The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein

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.

South of the Border, West of the Sun by Haruki Murakami

*Spoiler ALERT - unreliable narrator discussion*

It comes down to the missing Nat King Cole record and envelope full money for me.

On the surface this might come off as a mid-life crisis, with the lonely guy at the center going off course when a woman suddenly appears as a femme fatale with death in her eyes. If that was all it was, even done as eerie and coldly pretty as Murakami can only do, I probably would just write this off as an overly romantic slice of weird-ass Japanses noir. But....

When I got to the end of a novel and Hajime, the first person narrator, starts going on about 'alternate reality' and how because the senses and memory are so unreliable that you need external objects to confirm reality, but that this raises all sorts of problems because then you need other 'realities' to support the 'alternate reality' of the objects supporting the first reality and that this leads to an endless chain -- a chain that has been broken by the disappearance of the envelope full of cash. Now Hajime looks over the chasm of the broken chain and can't figure out which side he is on --
Well, this reader knew he'd better start questioning what is real in this novel. Most particularly is the adult Shimamoto, the mysterious fem-fatale, a real person?

I don't think she exists, excpet in the narrator's mind. If you go back in the book I don't believe any of the other characters in the book actually interact with her. Yes, I'm talking Bruce Willis and Haley Jole Osmond/The Sixth Sense kind of deal here. The narrator in this book is screwed up and playing a very odd game in his head - one that he isn't aware of but I believe the reader is suppose to clue in on by the end.

I've read other people's reactions to the book, questioning why there are so many loose ends and vagaries, and perhaps SOTB, WOTS is open ended and 'romantic'. But I like my interpretation, which seems to show the book is deadly sharp and anything but romantic.

I don't think Murakami is trying to portray mental illness, but rather playing with the consequences and selfishness of his main character's nostalgic desires -- and by making Shimamoto his character's hallucination shows how anti-life this force is. While Shimamto is the seductress/succubus manifestation of his hunger for the life of others, Izumi (the horrific vision of her at the end, who is also a hallucination, way too much of a coincidence that she suddenly shows up in a taxi) is the hungry ghost the void that lies within him. It all adds up to a bleak portrait of a monomaniacal egotist.

I'm sure there is nothing new in this interpretation, and a lot wrong, but it's my first pass at sinking into the book.

Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse by Victor Gischler

Like a poster for a exploitative horror movie with a hot chick cradling her machine gun in her arms, this books brings in the punters with it's naughty title but fails to deliver well executed action, humour, or sexiness.

Instead we follow hapless Mortimer, ex-accountant, looking for his ex-wife in post-Apocalyptic America. I guess Mortimer: Accountant Avenger just wasn't going to sell as many books. The book is an easy read and I did finish it almost painlessly. Up until the last couple of chapters I was convinced this was going to be the first in a series, just because it took so long for Mortimer and company to find the head guy and then be given a mission. Supposedly Mortimer comes out of hiding after nine or ten years to go and find his ex-wife, but he never convinces himself or the reader that that is the reason. Mostly he is just lonely. Instead, after sort of thrashing around for 218 pages the book suddenly has a 'purpose' of a sorts, which in the end doesn't achieve much. 'New boss, same as the old boss'. Gischler doesn't really evoke a sense of mood or texture, I never got a very clear picture of the world, and the action, especially the final battle at the end of the book, amounts to a pretty lame car chase. There is plenty of gore, but mostly the effect is B monster movie splatter.

The blurb on the cover (not the author's fault) draws unfortunate comparisons to Christopher Moore and Quentin Tarantino. Moore is way funnier and Tartinto's violence (when he is on his game) is far more shocking and effective.

Now, I'm just the kind of sexist pig who enjoys tits and ass, even when they are written about, but I had trouble with the book's depiction of the girl, Shelia, that 38 year old Mortimer hooks up with. To start with she is a girl, "sixteen or seventeen at most, but Mortimer wasn't sure that sort of thing mattered anymore." (148) Which is, whether you like it or not, common in male fantasies (also stat-rape in real life). But in the context of this story Shelia sleeps with Mortimer to 'thank/apologize' to him for saving her from a sadistic bastard who had probably being raping her since she was nine. She brushes this off later saying she wants to become a go-go-girl (prostitute) and that the guy wasn't raping her, he was stealing from her (not paying).

It really bugs me that Shelia doesn't seem to be affected at all from nine to ten years of sexual and physical abuse. That and Mortimer doesn't seem to connect himself, an adult in a relationship with her, with the sadistic idiot who has used Shelia from a very young age. Sigh. That's my rant. I'm fine with silly plots, dumb characters, and sexy fantasy, but I just couldn't swallow Shelia the happy hooker.

So why did I read this book? I was given it as a gift and then suckered in by the blurb. Perhaps it is the definition of a bestseller in that it was as easy to read to the end as it would have been to put it down. I'm done. I ranted. Now to find something with boobs that doesn't make me feel so dirty.