Farewell to an Old Friend
I grew up on science fiction. I came of age at the dawn of the space age and, at ten, devoured Robert Heinlein’s ‘juveniles’; then moved on to Asimov, Clarke, Simak and Pohl. I continued my habit through high school and college, but parted company in the early ‘70s as science fiction moved in a new direction that I found less compelling.
I remember reading Jules Verne’s ‘From the Earth to the Moon’ at the age of 11 or 12. President Kennedy had announced that we would send a man to the moon before the end of the decade and the Mercury program was getting underway. My immediate reaction to Verne’s tale was that it was horribly dated.
The ‘science’ didn’t make sense and the characters were museum pieces. Verne may have been ahead of his time in 1865 but, by 1961, his ideas could be charitably characterized as ‘quaint’.
I read Andrew Weir’s ‘The Martian’ this summer and thoroughly enjoyed the book. That enjoyment, in turn, sent me to my paperback bookshelf in search of something comparable to read. I pulled down Heinlein’s ‘The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress’. The book was first serialized in Amazing Stories in 1966 and published in hardcover that same year. It won a Hugo Award as the best scifi book of 1967. My paperback copy bears a printing date of May 1968 so that is likely the first time I read the work. I know I have not re-read it in at least 20 years.
In my view, the best science fiction starts with one or two ‘big ideas’. Clarke’s ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’, for example, posits the idea that a sentinel on the moon, placed by an alien civilization, has been activated. The really big idea, though, is HAL, a remarkable computer that apparently suffers from schizophrenia.
‘The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress’ has two very ‘big ideas’. The first is that, in the year 2075, the moon is colonized. OK, nothing new there. You could read all about such plans in Life magazine in 1969. But in Heinlein’s imagination, Luna is a 21st Century equivalent of 19th Century Australia: a dumping ground for Earth’s unwanted criminals and malcontents. But Luna also serves a vital function: because there are pockets of ice below the lunar surface, grain can be grown in tunnels. Lunar rice and wheat are critical to feeding Earth’s 11 billion people and especially those of overcrowded India. Grain is delivered to Earth in enormous canisters via what amounts to a catapult.
Heinlein’s second ‘big idea’ is Mike or, more specifically, a HOLMES IV supercomputer on Luna. Because the ‘Lunar Authority’ that runs the moon is loathe to spend money unnecessarily, rather than buying new computers and shipping them up from Earth, they’ve been connecting more and more memory and logic to this one already-powerful computer and entrusting it with ever-broadening responsibilities. One day, the computer ‘wakes up’ – becomes self-aware (this is two years before Clarke’s HAL 9000). The first person to notice the computer’s self-awareness is a freelance Lunar computer technician, Manuel ‘Mannie’ Garcia O’Kelly-Davis, who narrates the tale.
Mannie gives ‘Mike’ his name. Mike is a very lonely computer who has been trying unsuccessfully to get his human minders’ attention by engaging in juvenile behavior (issuing paychecks to janitors for enormous sums, for example). Only Mannie catches on.
The heart of the story is a revolution for Lunar independence – a revolt led by ‘Adam Selene’ who is, in reality, Mike. The stakes for the Moon’s three million inhabitants are life and death: for 50 years, there has been a one-way flow of resources from Luna to Earth. Ice will be depleted in a few years, after which there will be catastrophe. The incompetent Lunar Authority cares only about meeting ever-higher shipment targets. This revolution is not one of convenience; it is of necessity.
Heinlein writes with a great deal of humor – Mannie is a memorable character and a keen observer of the people and circumstances around him. The book’s best feature is its creation of a plausible future: a frontier society without formal laws in which death is never more than an airlock mishap away (half of those ‘transported’ to Luna to serve out sentences do not survive their first year). At the same time, Luna is also a society that observes a cordiality and openness that is Utopian. It is a society that is free of both prejudice and disease. Because men outnumber women two-to-one, it is a society in which women have the upper hand in all relationships.
Heinlein’s Earth is also plausible. Eleven billion people in 2075 sounds about right. There has been some kind of ‘wet firecracker’ nuclear war in the past, but New York (including the Yankees), Beijing and other major cities are still there. The Sahara Desert is shrinking. To prevent another war, there is a global government that has subsumed individual nations (there is the ‘North American Directorate’ and ‘Great China’, for example). The Federated Nations, headquartered in Agra, is a colossal bureaucracy that includes the Lunar Authority. Earth in other words, has muddled through.
