Dear Mr. MacLeod:
Any chance that you have actually written down your analysis/critique of _A Moon Is a Harsh Mistress_ anywhere? Or that you might be persuaded to do so sometime in the near future?
MacLeod:Perhaps not all that could be said, but there is this, from a draft of my article 'Politics and SF' in _The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction_ (CUP, forthcoming):
[preceded by discussion of other Heinlein works]
The work of Heinlein's which has had a more direct, if small, political effect - through its influence on David Friedman and other theorists of anarcho-capitalism, a significant minority strand in modern libertarianism - is The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. What is not immediately evident is that the book's hero and narrator is, albeit unwittingly, the villain of the piece. The carefully plotted revolution in a Lunar penal colony - in the name of free trade with Earth - actually succeeds in setting up a democratic state, which destroys the stateless capitalist anarchy which the colonists already enjoyed under the Warden's distant rule. They had liberty already, had they but known it, and by the end there's nothing for a good libertarian to do but move out to the new frontier of the asteroid belt. Just why this reversal is obscure points up the two main weaknesses of the book.
The first is that the system in which Manny, the narrator, is born and which may have been closest to the author's didactic intent is shown in action only fleetingly and incidentally: the key scene, where Manny acts as impromptu but legitimate judge - in a potentially capital case, at that - and forms a jury from the drinkers in a bar, can easily pass by as local colour, and the obvious objections to such frontier justice as the basis of a stable way of life are never seriously addressed. Instead they are dismissed in another offhand display of pseudo-Darwinian authorial legerdemain: those who abuse the system sooner or later find themselves shoved out of an airlock without a pressure-suit.
The second is that the revolutionary conspiracy whose progress is the spine of the story is run entirely as a process of top-down manipulation. Heinlein's mouthpiece character, Professor LaPaz, attributes this technique to Lenin's Bolshevik party - a serious misreading of the October Revolution, in which the insurgent democracy of the workers' councils was at least as central as the party. Without the self-correcting feedback of mass response, the Bolsheviks would have been as isolated as many of their contemporary emulators found themselves to be. (And as, indeed, the Bolsheviks became as soon as they ceased to rely, even tactically, on the popular will.) Likewise, the party itself could not have been prepared for revolutionary action without the long political winnowing of the preceding decades of factional strife. The 'Fifth International' which provides Heinlein's conspirators with their initial cadre and milieu is too ideologically diverse - virtually spanning the visible political spectrum - to be credible as a potential vanguard, and no attempt to develop any unifying revolutionary theory is so much as implied.
And do you have any objection if I continue to preach my perhaps idiosyncratic reading of _The Cassini Division_ as an analogue of a novel about the Culture-Idiran War written from the viewpoint of Xoralundra? I mean, I have always interpreted the final broadcast from the Cassini Division to dear little Ellen May--with its claim that the Bad Jovians had already killed all the Good Jovians before the comets hit--not as an accurate assessment of what went down but as what the Cassini Division's personnel *has* to believe in order to continue to live with themselves...
Posted by DeLong at July 15, 2003 04:09 PM | TrackBackWell, of course I have no objection, and I'm honoured that you should preach any reading of it at all, but I think this interpretation doesn't grok the True Knowledge :-) The Division's personnel *know* they have destroyed vastly superior beings and they really, really do not give a shit.
All the best
Ken MacLeod http://kenmacleod.blogspot.com/