Two Rereads

I reread John Varley's Red Thunder last week, in a fit of nostalgia after seeing it on the library shelf. I'd forgotten just how directly an influence it was on my fic "Have Spacesuit... if you liked that fic, definitely seek out Red Thunder. It's a delightful space adventure romp that brings in class and race and gender politics in ways that make sense and make the world feel much richer than the Heinlein novels it is clearly inspired by. (The other big influence on Red Thunder is Hiaasen, who gets an early namecheck. The plot is basically a Hiaasen novel as SF.)

But that nostalgia led me to reread The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, one of the biggest influences on Red Thunder. It was hit with the suck fairy a lot less than I'd feared. A lot of the most problematic things about gender or race are either jokes or deliberate provocations... Yes, Manny calls Chinese-Lunarians "the Chinee" and makes comments about how the only engineering they can do is copying other peoples' engineering, but he's called on the former and makes an effort to be more respectful, and on the latter the textual evidence undermines his claims. Yes, Manny is patronizingly sexist all the time, but we're given a lot of effort to explain the social context, to explain why it works for the Lunarians, and most importantly, to explain the shortcomings of the system. The ultimate pronouncement on the line marriage system is the Professor's, who finds it the most logical marriage system for the cultural setting of Luna, but not either universally the best or without significant flaws. In general, the professor's rational anarchism lets Heinlein explore a lot of different cultural ideas without passing judgement on them.

The plot and characterization also held up to inspection. Manny names his computer Mycroft, and the book is full of Sherlock Holmes jokes like the assembly of a set of Irregulars, but the plot also makes most sense viewed as a Holmes story, with Manny as Watson, participating in the plot, contributing his bravery, loyalty, competent hands, and companionship, but ultimately not clever enough to understand the whole shape of things until more is explained to him. It is satisfying in precisely the same way, too- as we learn more about the plan, the depth of the argument about political philosophy unfolds itself in the margins. The push and pull of different governance schemes, the tension between the words on paper and the actuality of power, the difference between the importance of propaganda and the importance of labor...

There's a fascinating scene where Manny deduces that Mike rigged the Congressional election in his favor, and is torn: On the one hand, some part of him believes really strongly that justice is built on fair play, that if you stack the deck in your favor, you end up compromising something really important. On the other hand, another part of him recognizes that when it comes to long-term thinking and thinking about the many instead of the few, Mike is almost certainly going to be a more enlightened ruler than any Congress. And then there's the third part of him, the part that Heinlein explicitly identifies as Randian, that thinks that selfishness is actually more enlightened, and Mike looking out for the good of the many is problematic on its own terms in a society that probably shouldn't be ruled by such a centralizing influence. The decisions Manny makes in the rest of the book are informed by this three-way conflict, which is hilarious since for most of the rest of the book, actions are happening too fast for Manny to make them and Mike ends up making them for Mike and then confirming them with him after the fact. Which often, I think, leads to Mike acting against Mike's own interest. The friendship between Mike and Manny is, after all, the emotional heart of a book that has many amazing emotional centers- Wyoh, Mum, Hazel, Stu, Greg, Prof, etc...

Moon was always my favorite Heinlein as a teenager, and I think it remains so now.