren't for everyone obviously, but that's the point of freedom from them. Each to their own &, if I'm not kissing them, why should I care? Intellectually I don't, but there are some things that are incredibly basic. For instance, my mother was pretty much a single parent. I raised a daughter & had a lot of young girls around the house, so my views on incest are quite firm & not open to rational thought or any sort of decision. I wonder if it is hardwired into us to some extent. I know stallions chase their daughters away when they're about 2 years old in the wild.

During my formative years, homosexuality was considered a mental illness & socially unacceptable, unless a person had enough money, position, &/or power that the rules didn't apply. That out has always made the convention irrational, so the changes in the past few decades haven't upset me at all. If society suddenly decided incest was OK, I would be quite upset, though.