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The Moon is a Harsh Mistress: Book One (Warning: Spoilers)

Actually, Wyoming is one of his better heroines, IMHO. She's smart, sexy but not a slut. RAH goes out of his way to portray as a dedicated revolutionary. She has flaws, but they are flaws that make her well rounded character.

Compare her to Joan/Eunice in I will fear no evil, or the empty headed sexpots in Stranger in a Strange Land and I think you'll see what I mean.
 
Also, you definately get the message that Mum was the true leader of the line marriage:
"Bog no! Mum decides."

bugger; ..... can't find the quote, but I also believe that after she was ready to relinquish her role, another female would be called to take over the mantle of power, no?
 
^^^Plenty of references to that. Earliest one I can think of is where Mannie tells us if he lives long enough to become senior husband, he will do what grandpaw does: let Sidris run it.
 
You know, I'm going to fess up. This time around, I'm not so impressed with Heinlein.

I can't quite put my finger on what it is. Last time I taught MIHM was in the mid-90s. During grad school, I never had the opportunity to teach an SF class, because there was someone already there with a lockhold on the course.

So I haven't read MIHM since then, and I'm not sure what Heinlein I have read in the meantime. Certainly For Us, the Living, but that doesn't really count.

I think my problem with Heinlein is that he doesn't always think through his ideas. Maybe. Little is explained in any detail. Have I read too much "Hard SF" lately, and I've gotten accustomed to expecting rigorous scientific explanations?

Or do I find his characters implausible? Certainly this is my first reading of Heinlein since really getting into evolutionary psych--am I just not buying into his sociological perspective?

It may also be that a steady diet of High Literature has ruined my palate.

More on this later.

Anyone else going to participate in this?
 
Certainly not buying into his concept of family and sexuality could be putting a damper on your enthusiasm.

Also I think his rather cavalier attitude toward revolution might be going clunk. This book was written just as war was about to become a horrifying reality thanks to TV as opposed to some sort of romantic undertaking.

As far as not explaining things, I actually like that. I remember an excerpt from Whitfield's Making of Star Trek in which GR told how a writer spent several pages of script on the captain telling the helmsman how to go in the opposite direction. GR allegedly tore out the pages and wrote in "reverse course!"

OTH, it may be that Heinlein loses some of his appeal as we get older. His heroes always seem to always have the right answer for every situation and a wise crack that perhaps to younger and more impressionable minds seems totally cool, but to older and more cynical types just seems superficially glib.

In that sense, some of his juvenile novels might hold up better, because there's not quite the sense of someone who has all the answers tellling the tale.

Just a thought.

I agree, where is everyone. 6 and I could dialogue our way through the whole book, but everyone should jump in!
 
See, this is what's starting to worry me. I fear that many of the things I think I like are actually a product of nostalgia, not the thing itself. I'm afraid that I have good memories of the times when I read Heinlein, and the relative simplicity of my life at the time. Then I start to wonder about other stuff I think I like, but which I've not sat down and read (or watched) in more than a decade and a half. Will I still like them?

As for the Hard SF, I don't want a multi-page explanation of things, but I do like a bit of scientific realism in my SF. I think I expect to learn something when I read, usually about physics, but any branch of science, really.

I dunno. I'm baffled by my reaction to the book, and I think my students have picked up on the fact that I'm not as enthusiastic about it as I was when I first assigned it.

I do still enjoy the juveniles, though. Looking through the library, I can see that I bought some SF Book Club editions of these in the late 90s/early 00s, and I remember reading them. But I expect so much less of them--they are pure nostalgia, and that's all I want them to be.

Sigh. This has been yet another lesson in aging.

But, I have to work on a closing lecture on the novel for next week, since I was overreliant on "student centered learning" last week. Perhaps I will find something that changes my mind . . .
 
Number_6 said:
You know, I'm going to fess up. This time around, I'm not so impressed with Heinlein.

I can't quite put my finger on what it is. Last time I taught MIHM was in the mid-90s. During grad school, I never had the opportunity to teach an SF class, because there was someone already there with a lockhold on the course.

So I haven't read MIHM since then, and I'm not sure what Heinlein I have read in the meantime. Certainly For Us, the Living, but that doesn't really count.