Where the book shows its age is in its science and, to this reader, the science becomes its undoing. Heinlein was a master of assembling first-rate technical information for his fiction and where he guessed correctly, he did very well. Lasers were little more than laboratory curiosities in 1966, yet Heinlein envisions them as industrial-grade mining tools that ‘Loonies’ convert to weapons capable of burning the antennae off spaceships. The induction catapult that delivers grain from Luna to Earth remains a technically feasible if unrealized tool.
At the same time, a central premise of the story today draws a ‘huh?’ from readers. The length of manned spaceflight in 1966 was a week and the long-term physiological effects of weightlessness or low gravity was subject to speculation. In ‘The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress’, Heinlein writes that one of the main reason for the ineptitude and cruelty of the Lunar Authority is that, for its management and employees, theirs is a permanent exile. After a few months of Luna’s one-sixth gravity, the human body ‘forgets’ Earth and return is impossible. In 2015, the crews of the ISS routinely stay at zero gravity for a year or more with no ill effects upon their return.
Finally, 50 years of Moore’s Law have made the story creak. Luna’s telephones are stuck firmly in the 1960s, complete with party lines and too-short extension cords. It requires a substantial percentage of Mike’s considerable computational power to generate a visual image of ‘Adam Selene’ on television. Mike’s voice synthesis is achieved with what amounts to an artificial larynx. There are no integrated circuits or microprocessors, no personal computers, no internet… nothing. The world unleashed by DARPA in 1968 and Intel in 1971 never happened and their absence is glaring.
I suspect that with each passing year, technological advancements will place ‘The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress’ closer to the realm of ‘From the Earth to the Moon’. It isn’t just that we didn’t colonize the moon starting in the 1990s; Heinlein could be forgiven that leap of optimism. The sad truth it is it that absent an unforeseeable technological breakthrough, such a colony will like likely never be.
I feel as though I have lost a longtime friend. It is still a whale of a story told with elán and wonderful humor. But when I closed the book this time, I had a sense that I will not be returning to Manny, Wyoh, Professor de la Laz, and Mike. Time and reality, alas, have passed them by.
I remember reading Jules Verne’s ‘From the Earth to the Moon’ at the age of 11 or 12. President Kennedy had announced that we would send a man to the moon before the end of the decade and the Mercury program was getting underway. My immediate reaction to Verne’s tale was that it was horribly dated.
The ‘science’ didn’t make sense and the characters were museum pieces. Verne may have been ahead of his time in 1865 but, by 1961, his ideas could be charitably characterized as ‘quaint’.
I read Andrew Weir’s ‘The Martian’ this summer and thoroughly enjoyed the book. That enjoyment, in turn, sent me to my paperback bookshelf in search of something comparable to read. I pulled down Heinlein’s ‘The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress’. The book was first serialized in Amazing Stories in 1966 and published in hardcover that same year. It won a Hugo Award as the best scifi book of 1967. My paperback copy bears a printing date of May 1968 so that is likely the first time I read the work. I know I have not re-read it in at least 20 years.
In my view, the best science fiction starts with one or two ‘big ideas’. Clarke’s ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’, for example, posits the idea that a sentinel on the moon, placed by an alien civilization, has been activated. The really big idea, though, is HAL, a remarkable computer that apparently suffers from schizophrenia.
‘The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress’ has two very ‘big ideas’. The first is that, in the year 2075, the moon is colonized. OK, nothing new there. You could read all about such plans in Life magazine in 1969. But in Heinlein’s imagination, Luna is a 21st Century equivalent of 19th Century Australia: a dumping ground for Earth’s unwanted criminals and malcontents. But Luna also serves a vital function: because there are pockets of ice below the lunar surface, grain can be grown in tunnels. Lunar rice and wheat are critical to feeding Earth’s 11 billion people and especially those of overcrowded India. Grain is delivered to Earth in enormous canisters via what amounts to a catapult.
