Recently I read an article regarding the very unhealthy obsession Western media has had for the Spartan mythos. While it does concentrate on the modern far right's unhealthy obsession with what has always been a deeply problematic image, it did get me thinking about one other aspect of the Spartan image. The super soldier.
Now, perhaps the most well understood modern reference to the super soldier is the men and woman of the SPARTAN program from the Halo franchise. I admit, I grew up on those video games and surrounding media, and found them cool, as any young adult uninformed about the horrors of war would. What did help was that the novels by Eric Nylund, especially Fall of Reach, went to great lengths to describe the blatant immorality and cruelty in the creation of the SPARTAN program. Essentially kidnapping and torturing children to create a group of well trained and augmented soldiers superior to any individual soldier produced via natural training.
Naturally though, this does raise the question of what purpose an augmented super soldier actually serves? Especially in a science fiction setting where a warship in orbit is probably far more useful than an augmented super soldier on the ground in most situations. Sure a squad of elite super soldiers faster and more deadly than a platoon of regular men may be useful in a surgical strike, but would they actually be worth more in an age of nuclear arms and guided missiles? The obvious rejoinder would be that even today special forces serve a purpose, for surgical strikes and to help gain information, but they are not war winners by themselves. Even a group with exponentially more ability than the modern SAS or Navy Seals would be of questionable utility in many respects vs slightly more augmented regular soldiers.
To be honest, creating a super soldier program makes very little sense. It offers no innate advantage over regular special forces outside specific context, and the costs/morality is something which is horrific to consider. Unless you are engaged in infinite war, like the Space Marines in Warhammer 40k, then you really don't have a use for them. And even if you do construct them, what on earth do you do with them in peace time?
My own, as yet unpublished novella Integration, deals with this idea. Could a super soldier really reintegrate into society peacefully? Can they even be seen as anything other than a threat by the government which created them? Would someone indoctrinated into military service be able to just hop back into civilian society without issues?
Ultimately, this is really an answer for fiction to think about. Well, so far at least...
Thursday, 27 February 2020
Wednesday, 19 February 2020
2312
Another one not for the re-read, but this is yet again a great science fiction work! Perhaps unsurprisingly, it is another by Kim Stanley Robinson. I take you to the future, three centuries from when it was penned. The exciting world of 2312.
We start our primer to the 24th century on Mercury. There the great mobile city of Terminator crawls ahead of the ever pursuing sun, allowing for the permanent colonization of the planet. Enter our protagonist Swan Er Hong, an artist on the planet out doing a 'sun walk' a journey of staying just ahead of the deadly star. Her famous grandmother, Alex, the Lion of Venus, has just died. Swan is gathering in the city with her family and friends, when she meets with a representative from the Saturnian league a 'toad faced' fellow named Fitz Wahram who was also a friend of Alex's. Even before the funeral is complete however, things get strange. An inspector from Interplan (think the Space Police) Jean Genette, comes asking if Alex had any enemies.
Little does Swan know, but her grandmother was involved in a Solar System spanning plan. It centered around the Mondragon Accords, which were to develop a semi-planned economy for Earth and all the settled planets, moons, and terrariums which act as floating habitats for humanity in the void. All of these are looked over by qubes, small quantum computers with advanced AI in them. The AI though, are not truly self-aware. But if that is the case, why was Alex so intent on keeping her work away from the artificial eyes of qubes? And why did she keep so much hidden from Swan and the qube implanted in her head, Pauline?
This sparks a long journey around the Solar System, from the mobile city of Terminator on Mercury, to the great ridge covered moon of Saturn, Iapetus. We take a floating tour of where humanity has advanced to in the 24th century and get to bask in how far we have come, but also how far we have fallen.
We see that Earth is still a place of extreme inequality, and great desperation. The sea level has risen by 11 meters in the past few centuries, flooding great metropolises like New York, and sending entire coastlines to the bottom of the ocean. The only ice sheets left are in Antarctica and Greenland. Meanwhile the ravages of global warming have led to mass extinctions, great desertification, and billions dependent on food grown in the many thousands of terrariums and then shipped down the orbital elevators to feed Earth's masses.
Meanwhile, in space those living on the terrariums have lives of great luxury. They have access to quality healthcare, need to worry little about their material health, and can afford to undergo many progressive gene therapies to live long and happy lives measuring over a century, or in some cases two and maybe more! Mars has been terraformed, and Venus is well on its way to being turned into another Earth, but one with a substantially higher gravity. The moons of Jupiter and Saturn are being colonized and terraformed, and the future outside of Earth seems very bright.
Naturally, this sparks resentment from peoples on Earth. They feel left behind or resentful of spacers, and that they live in luxury while the majority of humanity does poorly. The spacers then feel that the Earthers are ungrateful, backwards and unwilling to work to solve their own problems.