I think my problem with Heinlein is that he doesn't always think through his ideas. Maybe. Little is explained in any detail. Have I read too much "Hard SF" lately, and I've gotten accustomed to expecting rigorous scientific explanations?

Or do I find his characters implausible? Certainly this is my first reading of Heinlein since really getting into evolutionary psych--am I just not buying into his sociological perspective?

It may also be that a steady diet of High Literature has ruined my palate.

More on this later.

Anyone else going to participate in this?
Click to expand...
Yeah, I'm waaaaay late. RL and all that. The only chapters I read in MIHM are what I managed to cover while waiting for Dune to start.

However, somehow, I did manage to read To Sail Beyond The Sunset recently. This book is mainly about Lazarus Long's mother, Maureen Johnson. The novel chronicles her life from preteen to adulthood (and beyond).

Let me just say...

I didn't buy any of it. The tone of the main characters was one of condescension and moral superiority. Maureen would often espouse her views on any number of topics as if she were privy to the the absolute truth of the universe. It got real old, real fast.

While her husband is serving in WWI, Maureen pays a booty call to the local clergyman, and has the fucking nerve to claim she was "quasi raped". Why? Because when a parishoner came to call in the middle of their horizontal mambo, Maureen was unceremoniuosly shoved in a closet instead of formally introduced. Sheesh.

I am no longer buying into the "contract marriage" thing, either. 6 is right. Biological determinants totally preclude this type of arrangement. It would never work, ultimately.

Not to mention the incest. Lazarus Long goes back in time to sleep with his mother, father, and a couple of sisters (one of which he creates a holiday for that ends up snowballing into an integral religious fertility rite on numerous worlds, in numerous timelines. Yeah...right). Maureen ends up sleeping with her father, and she pushes her husband to sleep with her daughter:
Thirty odd minutes later she (Nancy...Maureen's daughter) closed her eyes and opened her thighs and for the first time received her father--then opened her eyes and looked at Jonathan (Nancy's husband) and me, and grinned. I grinned back at her; Jonathan was too busy to look.
Click to expand...

Surprisingly, Maureen is upset when her son and daughter fall in love. WTF? That makes no sense at all. The children are brought up in an extremely sexually permissive household, but are punished when they follow Mommy's example? Puh-lease.

I used to think all this sleeping around was sophisticated and progressive....an example of a "higher moral attitude".

Now? I can't believe I totally embraced Heinlein's morality in my younger days. What a crock of shit. Heinlein presents morally suspect ethics as the "enlightened path", attempting to appear morally superior to the average joe.

I'm not buying it any longer.

This shocks me. I know exactly what Number_6 is saying about changed perspectives. The experiences I have amassed over the last 20 years have caused a cosmic schism between the philosophies Heinlein touts, and my hard earned personal beliefs.
 
Number_6 said:
See, this is what's starting to worry me. I fear that many of the things I think I like are actually a product of nostalgia, not the thing itself. I'm afraid that I have good memories of the times when I read Heinlein, and the relative simplicity of my life at the time.
Click to expand...
That's exactly what I was thinking, also. I have very happy memories of my Heinlein "book club". It seemed we were all on the same page (both literally and figuratively). Maybe it was the group dynamic. Maybe we were all horny. I don't know. But for us, in that time, Heinlein clicked.

That time, like my youth, has passed. Sigh...

Get out the rocking chairs and bifocals, 6. We're becoming 2 old biddies....
 
Well, I will say that after Time Enough For Love, I basically had enough of Heinlein. I really felt like he ran out of things to say and just started churning out semi-senile adolescent sexual fantasies.

The problem with his post Time Enough for Love work is that when you have read all, or nearly all, of his earlier stuff there is nothing new. The same catchphrases, the same plot lines and the same super slick heroes.

To me that actually strengthens, not weakens The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. The phrases that became cliches were fresh. The sexual themes were undercurrents, not major plot points and the heroes were just flawed enough to be believable.

As far as the love affair libertarians have with TMIAHM, well I think a lot of them are just in love with the idea of taking away someone else's "free lunch" and getting their own. But that's a topic for a different forum.
 
That's what was missing from To Sail Beyond The Sunset, Mike....flawed heroes.

Everyone always made the right decisions, and had the right answers.

This kind of narrative may be enticing when young, but the older you get, the more you realize there are no easy choices, or answers.

And you just may be right about the libertarian observation....
 
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