The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Day 1: The Underqualified Chauffeur

After Wells and Asimov, who to experiment with next? As I've said, there are a lot of well-known names in the Science Fiction field, and I won't be getting to most of them.


But next up, I wanted to try something by Robert Heinlein (or, as the book I have credits him, Robert A. Heinlein; I suppose the middle initial is optional).


Robert (A.) Heinlein won the Hugo Award (which I'm pretty sure is one of the biggest, if not the biggest honor in Science Fiction) four times. The totally unbiased description on the book jacket of this book calls him "the dominant science fiction writer of the modern era". He's well-known and popular. In short, there are a number of reasons I felt I should include him in my lineup.


But like I said in my first Foundation post, choosing an author is only half of the process. Next I had to decide which book I was going to read, and I had three candidates: Starship Troopers (because it's been made into a movie, which seems to indicate that it's fairly popular), Stranger in a Strange Land (because, from what admittedly little I've seen, it appears to be his best-known work), and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (because a friend of mine read it last year and had good things to say about it, which is how I first heard of Robert Heinlein) (or Robert A. Heinlein).


So I asked a widely-read mentor knowledgeable about these sorts of things which of the three she thought was his most famous and important work, and she said The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (she later changed her answer to Stranger in a Strange Land, but I opted to go with her first instinct).


Thus...




***


I've gotten tired of saying negative things about books that are popular, well-loved, and come to me recommended, and I'm sure that anybody reading these posts has gotten tired of reading said negative comments. But it's starting to seem like it can't be helped. I don't like Science Fiction. And I'm sorry about that. I'm really, truly sorry, for a lot of reasons.


I'm not really enjoying this book. Again... lots of reasons for this.


First of all: this book is kind of hard to read.


The basic setup of the book is that in the not-too-distant future the Earth sets up a penal colony on the moon. Criminals of all different calibers and a few voluntary colonists are sent up from every major country on Earth, where they live and work. Decades later, the Moon is shared by the more recently arrived criminals and by the children of the earlier groups, born free and raised on the Moon (or Luna, as its citizens call it). And, as one might imagine, the Lunar citizens (or Loonies) have developed their own unique dialect.


This is where the difficulty comes from.


Of course, it makes perfect sense for the Loonies to have their own dialect. Language is constantly evolving, and a group of people isolated from the main body of humanity as they are would certainly be talking differently within a few generations. Honestly, I think it's almost unrealistic how little Heinlein's future Moon-language differs from modern English. There are only two major differences - first, a number of foreign words and phrases of various origins have become incorporated into everyday English, and second, the language has grown more abrupt, with Loonies frequently leaving out words like "I", "you", "a", or (most notably) "the".


And the book is written in first-person narration. So the entire book is made up of sentence fragments and sentences completely devoid of the word "the".


But wait, there's more.


Like a lot of Science Fiction, this book deals with social science as much as it does physical science. The book chronicles the main characters' decision to revolt against Earth (or, as they say, Terran) rule and establish their own Lunar government (think American Revolution but in space and instead of the Founding Fathers you have an AI computer running everything). This decision is brought about because of the unfortunate economic situation on Luna - the Authority (which I think is the Lunar government established by Earth; the book's never actually said) controls everything, which leads to overpricing of necessities and inefficient trade (like I said; American Revolution). What this all amounts to is that the book has a lot of explanations of complex economics, introductions of various unconventional political ideologies, inflammatory speeches, statistical analyses, lengthy conversations, and, eventually, long descriptions of the steps taken to set up a revolutionary party and start engineering the revolt - all written in this choppy patois, as if everything going on wasn't hard enough to understand already.


Now, I get what Heinlein's doing. As I said, it makes sense to have a unique Lunar dialect. And it probably wasn't easy for an obviously educated and well-read man like Heinlein to write a whole book in this style. I respect the intelligence of the decision and the effort it must've taken to pull it off. But in practice, it's driving me a bit crazy.


There is a small amount of relief in that there are two characters who don't speak in the dialect, an eloquent earthborn Professor and the aforementioned AI computer who is running and organizing the revolt. Why the book couldn't have been narrated by one of them is anyone's guess.


As for characters, they're slightly more developed than Foundation's characters are, because the whole book is one continuous story and it's much more a story about people (and a computer) than it is about human history and human nature in general. But there still isn't an overlarge amount of time spent with the characters. I know the main characters' physical descriptions, backstories, political ideologies, and not much else.


Such is the case with just about every aspect of the book. Anything essential to the central plot is described in detail. Everything else the readers have to figure out on their own. For example - Lunar society involves both polygamy and polyandry, often simultaneously. But there are no expository paragraphs helpfully telling the reader this or explaining how such uncommon and outdated practices have become the norm in this highly advanced, futuristic society. Rather, there's a scene early on where the narrator briefly chats with a new acquaintance about his four wives and four co-husbands and if the readers can't figure out what's going on and shift all their paradigms accordingly, that's their problem. I have only the vaguest idea what the cities on Luna look like. I barely understand why this revolution is happening in the first place.


But Heinlein makes sure to spend sixty pages describing the financing of the revolutionary party, the circulation of propaganda, and a lucky sequence of events that gains the revolution an ally on Earth.


I've talked before over the course of this project about preferring character-driven books over plot-driven ones. Here I want to say that there's nothing inherently wrong with plot-driven books. I've read plot-driven books before without having trouble getting through them. I've even enjoyed them. Just because they're not my preference doesn't mean I can't think they're good.


But I think that in order for a plot-driven book to work, in order to have a book that has almost no emphasis on character or setting be readable and enjoyable, the plot has to actually drive the story. And so far, in my opinion, this one just doesn't.


But maybe it will. (This is me trying to get some positivity and optimism into the post.) I'm only halfway through the book; so far it might all have been set up for a thrilling and engaging second half. Plots can become better and more engaging. This could easily prove to be a really great example of a plot-driven book... provided you can get through the first half.


*Shrugs* Well, I suppose I'd better go read some more...


~Pearl Clayton