This is one of the central conflicts of the story as Swan and Wahram go back and forth between the habitats of the Solar system and Earth, trying to continue the secret project that Alex's grandmother was working on. But the issue of the qubes also looms large throughout the entire story.
Exploring the Earth and the settled solar system in this story makes for an engaging read, and that we do it through the eyes of two characters who alternately detest and desire one another, is pretty fun.
Swan is a very headstrong, antisocial, and - even by the standards of the 24th century - heavily augmented woman. She has undergone numerous gene therapies, had a qube directly transplanted into her head, and even eaten lifeforms found on the oceans of the moon Enceladus. With all this, she has trouble with people, and a difficult past which continuously haunts her, giving her trouble beyond her comfort zone. It also makes her short tempered, and not extremely understanding of the motivations of others. This proves quite capable of biting her in the ass on occasion.
In contrast we have Wahram, who is slow, methodical, and not nearly as ready to jump into extreme situations. He has lived for years around Saturn, working as necessary, and supporting a small family creche he is apart of. His friendship with Alex was because he believed in her vision of the Mondragon Accords unifying humanity through an interdependent economic system, and using the terrariums to help keep species that had gone extinct on Earth alive. Whether Swan can live up to that vision is anybody's guess.
The relationships of these two is central to the plot, making for a kind of cute read.
Our supporting cast is fairly small. Mqaret, Swan's grandfather, plays a the role of an elder father figure to Swan, helping her in the background. Jean Genette, the Interplan inspector who is galavanting about the Solar system on his mission to find out if Alex's fears of the qubes has any basis, and finally Kiran, a boy who rescues Swan from the slums of New York for rescuing her, and he is inadvertently thrown into the chaotic workings of the governing body of Venus, the Venusian Working Group.
Each character has an important role to play in the overall plot, and they do each help round things out to a satisfying conclusion in the end.
The plot itself is not what one would call, action packed. It is more driven by drama, emotional soul searching, and trying to piece out whether any of the main casts fears are actually there at all. It does make for some interesting overarching mysteries. We do have some very fun action sequences though, and bits of adventuring and derring do which would not look out of place on older classics. The scenarios will look very familiar to other sci-fi lovers!
This story though, is largely one which revolves around an interplanetary adventure and romance. It manages to tell both stories quite well I think, and I did not find myself getting bored, even if I admittedly skimmed a few more emotional soul searching internal dialogues. The interactions between the lead characters were always fun, and made for good ways to build both tension and the world around them. With the secondary characters fleshing things out, an amazing story came to light as I progressed through their adventures.
The way the story is set, with chapter headings telling you who we will be seeing and then extracts from in universe documents giving important context and background, the reader will never feel totally lost.
What really sucks you in is the amazing work done on building this vision of the lead up to the year 2312, how the Solar system works, and an honest examination of how, despite all the progress, humanity has not achieved utopia. This was a futuristic setting which I couldn't get enough of. It was familiar enough that I could grasp much of what was going on, while being alien enough that I had a little trouble wrapping my head around many of the concepts in it. That said, it was amazingly conceived and I loved all the detail that went into crafting such a complex and nuanced future, but one not so alien as to be impenetrable. It presented problems, and was bold enough not to decide on easy solutions.
Anyone who earnestly enjoys good science fiction would also be sucked into this world I think, and I believe you too will be happily drawn into the world of 2312. Please enjoy this one!
We start our primer to the 24th century on Mercury. There the great mobile city of Terminator crawls ahead of the ever pursuing sun, allowing for the permanent colonization of the planet. Enter our protagonist Swan Er Hong, an artist on the planet out doing a 'sun walk' a journey of staying just ahead of the deadly star. Her famous grandmother, Alex, the Lion of Venus, has just died. Swan is gathering in the city with her family and friends, when she meets with a representative from the Saturnian league a 'toad faced' fellow named Fitz Wahram who was also a friend of Alex's. Even before the funeral is complete however, things get strange. An inspector from Interplan (think the Space Police) Jean Genette, comes asking if Alex had any enemies.
Little does Swan know, but her grandmother was involved in a Solar System spanning plan. It centered around the Mondragon Accords, which were to develop a semi-planned economy for Earth and all the settled planets, moons, and terrariums which act as floating habitats for humanity in the void. All of these are looked over by qubes, small quantum computers with advanced AI in them. The AI though, are not truly self-aware. But if that is the case, why was Alex so intent on keeping her work away from the artificial eyes of qubes? And why did she keep so much hidden from Swan and the qube implanted in her head, Pauline?
This sparks a long journey around the Solar System, from the mobile city of Terminator on Mercury, to the great ridge covered moon of Saturn, Iapetus. We take a floating tour of where humanity has advanced to in the 24th century and get to bask in how far we have come, but also how far we have fallen.
