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A review by tomasthanes
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein
5.0
This book was not at all what I was expecting. Without any tangible data, I was thinking that the story would revolve around lunar miners (in the same sense that "The Expanse" books have the belters, miners extracting ice and ore from the asteroid belt). Nope, not even close.
It turns out that Moon was a penal colony, a dumping ground for criminals, like Australia was for Great Britain. Convicted felons on Earth were shipped up to the Moon were they'd do hard service until their sentences were met and then, because of their adaption to 1/6th gravity, would be unable to return to the earth and so, again like Australia, a inique economy and culture came into being.
The primary export of the Moon was food grown in tunnels ("warrens") under lights with water and fertilizer added. The food (mostly grains) were packed into steel containers and launched from the Moon's surface back to Earth via a magnetic catapult. The containers would have very limited guidance and control and would splash down into the ocean off of India where they'd be recovered and offloaded.
A lot off the management of the grain shipments to Earth (basic ballistics) was performed by a central computer named "Mike". We're using to thinking that our powerful computers used for machine learning or other artificial intelligence tasks will one day become sentient because, after all, humans evolved into sentience so it must be able to happen to "thinking" machines. Unfortunately this written in the mid-60's so computers were centralized mainframes with 64KB of RAM and programs written in COBOL, FORTRAN, and PL/1. They used pre-modem synchronous interfaces that one day hoped to be as fast as a 1200 baud modem. This was the kind of a computer that became sentient in the book. I'm suppressing my disbelief only because Mike was such a sympathetic character in the book.
The Lunar Authority was a political entity on Earth that managed the relationship between the Earth and the Moon. The Lunar Authority dictated and the Moon kowtowed (that last word may not be politically correct but is nevertheless accurate). The Lunar Authority set the quotas and paid the farmer in L.A. tender that barely had any worth. If you could, you immediately converted what you were paid into Hong Kong dollars because those had a stable value on the Moon.
So this story is about the war between Earth and the Moon for independence. I won't tell you how it ends. It's worth reading it yourself.
It turns out that Moon was a penal colony, a dumping ground for criminals, like Australia was for Great Britain. Convicted felons on Earth were shipped up to the Moon were they'd do hard service until their sentences were met and then, because of their adaption to 1/6th gravity, would be unable to return to the earth and so, again like Australia, a inique economy and culture came into being.
The primary export of the Moon was food grown in tunnels ("warrens") under lights with water and fertilizer added. The food (mostly grains) were packed into steel containers and launched from the Moon's surface back to Earth via a magnetic catapult. The containers would have very limited guidance and control and would splash down into the ocean off of India where they'd be recovered and offloaded.
A lot off the management of the grain shipments to Earth (basic ballistics) was performed by a central computer named "Mike". We're using to thinking that our powerful computers used for machine learning or other artificial intelligence tasks will one day become sentient because, after all, humans evolved into sentience so it must be able to happen to "thinking" machines. Unfortunately this written in the mid-60's so computers were centralized mainframes with 64KB of RAM and programs written in COBOL, FORTRAN, and PL/1. They used pre-modem synchronous interfaces that one day hoped to be as fast as a 1200 baud modem. This was the kind of a computer that became sentient in the book. I'm suppressing my disbelief only because Mike was such a sympathetic character in the book.
The Lunar Authority was a political entity on Earth that managed the relationship between the Earth and the Moon. The Lunar Authority dictated and the Moon kowtowed (that last word may not be politically correct but is nevertheless accurate). The Lunar Authority set the quotas and paid the farmer in L.A. tender that barely had any worth. If you could, you immediately converted what you were paid into Hong Kong dollars because those had a stable value on the Moon.
So this story is about the war between Earth and the Moon for independence. I won't tell you how it ends. It's worth reading it yourself.