(I've been shifting some old material over to my new web space, and was reminded that I have a large store of old book reviews and book log entries already in HTML form. For lack of the energy to do anything much more constructive, I'll post some of them here over the next few days.)

The Moon Is a Harsh Mistresss by Robert A. Heinlein. A recurring problem I have with literature is that I have a hard time with the idea of the infinite variability of literary tastes, at least when it comes to people I like and respect praising works I don't like. When someone whose tastes I generally admire praises a book, I want to see in it what they see in it, and often I can't. But I keep trying, and so when I re-read Tolkien, I strain to see what Jo Walton sees in the poetry, when I read Lois McMaster Bujold, I try to see the same dark psychological issues Graydon Saunders does, and when Patrick Nielsen Hayden (Tor editor and guitarist extraodinaire) praises Heinlein at Boskone, I want to take another look. And the ending is always the same: two-thirds of the way through The Fellowship of the Ring I can't take it any more, and start skipping any passage in italics; Miles Vorkosigan remains James Bond In Space (though not in a Doug Bell (Space Bang !) sense...); and, well, this review.

This problem is especially troubling in the case of Heinlein because, well, I used to like Heinlein's books a lot (as I said when I wrote about The Green Hills of Earth). I tore through most of them back in the day (though I somehow missed Starship Troopers), and even enjoyed parts of The Number of the Beast (the fact that I was fourteen might've had something to do with that). I clearly recall checking this one out of the high school library and reading it in an afternoon.

Having decided to try Heinlein just one more time, I picked this particular book for two reasons: 1) It seems to be widely held to be one of his best, with most of the good features that drew fans to him back in the day, and relatively little of the self-indulgent crap which ruins his late works, and 2) It only cost a buck and a quarter at the local used book store. Also, my impression of the book from that earlier reading was generally good, and I didn't already own a copy.

Starting with the positive features, there's plenty of imaginative stuff here. For those who've been living in a cave for the last fifty years, the book is the story of the Revolution which transforms the prison colony on the Moon into Free Luna. A great deal of thought has clearly gone into the details of how the colony is arranged, what living in that environment would be like, and how to handle the transportation issues between Earth and the Moon. There are some howlers on the computer end (Heinlein seems to greatly overestimate what you can fit in 10MB of data storage, and computers are the size of whole rooms in 2276), but as I said in my earlier comments, you've got to admire the sort of optimism that had us conquering space with 1966 technology... The narration is done by Manuel O'Kelly Garcia Davis in an invented pidgin, and while this means the book suffers the usual problems of books written in dialect, Manny is an interesting character, and his narration is probably as close as Heinlein ever came to following the old writing dictum to "Show, Don't Tell."