Monday, March 07, 2022

Simply the Best?

It's hard to pick a best or worst out of Heinlein's works. The corpus of his writings includes pulp sci-fi shorts from the Thirties, Boy's Life juveniles... what we'd now dub "Young Adult" literature ...from the Fifties, and adult novels ranging from fantasy to space opera to cyberpunk from the Sixties through the Eighties. Heck, dude wrote a copious amount of non-fiction as well.

All that being said, I just finished re-reading The Moon is a Harsh Mistress again and I gotta vote for this being RAH's best work. I'm probably not alone, because if you type "the moo" into the Wikipedia search box, the title is the second suggestion after "The Moody Blues".

It's probably the fourth or fifth time I've reread the novel, but the most recent was almost certainly nearly a decade ago. It's held up surprisingly well, partly because it doesn't rely much on tech or gadgets. 

We can't point and laugh and say "Oh, look how they think our moon colonies are!" because we don't have any of those yet in 2022 (which would probably stun Mr. Heinlein to hear way back in 1966.) About the most noticeable anachronisms are that almost all communication seems to be by wired landline, although low powered suit radios are mentioned, and the idea of a huge room-sized computer running most of the moon is odd if you allow yourself to stop and think about it, but the plot steps along well enough that you probably won't.

It's not a tech story, anyway. It's a people-driven story told from the first person... which is common of Heinlein's best efforts, come to think of it. Even the computer (who is arguably the most important character) is a people.

Definitely recommend.

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