The Moon is a Harsh Mistress: Book Review

I just finished reading The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, by Robert Heinlein. This author is one of the OGs of science fiction, having shaped the genre from the mid-twentieth century on, so I was very eager to read this, as it was my first book of his. This book is about a libertarian revolution on the moon. A colony that is economically linked with earth, and is politically repressed by the so-called "Authority," seeks to liberate itself from its oppressive grip. At the center of this revolution are three people and an AI computer that has chosen to take part in the revolution for its own reasons.

So, what did I think of it?

No Spoilers

I'm not going to mince words. I did not like this novel. At all. In multiple senses, I outright disliked the story: I did not like the characters, except on a shallow level. I did not like the shallow exploration of the ideas; this felt like a whole host of lost opportunities. I did not like the stakes of the story. And I did not like how the story was delivered to the reader, namely an overreliance on telling over showing.

Characters

The characters were quite shallow, all things considered, though I doubt most fans of the novel would really care all that much. It's not like the novel is supposed to be character driven in the first place. I won't spend too much time criticizing the novel on these merits. Instead, I figured I could critique the way in which Heinlein portrays one thing in particular that relates to the characters, but could also tie into the themes. It doesn't really matter, though.

Mike

Mike is the nickname given to the artificial intelligence that takes part in the revolution. I was incredibly excited to start this story, partly because of this aspect of the story. AI is not only relevant to today, but it is inherently a rich subject matter that is deep with potential for discussion and exploration. What we got was a mixed bag, ultimately, though it was mostly negative because thematically, Mike was never really explored in an extensive manner that I found to be interesting.

Mike was interesting in the beginning as a character, especially given that he was not fully emotionally developed, and had a naive understanding of how people were. This was all downstream of the fact that people did not understand his own sentience. The fact that he had a fixation on jokes was also funny and interesting. The problem was that this was all heavily frontloaded; we did not see much of this in the latter portions of the novel. I also hoped it might actually become more relevant to the plot, which did not develop in any way that I thought was interesting. I had predictions for how everything might go wrong for the rebellion in ways that could involve Mike one way or another, but Heinlein seemed unwilling to explore things in that way. This is actually tied to a much broader plot problem that I will discuss later on.

Mike as an actual thematic point falls flat because he really just functions as a convenient plot device for the rebellion. The only reason the rebellion has a chance is because of him. That is fine. But it all starts and ends there. The back of the book talks about the motivations of the AI, saying that he is taking part "for reasons of his own." This sounds ominous, and it is suggestive of further developments down the line. But beyond the mere question of plot development, the question of thematic points regarding AI—like whether AI is capable of understanding humanity's values, etc.—was left unexplored. In other science fiction stories, we have AI concluding that humanity is its own greatest threat, thus trying to establish a dictatorship to protect them. What do we have with Mike? Plot convenience. That seems to be it.

There is a part where we have one potentially interesting idea that is barely explored. Wyoh, the main female character, questions why Mike has to be considered a male. She even creates a separate cell phone contact that would automatically trigger a personality switch in Mike to make him a her, so she could talk to a female version of Mike. This was interesting and even relevant (to today), but it barely even comes up again.

This was disappointing because there was so much that could be unpacked with this. For example, we know that sexual reproduction evolved and made complex life possible. It is at least one possible condition needed for complexity because it introduces another mechanism for variation to the evolutionary process. Two parent organisms will mix their genes to create new offspring; in addition, during meiosis, there is a process called recombination, where chromosomes shuffle genes between them before they pass on to the offspring. Instead of simply relying on random mutation during cloning that happens during asexual reproduction, these factors also increase the amount of variation. Reflecting this, multicellular organisms that can asexually reproduce are exceptional, and there is usually an explanation to account for the complexity. Some can toggle back and forth between asexual cloning and sexual reproduction, and others have polyploidy.

The reason this is interesting is that it is arguably impossible for humanity, or any complex life form, to evolve without a sex distinction. But is it possible for AI to be developed without a sex distinction? What reason is there to have one at all? There is the question of whether AI, specifically general AI, could actually have consciousness. Would it have to be developed via an evolutionary process, rather than a top down process, that we see now? That would imply that sexual difference would have to be introduced. And that would ask questions about the degree of dimorphism. There is a whole host of questions worth unpacking, here.

