(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."
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...).
This is, as I said, a general problem with political fiction (I had the same problem with The Cassini Division)-- probably because the people who are inclined to write political fiction tend to do so because they're True Believers of one sort or another, and they write it in a manner which makes their political faith look good and their enemies look bad (Is Jack Ryan Pope yet?). It's a problem with political theory as well-- I agree that a Libertarian society would be a wonderful place to live if real people behaved the way they need to to make a Libertarian society function, but I also think that a socialist state would be a nice place to live if real people behaved the way they need to to make a socialist state function. If men were angels, or angels governed men, life would be wonderful.
But men aren't angels, any more than cows are spheres, and, indeed, the most interesting parts of humanity are precisely those parts where we deviate from the spherical, frictionless, angelic ideal. I agree that the principles of Libertarianism are good ones, but the interesting question is what happens when those ideals collide with the real world. Politics is a fascinating subject precisely because it deals with that collision, with the question of how you preserve as much of your high ideals as possible while accounting for deviations from ideal behavior. How does Communism accomodate greed, or Libertarianism irrationality? Political theory, dealing as it does with idealized cases, is not that interesting to me, nor is political fiction about characters who are spherical and frictionless in just the right ways to make the fictional society work.
Real politics is all about compromise (a point often missed in the deification of America's Founding Fathers-- yes, they had high ideals, and grand theories about the role of government, but they were also realists, and willing to compromise to make a Republic that worked, however non-ideal its structure may have been), but compromise in Heinlein's fictional politics is too often compromise in the "Let's put aside our petty differences and all agree that Socrates is a genius" sense. While this is a form of compromise much beloved of the current occupant of the White House, it's bad politics, and bad fiction. This book, like most of Heinlein's other work (and Ayn Rand's, for that matter) compounds the annoyance of the bad politics with the smug superiority that's Libertarianism's most annoying trait-- the heroes of the revolution are noble and selfless and good, their enemies are bulies and charlatans and incompetents.
Anticipating a common objection, I know that the society in the book doesn't end up holding to the "rational anarchist" ideal set up early on-- throw-away lines at the start and end of the book indicate that they've fallen into the swamp of government and taxation (oh, the horror). I can't help thinking, though, that the more interesting story, politically, is glossed over in those few lines. (Also, I don't buy the Lunar society before the Revolution...)
Having expended countless electrons in the course of damning the political elements of the book, I'll close by lamely saying that the rest of the plot is pretty good. The success of the revolution is a little too dependent on everyone in power on Earth acting like a complete idiot, but the bits with the actual action are well done, if scarce. Heinlein clearly thought about the possibilities of the computer system he used (daft though parts of it seem today), and while the bombing of Earth contained more information about ballistics than really necessary (he says, at the end of a term spent teaching Newtonian mechanics), it's a nifty idea. I just wish more time had been spent on those bits, and less on frictionless politics.
Maybe I just need to drop back farther into Heinlein's career to find more enjoyable and less political books, but I suspect that he just doesn't do it for me any more. Hopefully, typing this whole rant in will serve as reminder enough of why I don't like these books that I won't be tempted to re-read more.
(Originally posted to The Library of Babel.)
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