Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress was first serialised in Worlds of If from 1965-1966 before novel publication in 1966. In this narrative the Moon (Luna) has been colonised by convicts deported from Earth several generations ago, who labour to satisfy Earth’s increasing demand for resources (grain). This economic arrangement is overseen by an organisation (the Authority) representing Earth’s interests on Luna, namely the maintenance of a flow of cheap resources to the imperial centre. The plot concerns a conspiracy by a group of “rational anarchists” to unite the people of Luna, overthrow the Authority and declare independence from Earth. This text departs from the political framework of earlier terraforming texts by offering an exploration of libertarian political philosophy as an alternative to the imperial and fascist politics seen in the earlier consensus futures of the 1950s terraforming boom. Many of the themes in this text are developments of ideals of self-sufficiency and ecologically informed economics explored in Heinlein’s Farmer in the Sky: the revolutionary
Professor Bernardo de la Paz exhorts Earth’s politicians to
Send us your poor, your dispossessed, send them by thousands and hundreds of thousands; we’ll teach them swift, efficient Lunar methods of tunnel farming and ship you back unbelievable tonnage. Gentlemen, Luna is one enormous fallow farm, four thousand million hectares, waiting to be plowed!.108
The political context, with its reference to the American war of Independence and the colonisation of Van Dieman’s island, develops themes established by earlier 1950s stories. Significantly it is the poor
107
Dune Messiah, p. 56.
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and the dispossessed who are relied upon to abandon their lives on Earth to become colonial farmers, thus hinting at the exploitation involved in terraforming the Moon.
Geoengineering themes are explored in the context of an overpopulated and politically strained Earth which continues to sustain a socio-economic cycle that only exacerbates these ecopolitical problems. The increasing demand for resources on Earth informs the Authority’s use of criminals as slave labour on Luna, establishing a terragouging model of terraforming as the primary human relationship to Earth and the Moon’s environment. In this regard The Moon is a Harsh Mistress bears many similarities to the consensus futures of the 1950s terraforming texts. At its conclusion, the assumption of a terragouging model for approaching other planets is not significantly challenged. As Luna settles into Independence, Mannie considers the terraforming of the asteroids in terms that draw on space as a field of continued conquest, adventure and excitement.109 The struggle for personal fulfilment outweighs the interest that a continued development of a Lunarian society holds for the text, which eventually turns outward toward space rather than inward toward a development of more equitable social relationships on both Earth and Luna.
In order to combat Earth’s exploitation of the Lunarian society for the production of cheap resources, de la Paz argues for self-sufficiency as a step toward a capitalist-libertarian ethic of the free market:
Every load you ship to Terra condemns your grandchildren to slow death. The miracle of photosynthesis, the plant-and-animal cycle, is a closed cycle. You have opened it – and your lifeblood runs downhill to Terra. You don’t need higher prices, one cannot eat money! What you need, what we all need, is an end to this loss. Embargo, utter and absolute. Luna must be self-sufficient!.110
De la Paz recapitulates Miller’s symbol in “Cruxifixus Etiam” of the wine soaked Martian sand, which stands as an image for the lives of the labourers that have been sapped by an alien
environment.111 This image trades on the connection between ecological energy flows and blood, describing a feedback loop from the colonists to the land. De la Paz’s call for a free market is grounded in an awareness of the finiteness of Luna’s resources: the scarcity of nutrients and water 109Moon , p. 303. 110Moon , p. 17. 111
Walter M. Miller, ‘Cruxifixus Etiam’, in The View From the Stars (Hertfordshire: Panther, 1968; repr. 1973), pp. 58-78.
used to grow grain on the Moon makes its ecological system exceedingly fragile. Coupled with the Malthusian population explosion that leaves many countries on Earth (India is the main example) unable to provide living space and food for its populace, the urgency of establishing a free market is intensified. Mannie’s friend and co-conspirator, the AI known as Mike, uses a series of statistical scenarios to project a decline on Luna in seven years. De la Paz later argues to the Lunar Authority on Earth that ‘[d]iscussions of how to augment our shipments must be based on the facts of nature, not on the false assumption that we are slaves, bound by a work quota we never made’.112 The urgency of this ecological decline scenario leads to the necessity of establishing economic, and hence political, self-determination on Luna.
This call for a scientific outlook that can appreciate and make decisions based on the facts of energy economics is rooted in de la Paz’s libertarian political philosophy, “rational anarchism”. The political use that discourses of nature are put to in justifying Earth’s instrumental relationship to Luna is contested by a philosophy that privileges a certain value of rationalism. Jason Bourget has argued that Heinlein’s reformulation of nineteenth century libertarian political philosophy is undercut by a biological determinism that privileges masculinity, thus preventing the realisation of a libertarian utopia in the text.113 Heinlein’s notion of biological determinism elevates masculinist individualism by representing it in terms of a teleological notion of evolution. This is coupled to an insistence that politics suitable to the level of individual interaction can be scaled up to best equip a global society for survival. Rational anarchism locates social responsibility with a specific individual:
A rational anarchist believes that concepts such as “state” and “society” and “government” have no existence save as physically exemplified in the acts of self- responsible individuals. He believes that it is impossible to shift blame, share blame, distribute blame. . . as blame, guilt, responsibility are matters taking place inside human beings singly and nowhere else. But being rational, he knows that not all individuals hold his evaluations, so he tries to live perfectly in an imperfect world. . . aware that his effort will be less than perfect yet undismayed by self-knowledge of self-failure.114
By coupling this political philosophy to notions of biological determism, Bourget argues that
‘Heinlein’s populist revolution is rapidly transformed into an elitist dictatorship, dominated by a few
112Moon
, pp. 83-84. 113
Jason Bourget, ‘Biological Determinism, Masculine Politics and the Failure of Libertarianism in Robert A. Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress’, Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction, 104 (2008), 10-22 (pp. 10-11).
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charismatic men who assume complete political and economic control over as soon as the Lunar Authority no longer exists’. De la Paz is one such charismatic figure, whom ‘Heinlein unwittingly transforms […] from a representative of libertarian thought into a tyrant with a fit belief in the importance of his own masculine individuality’.115 In many ways the masculinist fascism that de la Paz represents recapitulates the Machiavellian masculinity of Paul and Leto II in the Dune series toward the Fremen, thus sustaining a tradition of instrumental relationships toward planetary
environments and their inhabitants. In The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, the use of grain shipments and rocks from Luna’s surface as projectiles with which to threaten Earth is one manifestation of this individualism and instrumentalism.
Rational anarchism represents a backlash against the idea of global governmental systems or, in Anderson’s case, an interplanetary UN. It rejects bureaucratic systems and denies a global sense of identity rooted in responsibility to the group. However, as Bourget has shown, this individualism is restricted to those who see it as their duty to ensure their position as leaders directing the course of history. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress closes spaces for a libertarianism that allows multiple voices to interact, which would open a dialogue about the meaning and function of a plural community: Mannie finds that the results of the election for a Lunarian council has been rigged by Mike, giving him a seat on the council that he had not been democratically elected for. De la Paz calls this anarchism
“freedom”, a notion that is revised by Le Guin as freedom to do anything, not a freedom from anything.116 Heinlein’s treatment of a terraformed Moon as an alternative, anarchist political system clashes with the implications of his biological determinism, but it does represent a departure from earlier ideas of global or interplanetary governments and responds to the same counter-cultural opposition that informed the New Wave of sf.
115
Bourget, pp. 18, 19. 116The Dispossessed