I am not arguing that this is the exact train of thought Heinlein should have taken, I am simply giving an example of a direction that could have been taken with his book. Heinlein took the story in precisely no directions. And this is only the start of the problems.

Shallow Ideas

I already unpacked one of the key ideas that related to the characters above, but that structural decision is because I have much more to discuss in the main section on ideas. Because this is a science fiction novel, the lifeblood of this novel is the ideas. And as I mentioned, I felt like Heinlein never really unpacked the ideas to any significant degree. AI was a dud. Another dud was the idea of Tanstaafl.

TANSTAAFL

This stands for There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. It is on the back of the book, and the novel is known for popularizing the phrase. It is fundamental to the libertarian ideals that the book espouses. The basic idea is that nothing is truly free. The idea that you can have free housing, free food, free health care, free [insert Right here], is just a myth. Somebody must pay for it.

Fair enough. The problem was that the idea was simply there in the text. It was not a lesson that was learned. There was no point within the story where characters were forced to suffer the consequences of not accepting this principle (or fact, as Mannie puts it). The characters simply tout the idea and present it as correct, and it really has nothing to do with their victory either. Tanstaafl is not why they won. It is simply the aesthetic, the ideological skin, that the good guys just so happened to be wearing in the story at the time. Presumably, if you're going to write a book about a libertarian revolution, you would want to make a case for why your ideas are the right ones. Heinlein never truly does that.

Compare this to the first Avengers movie. In it, we see the main heroes clash with one another. Tony Stark and Captain America do not get along for obvious reasons, and the chaos helps trigger the Hulk. This marks the mid-story disaster. The end of the story has the heroes coming together to defeat Loki. Yes, this is an eyeball-rolling theme about the power of friendship, or whatever. I chose this for a reason, because even a story like this understands that in order to argue for a given theme, the story progression needs to bear that out. The story's events need to be an argument for the theme. Heinlein does not do that for Tanstaafl.

Another thing that frustrated me about the execution of the principle is that, for what arguments we got, they were rather weak. At one point, they make a point about Tanstaafl, accusing their oppressors of taxing their labor to fund their own social programs. They emphasized that the Lunar colony on the Moon was not benefiting from the social programs. The problem with this is that if the Lunar colony were benefiting from the programs, it would imply that the taxation would actually have a stronger basis. If your argument against "free" healthcare is that you don't receive the healthcare even as you have to pay for it, then what happens when you actually do receive the healthcare. Do you support it now? Is this really a libertarian argument against taxpayer-funded healthcare? An actual argument would be that I don't want to pay for other people's bad habits. Either we collectively agree to ban soda, sugar, junk food, and all unhealthy food, and then collectively pay for each other's healthcare—or we have the freedom to do what we will, and we pay for our own health bills.

Gender Relations

I probably plan on reading at least one more Heinlein, and I have no doubt that I will dislike that book as well. That book is Starship Troopers, which I know is critiqued by The Forever War, a book that I have already read. Based on this book, and the way that gender is portrayed in The Forever War as a critique of Heinlein, he seems to have a romanticized understanding of how gender dynamics works.

In this novel, there is an entire section where he talks about how the dearth of women actually gives women more power in sexual relations, because men have to compete with one another for sexual access. This is only a shallow analysis, given that he does not take into account gender differences. He seems to think that we can treat people as abstract agents negotiating on a neutral plane. In that context, it does make sense to say that the party who is more plentiful has less negotiating power, and must make compromises. On the other end, the less plentiful party has more negotiating power, and can make more demands. But when gender is taken into account, the dynamic shifts. Men will also respond to the fact that they have less negotiating power in ways that will compensate, and that will include coercion. And this is what we see, historically. I don't think it is a mistake that things like rape culture on college campuses became less common the more represented women became. Men technically got more negotiating power, had less reason to use coercion, and rape culture receded. And if the trend reverses, then rape culture could very well come back, if I am right.

It is no mistake that Heinlein is a libertarian. He has a utopian vision of human nature of his own. It permeates this story throughout.

Misinformation

The issue of misinformation comes up indirectly in the story repeatedly in ways that made me laugh. Heinlein takes for granted that you can ethically stretch the truth for political gain. They fake illness and news stories, they spread false information—and I just found this all to be really fascinating in our current climate, where people are obsessed with the spread of misinformation and being the tellers of truth. I have long been of the opinion that nothing has changed with regards to humanity's respect for truth. America invaded Iraq on the basis of misinformation that came from the government itself, and this book and the sentiments it expresses only further confirms that nothing has changed.

