Re-reading this novel was a humbling and a little melancholy experience for me, but also enjoyable. I first read and absolutely loved
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress when I was thirteen or fourteen and COMPLETELY missed that Mannie the narrator has a faux-Russian accent. I mean, it is right there on the first page!
"Not fastest. At Bell Labs, Buenos Aires, down Earthside they've got a thinkum a tenth [supercomputer Mike's] size which can answer almost before you ask. But matters whether you get answer in micro-second rather than millisecond as long as correct?"
Da, went completely over my head it did as I read silently to myself, hiding in my bedroom all through my tormented adolescence.
Now, I may just have flushed out what didn't compute or what I just didn't have a frame of reference for. Heinlein's sexual politics for one. He comes up with a utopia that is supposed to be better for women, but really the main female character in the book is just there to look good and fall in love with the narrator Mannie. Women have more power on Luna because they are a scarce commodity (the ratio of men to women is very high), but this just boils down to sex objects on pedestals, not any type of feminism. Much of the politics-politics, the rational anarchism as it is called in the book, or libertarianism I suppose in the modern context, went over my head when I first read it. Much of that was actually interesting this time, though I still feel it sounds like a great plan as long as you are never in a position of need yourself. Heinlein is still pretty good at presenting this stuff entertainingly at this point in his writing career, though some of the lectures were starting to get long.
Some stuff that did appeal, how Heinlein characters knew everything and were always more intelligent than their opponents has lost some of its coolness factor, now that I'm not a young teen with an enormous appetite for power fantasies. Mannie, the Professor, and Mike the supercomputer (with Wyo looking on) hatch a plan to lead a revolt for the freedom of Luna and then they enact the plan, and then....the plan goes exactly to plan because they are all so damn smart, nobody else can come up with anything smarter or unexpected to stop them. A lot of Heinlein's supermen characters and the worlds they live in comes off as Papa Heinlein playing god in his own little sandbox and not really engaging with the big, complicated, messy, unfair, chancy world outside.
(Though to be fair, the one thing that struck me this time through was that though the revolution part of the plan goes off without a hitch, any plan for an anarchist/libertarian system afterward is quickly set aside by the people that the revolutionaries free. My sense is that 'the stupids' (all the non-Heinleinian supermen and women) are going to set up a settled ordered democratic government with lots of rules and regulations and taxes. In the end Mannie is thinking about leaving the moon and heading for the less regulated Asteroids. A very American, very western (in the sense of cowboys on the frontier) ending.)
The best part of the book is the relationship of Mike, the newly wakened supercomputer, with his first human friend Mannie, the narrator. This is the part that I do remember from my first reading of the book and its still the part that I feel Heinlein got right this time through. Perhaps because Mike is, in a way, a child at the beginning of the book and then grows up as the novel progresses this actually makes him the most rounded of the characters in the book.
So I enjoyed the story, but Heinlein is that uncle I worshiped when I was younger and now have discovered is all too human, like the rest of us. It would be all too easy just to bash and dismiss someone who was very important to me when younger. I've listed a lots of things that I don't like in the book, but I'm still going to treasure those bits that get my mind and heart firing.