Heinlein’s second ‘big idea’ is Mike or, more specifically, a HOLMES IV supercomputer on Luna. Because the ‘Lunar Authority’ that runs the moon is loathe to spend money unnecessarily, rather than buying new computers and shipping them up from Earth, they’ve been connecting more and more memory and logic to this one already-powerful computer and entrusting it with ever-broadening responsibilities. One day, the computer ‘wakes up’ – becomes self-aware (this is two years before Clarke’s HAL 9000). The first person to notice the computer’s self-awareness is a freelance Lunar computer technician, Manuel ‘Mannie’ Garcia O’Kelly-Davis, who narrates the tale.
Mannie gives ‘Mike’ his name. Mike is a very lonely computer who has been trying unsuccessfully to get his human minders’ attention by engaging in juvenile behavior (issuing paychecks to janitors for enormous sums, for example). Only Mannie catches on.
The heart of the story is a revolution for Lunar independence – a revolt led by ‘Adam Selene’ who is, in reality, Mike. The stakes for the Moon’s three million inhabitants are life and death: for 50 years, there has been a one-way flow of resources from Luna to Earth. Ice will be depleted in a few years, after which there will be catastrophe. The incompetent Lunar Authority cares only about meeting ever-higher shipment targets. This revolution is not one of convenience; it is of necessity.
Heinlein writes with a great deal of humor – Mannie is a memorable character and a keen observer of the people and circumstances around him. The book’s best feature is its creation of a plausible future: a frontier society without formal laws in which death is never more than an airlock mishap away (half of those ‘transported’ to Luna to serve out sentences do not survive their first year). At the same time, Luna is also a society that observes a cordiality and openness that is Utopian. It is a society that is free of both prejudice and disease. Because men outnumber women two-to-one, it is a society in which women have the upper hand in all relationships.
Heinlein’s Earth is also plausible. Eleven billion people in 2075 sounds about right. There has been some kind of ‘wet firecracker’ nuclear war in the past, but New York (including the Yankees), Beijing and other major cities are still there. The Sahara Desert is shrinking. To prevent another war, there is a global government that has subsumed individual nations (there is the ‘North American Directorate’ and ‘Great China’, for example). The Federated Nations, headquartered in Agra, is a colossal bureaucracy that includes the Lunar Authority. Earth in other words, has muddled through.
Where the book shows its age is in its science and, to this reader, the science becomes its undoing. Heinlein was a master of assembling first-rate technical information for his fiction and where he guessed correctly, he did very well. Lasers were little more than laboratory curiosities in 1966, yet Heinlein envisions them as industrial-grade mining tools that ‘Loonies’ convert to weapons capable of burning the antennae off spaceships. The induction catapult that delivers grain from Luna to Earth remains a technically feasible if unrealized tool.
At the same time, a central premise of the story today draws a ‘huh?’ from readers. The length of manned spaceflight in 1966 was a week and the long-term physiological effects of weightlessness or low gravity was subject to speculation. In ‘The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress’, Heinlein writes that one of the main reason for the ineptitude and cruelty of the Lunar Authority is that, for its management and employees, theirs is a permanent exile. After a few months of Luna’s one-sixth gravity, the human body ‘forgets’ Earth and return is impossible. In 2015, the crews of the ISS routinely stay at zero gravity for a year or more with no ill effects upon their return.
Finally, 50 years of Moore’s Law have made the story creak. Luna’s telephones are stuck firmly in the 1960s, complete with party lines and too-short extension cords. It requires a substantial percentage of Mike’s considerable computational power to generate a visual image of ‘Adam Selene’ on television. Mike’s voice synthesis is achieved with what amounts to an artificial larynx. There are no integrated circuits or microprocessors, no personal computers, no internet… nothing. The world unleashed by DARPA in 1968 and Intel in 1971 never happened and their absence is glaring.
I suspect that with each passing year, technological advancements will place ‘The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress’ closer to the realm of ‘From the Earth to the Moon’. It isn’t just that we didn’t colonize the moon starting in the 1990s; Heinlein could be forgiven that leap of optimism. The sad truth it is it that absent an unforeseeable technological breakthrough, such a colony will like likely never be.
I feel as though I have lost a longtime friend. It is still a whale of a story told with elán and wonderful humor. But when I closed the book this time, I had a sense that I will not be returning to Manny, Wyoh, Professor de la Laz, and Mike. Time and reality, alas, have passed them by.
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