Book reviews: The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress

[baloonworld]

Junky space porn celibrating anarco-sydicatism. Refutes the values of other governmental systems by having peple in an immaginary socity say that they have never seen the need for n where n is somthing provided by an existing socity. Given that the socity is based on the premise that it is cheaper to grow grain hydroponicly on the moon and ship it to Earth than grow it hydroponicly on Earth, the validity of the hypothetical socity is pretty much nil. Heinlien sets up an ideal oppertunity to explore ideas concerning utilitarian socity ran by a loving machine overlord, and then carefully avoids it at the last minute, presumably for reasons of it being interesting. Charitors are almost psycopathic in their emotional detachment from the death of their loving machine-god.

With two exceptions (below), all the other (54) reviews on iRead are either libertarians saying "this book describes a world just like the one I imagine I live in. It is therfore excellent" or "this book is good"

"libertarian tough-guy writing at its best. Which isn't really saying a whole lot."

"Well, I'm TRYING to read it, anyway. I find Heinlein's take on gender to be REALLY off-putting."

Comments

[trailingvortex.livejournal.com]

I have only read one book by him, Starship Troopers (nothing like the film) and I would not call it particularly libertarian. It appears to advocatewhat I would call...militaristic authoritatian meritocratic democracy. I'm not sure that's very helpful. Sorry. Read it. It's a good book.

[baloonworld.livejournal.com]

The moon-revolution did have a bit of an authoritarian streak: it was masterminded by a small band of heros of exceptional talents acting for the good of the people*. They didn't much respect the yammerheads; they were never really consulted, the post-revolution election was rigged, and the yammerheads were given a parlement and a series of committees to keep them out of the business of running the place.
The libertarian ideal lead to the heros stepping down as soon as they could, after establihing a set of governmental systems that effectivly meant that their sucessors could not change the system to a less libertrain one.

*Henceforth refered to (perjoratively) as yammerheads, as in the text