Unfortunately, his every instinct is to Tell rather than Show. And Tell, and Tell, and Tell some more. This is an incredibly talky book, with long sections (of a fairly short book) that are little more than characters holding forth on issues of political philosophy. There are some good scenes buried in there, but the bits in between are a hard slog. There are at least three detailed descriptions of the full organization of the Revolution (one setting up the cell structure used, another describing refinements to it and putting in names, and a third description of the provisional government set up after the Revolution), for example, each of which stops the story dead in its tracks for longer than really necessary. There are grand political manifestoes declaimed on a couple of occasions, and other sections of dialogue that read like Plato's dialogues (in the sense that one character is only there to say idiotic things and make Socrates look good). The book is mercifully too short to allow a sixty-page John Galt speech (and I think Heinlein had more sense than that), but that's the only thing it's lacking in the "talk-talk" department.

The biggest problem with the book, though, is that it cheats (and not just because the Revolution has a self-aware supercomputer running the show). And it cheats in a way that makes the long political sections fundamentally uninteresting to me.

There's an old, old joke in physics geek circles about a farmer who can't get his cows to produce enough milk. He goes to one expert after another, to no avail, finally turning to his friend, a theoretical physicist, in desperation. The physicsist listens carefully to the description of the problem, goes away thinking, and calls his friend back the next day saying "I've got the answer." "Great!" says the farmer, "What do I do?" "First," says the physicist, "we assume a spherical cow..."

This book, like most tracts of political fiction, is like reading about spherical humanoids (they're probably frictionless, too). The Revolution, and Lunar society in general, works because the characters in the book just happen to behave in exactly the correct manner to allow the society to work like its creator wants it to. Everybody's absurdly rational, the revolutionaries are all gallant and noble and selfless, nobody's out for personal gain above principles, and the enemies on Earth bluster and blunder and twirl their moustaches evilly. It's a ridiculously slanted field, and moreover, I don't for a minute believe that real human beings in that situation would behave anything like the characters in the book do (if nothing else, I can't swallow the idea that a committed socialist would ever be swung around to believe in "rational anarchism" through a single bull session, as occurs early in the book...).