★★★☆☆ Why did I like this so much?

The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress

Robert A Heinlein

I read The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress in paperback not terribly long after it first came out. Over the ensuing years I pretty much read that paperback to rags. The mystery now is, why? Why did I feel at the time that it repaid so much rereading?

Part of it, I think, was that for an avid science fiction reader, there was not really a whole lot of better stuff available. It is hard to imagine now, but back in the sixties readable science fiction was pretty thin on the ground. I lived out in the sticks, and my recourses for books were mostly a high school library and a small Waldenbooks at the local mall. (Borders and B&N megastores had not yet been invented.) Robert A. Heinlein, of course, was one of the Big Four Golden Age science fiction authors. I gobbled everything he wrote voraciously, including some novels that, at the distance of fifty years, I now recognize as Dreck.

The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress is not Dreck. It is, I now think, one of the better Heinlein novels. In terms of plot and characters it's typical Heinlein. We have the obnoxiously wise old Prof (who seems to be Heinlein's voice), Mannie, the young point-of-view computer technician (the Engineer is a stock character in Heinlein novels), and, Wyoming, the smart, sexy girl whose love the aforementioned Engineer eventually wins.

And we have a fourth character -- Mycroft/Mike -- the computer who wakens to consciousness. By 1966 this was no longer a revolutionary or even particularly novel idea, but Mike may have been one of the earliest AI characters in a popularly successful novel. Even compared to the humans, Mike is the best character in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. He is endlessly curious and somewhat child-like. He is also intelligent, and of course very good at computation. (Although when he talks to Mannie Mike has a male persona and uses male pronouns, she has an alternate personality Michelle when she talks with Wyoh.) And Mike is not a destructive monster -- not a Frankenstein's monster or Skynet -- as was and still is a cliché in science fiction.

I guess that's the answer. I have always liked the idea of artificial intelligence, and I suppose that to high-school me an appealing, intelligent computer, even if he was recognizably unrealistic, made the book.

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