The Stakes

In talking about the stakes, I want to talk about the plot of the story. It is not enough that you describe, in the abstract, what will be lost if the characters don't achieve the goal that they pursue. As the plot unfolds beat-for-beat, there needs to be a build up of tension. The characters need to experience setbacks and disasters that force them to rethink things and regain their footing. This is what makes the stakes actually feel real, rather than contrived.

For Heinlein, he merely states what the stakes are, at best, and then vaguely alludes potential disasters that aren't actually disasters. In fact, they are so underwhelming, that mentioning them here is hardly even a spoiler. At one point, the characters are so revered by their followers, that one of them is proposed as King, undermining their ideal of democracy. That sounds interesting. Part Two even ends on this "disaster." But it never builds from there. I swear, unless I missed something, the story seems to have just forgotten that it happened. And even if it did, it still had me asking questions, like why a certain "Adam Selene" wasn't chosen instead. There are obvious story craft reasons for why, but that is irrelevant to the in-world motivations of the characters. For reference, Adam Selene is another revolutionary that is revered in the movement, and for some reason, he was just conveniently forgotten until he wasn't.

Another point in the story, without revealing too much, has them planning and apparently failing, only for the POV character to learn that it was all a part of the plan. I like these kinds of plots less and less. Characters actually need to fail. Enough of this fake out failing, where some characters, and the reader, only think they have failed—only for the twist to be that it was all according to plan, anyway. You can get away with this kind of twist if it happens in a place in the story where it happens naturally. But if it takes place where the second act disaster is supposed to be, for example, then it falls flat.

Think about the movie, The Dark Knight. In that movie, one of the low points is when the Joker, after being caught, leads Batman and the cops on a merry chase, Harvey Dent is injured, and his wife-to-be is killed. The Joker escapes with Lau, a man wanted by the mob, and it is essentially realized that the Joker had planned to be caught. It was all part of the plan, of course, but in this case, the plan was the villain's, and it marked the low point of the story. From the perspective of Batman and the cops, they actually suffered a loss. They actually failed to capture the Joker in a meaningful sense, as he later escapes. They lose possession of Lau. Harvey is injured (and this marks his downfall, as his wife is killed). Batman loses his own love. Not only all of this, but it reveals corruption within the police, as well, which Gordon has been ignoring and making excuses for up until now. The Dark Knight has problems. But that does not change the fact that the viewer feels this, because the characters actually lose something. Many things.

I never actually felt at the edge of my seat while reading this novel. I never actually got the sense that they were going to fail at any point in the story. Heinlein uses some cheap gimmick in this story, where the AI uses an odds calculation to determine the likelihood of victory, and this was not an effective way of eliciting emotion. It's just numbers thrown at the reader. Not only that, but the numbers start to have the opposite effect by the end of the novel, which was just annoying.

I got the sense that Heinlein was more interested in the mechanics of successfully executing a revolution, than creating a compelling story.

Telling the Story

Much of the story was just telling the reader the story, not showing it. A good writer knows how to balance these two things out. Tell when things are boring, and show when things are intense or important in some other way. Heinlein essentially tells the reader his entire novel. I read this book as a part of a buddy read on Jason Fuhrman's channel, and he said that this book has enough content for a whole series, and he is right. Heinlein blasts through so much material in so few pages because he is simply telling the story in narrative summary, with faint blips of scene here and there.

This is not necessarily a bad thing for me. As I said, there are trade offs, and some stories are more heavy in exposition than others, because of the nature of the content. I don’t expect this book to be a rip roaring thriller written by Dan Brown. The problem is that he leans too far toward exposition, compresses too much story—and most importantly, there is nothing interesting to make the exposition compelling in the first place . . . at least to me.

A good example of an exposition heavy writer whom I find interesting would be R. Scott Bakker. He uses his exposition for his philosophy and worldbuilding. Not only that, but he incorporates it into the overall writing style of his story. The point is that there is compensation to make up for what is lost in the telling.

Conclusion

I was very disappointed with this story. I think I will give it a 1/10.

Video: https://youtu.be/MVQJZegcbvM