The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

I was a voracious reader as a child. In the beginning I read everything, but when I was given a science fiction novel as a Christmas gift (Catseye by Andre Norton, circa 1960) I devoured it and never looked back.

Early on, I had very little thought for the authors of the books I was reading, nor for the literary value - if any - of their works. I read what I liked, and with science fiction I liked it all.

Still, some were favorites, which brings us to The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, by Robert Heinlein. It is a Hugo Award winner, and one of the great works of moon sci-fi.

The book presents a lunar society in which the adaptation to a unique local environment (proximity to hard vacuum, a perennial shortage of women) is worked out in logical, and highly entertaining, detail. It is also an adventure story involving intrigue, revolution, and dropping large rocks down a big fat gravity well.

Mike - the computer who wakes up - is a major player in the plot, and I still love Heinlein's cut-to-the-chase discussion of the nature of self-awareness:

"Is a virus self-aware? Nyet. How about oyster? I doubt it. A cat? Almost certainly. A human? Don't know about you, tovarishch, but I am."

Such was my literary naivete as a child that it was years later before I realized that the odd way the book reads is due to the total lack of the definite article (the word 'the') in Heinlein's first person narrative by our hero, Mannie; Heinlein's version of a lunar dialect.

It was also many years before I learned about Heinlein's political leanings and his rather - umm - unusual take on family relationships. At the time I didn't need more that a good story, and as that, the book works.