The Moon is a Harsh Mistress — Robert A Heinlein

In 2075 Luna is a penal colony. Transportees and their descendants mine ice and grow grain, and the Lunar Authority ships the harvest down to a starving Earth at a fixed price. The trade is one-way in a physical sense as well as an economic one: the water leaves and does not come back, and the Professor’s arithmetic gives the colony seven years before it eats itself.

Mannie, a one-armed computer technician, is the only person who has noticed that the Authority’s master computer woke up. Mike is bored, lonely, and fond of jokes he does not understand. Together with the Professor — an old exile who calls himself a rational anarchist — and Wyoming Knott, an agitator from Hong Kong Luna, Mannie turns a machine that controls every door, phone line, and grain catapult on the Moon into the nervous system of a revolution.

Mike runs the conspiracy as an invented figurehead, computes the odds of success, and edits the news. Earth refuses to negotiate with a rock. So the Loonies use the catapult for what it can also do: drop cargo pods on a planet at the bottom of the gravity well, on schedule, published in advance, until the bombardment stops being a threat and becomes a demonstration.

A book about rational anarchism carried entirely by two characters: Mike, an AI written in 1966 that reads like something from last year, and a Professor who wants the Moon free of Earth. He has the moral high ground and, conveniently, the literal one at the top of the gravity well.

I really enjoyed this book. First the AI: Mike is so like our LLMs nowadays but imagined in the 60s. He is a great character, but as the story progresses the Professor who leads the anarchist revolution becomes the main figure. Well, apart from Mannie, who narrates the whole thing.

As it goes on the Lunar Colony (read this critical: Colony like in extortion) gains leverage over Earth and plays tit for tat with the planet. This escalates into a final standoff where the Moon wins due to its ability to throw rocks down the gravity well. Same trick as in Leviathan Wakes — except this is 1966 and Leviathan Wakes is 2011. Well it is a common enough trope, I wonder who came up with it.

But what really got me was the Loonie creole spoken on the Moon, and the Professor, who fought for rational anarchism knowing it would never be achieved.

Nothing annoyed me, which is worth noting because normally something does. The long stretches where the Professor stops the plot to explain TANSTAAFL or how a revolutionary cell should be structured, that is exactly the kind of thing that makes other people put a book down, and for me it was a highlight. So: didactic prose is a feature, not a bug, at least when the ideas are good.