I have tried twice now to read this book, and both times I found I couldn’t stand it. Perhaps the third time will be the charm, but I doubt it.
The first time, it was all the moon slang. Some people find it interesting and clever, but honestly, it just grated on me. It’s kind of like the belter slang in Leviathan Wakes, but the whole book is written in it. At least with the Expanse, you can skim over the slang without missing much.
The second time, it was a combination of things. I know that it’s become fashionable to bash all the golden age writers for not being woke enough—and don’t get me wrong, I have no desire to join that crusade. I really enjoyed Farnham’s Freehold, and I thought Starship Troopers was an excellent book as well. But with The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, I really had a problem with how the women were all characterized, and I can’t honestly call it anything other than misogyny. For example, every time Heinlein introduces a female character into the story, the first thing he describes about her is how sexually attractive she is (or is not), and gives us a detailed physical description to back that up. Not so with the men.
But what really got to me was how unrealistic and unbelievable his free love lunar society is. To put it bluntly, it reads too much like an adolescent fantasy where none of the consequences or social implications of such a world have been sufficiently thought through. Granted, Heinlein wrote this book in the 60s, when people still thought that the sexual revolution would lead to more sex, better sex, and a less prudish and more sex-positive culture. With the benefit of hindsight, though, we can see that that was a fantasy as well.
The truth (and I’m sure to get some flak from the woke crowd for saying this) is that on average, people in traditional monogamous marriages who are faithful to their spouses have more sex, better sex, and lead much more sex-positive lives than people who are promiscuous. When we broke down all the traditional boundaries of sexual morality, we cheapened sex and destroyed the family. As a result, people nowadays are having less sex, worse sex, and are far more vindictive and prudish than they ever were before the sexual revolution. Followed to its logical conclusion, you end up with our current transgender craze, where it’s now become fashionable for teenage girls to sterilize themselves, and anyone who stands up to that madness is censored, cancelled, deplatformed, and destroyed.
But in Heinlein’s free love future, where all of the traditional boundaries around sex have been dissolved, none of those things have played out. It’s the ultimate fantasy of sex with no consequences, writ large across society. The point at which it just became too much for me was after the main character, who is supposed to be in a multi-generational group marriage (which I don’t even want to begin to unpack), seriously considered whether he ought to have sex with the pretty young revolutionary girl that he just rescued. Excuse me? A group marriage that still allows for the occasional one-night stand is no marriage at all. A society where that is the norm would probably fall apart within two or three generations, and even if it didn’t, the people who were the product of such a society wouldn’t think or act like they just walked out of the 1960s, like Heinlein’s characters do.
In short, Heinlein’s free love future retains all of the strength and stability of a world where traditional sexual morality has never been disrupted, except that the new “morality” is promiscuous in the extreme. Either Heinlein doesn’t know very much about sex (which I doubt), or he was more interested in indulging a sexual fantasy than in seriously thinking through all the consequences and implications of his world. Either way, I couldn’t stand this book for more than a couple of chapters.
Two stars because everything not related to sex is actually pretty good, as far as I can tell. Maybe I’ll try this book again at some point, but for now, it’s at the bottom of my pile.