Joe Santoro's Reviews > The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress

This is definitely one of those books I can appreciate more than I actually enjoyed. At it's heart, one could call it 'a guide to the Revolution'. For me, having just read Animal Farrm, it was a stark contrast... here we have socialism as the obvious best choice for government.

We have 'Prof' who seems the poster child for that thought, a rational anarchist that things people are inherently good and that the trapping of power and government cause all evil. Not something I agree with, but an amazingly optimistic view for a guy who I feel like is mostly negative in his writing.

I was hoping Mike was going be awesome, but his early character development was abandoned for having him be a literal Deus ex Machina.

While I did enjoy the book and it progressed logical in the story of the Moon going from a prison colony to Free Luna, things were far too easy, to the point where some obvious points were dropped in the service of the plot (the fact that Earth wouldn't attack because of food stopping? never mentioned again after Earth attacked). Heinlein also had a somewhat nonsensical view of technology... nothing wireless exists, yet a computer can drop a rock with pinpoint accuracy on Earth? Radar just isn't that good.

We'll give a pass to the fact that he's decided the Moon has water, nitrates, etc. in such abundance they can send food to Earth for years.

OVerall, I'm very glad I was encouraged to read this by the Hugo/Nebula group, but I definitely wouldn't rate it as one of my favorites.