We see that Earth is still a place of extreme inequality, and great desperation. The sea level has risen by 11 meters in the past few centuries, flooding great metropolises like New York, and sending entire coastlines to the bottom of the ocean. The only ice sheets left are in Antarctica and Greenland. Meanwhile the ravages of global warming have led to mass extinctions, great desertification, and billions dependent on food grown in the many thousands of terrariums and then shipped down the orbital elevators to feed Earth's masses.
Meanwhile, in space those living on the terrariums have lives of great luxury. They have access to quality healthcare, need to worry little about their material health, and can afford to undergo many progressive gene therapies to live long and happy lives measuring over a century, or in some cases two and maybe more! Mars has been terraformed, and Venus is well on its way to being turned into another Earth, but one with a substantially higher gravity. The moons of Jupiter and Saturn are being colonized and terraformed, and the future outside of Earth seems very bright.
Naturally, this sparks resentment from peoples on Earth. They feel left behind or resentful of spacers, and that they live in luxury while the majority of humanity does poorly. The spacers then feel that the Earthers are ungrateful, backwards and unwilling to work to solve their own problems.
This is one of the central conflicts of the story as Swan and Wahram go back and forth between the habitats of the Solar system and Earth, trying to continue the secret project that Alex's grandmother was working on. But the issue of the qubes also looms large throughout the entire story.
Exploring the Earth and the settled solar system in this story makes for an engaging read, and that we do it through the eyes of two characters who alternately detest and desire one another, is pretty fun.
Swan is a very headstrong, antisocial, and - even by the standards of the 24th century - heavily augmented woman. She has undergone numerous gene therapies, had a qube directly transplanted into her head, and even eaten lifeforms found on the oceans of the moon Enceladus. With all this, she has trouble with people, and a difficult past which continuously haunts her, giving her trouble beyond her comfort zone. It also makes her short tempered, and not extremely understanding of the motivations of others. This proves quite capable of biting her in the ass on occasion.
In contrast we have Wahram, who is slow, methodical, and not nearly as ready to jump into extreme situations. He has lived for years around Saturn, working as necessary, and supporting a small family creche he is apart of. His friendship with Alex was because he believed in her vision of the Mondragon Accords unifying humanity through an interdependent economic system, and using the terrariums to help keep species that had gone extinct on Earth alive. Whether Swan can live up to that vision is anybody's guess.
The relationships of these two is central to the plot, making for a kind of cute read.
Our supporting cast is fairly small. Mqaret, Swan's grandfather, plays a the role of an elder father figure to Swan, helping her in the background. Jean Genette, the Interplan inspector who is galavanting about the Solar system on his mission to find out if Alex's fears of the qubes has any basis, and finally Kiran, a boy who rescues Swan from the slums of New York for rescuing her, and he is inadvertently thrown into the chaotic workings of the governing body of Venus, the Venusian Working Group.
Each character has an important role to play in the overall plot, and they do each help round things out to a satisfying conclusion in the end.
The plot itself is not what one would call, action packed. It is more driven by drama, emotional soul searching, and trying to piece out whether any of the main casts fears are actually there at all. It does make for some interesting overarching mysteries. We do have some very fun action sequences though, and bits of adventuring and derring do which would not look out of place on older classics. The scenarios will look very familiar to other sci-fi lovers!
This story though, is largely one which revolves around an interplanetary adventure and romance. It manages to tell both stories quite well I think, and I did not find myself getting bored, even if I admittedly skimmed a few more emotional soul searching internal dialogues. The interactions between the lead characters were always fun, and made for good ways to build both tension and the world around them. With the secondary characters fleshing things out, an amazing story came to light as I progressed through their adventures.
The way the story is set, with chapter headings telling you who we will be seeing and then extracts from in universe documents giving important context and background, the reader will never feel totally lost.
What really sucks you in is the amazing work done on building this vision of the lead up to the year 2312, how the Solar system works, and an honest examination of how, despite all the progress, humanity has not achieved utopia. This was a futuristic setting which I couldn't get enough of. It was familiar enough that I could grasp much of what was going on, while being alien enough that I had a little trouble wrapping my head around many of the concepts in it. That said, it was amazingly conceived and I loved all the detail that went into crafting such a complex and nuanced future, but one not so alien as to be impenetrable. It presented problems, and was bold enough not to decide on easy solutions.
Anyone who earnestly enjoys good science fiction would also be sucked into this world I think, and I believe you too will be happily drawn into the world of 2312. Please enjoy this one!
Monday, 10 February 2020
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
Another one for the Great 2020 reread!
I originally read this sci-fi classic way back in high school, I loved it then and I certainly love it now! It is a classic story of science fiction, one of Robert Heinlein's best works IMO. A story of politics, life on the moon and the desire of the Loonies, as they affectionately call themselves, for liberation from the Earth based Lunar Authority. By any stretch of the imagination, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress!
The story is told through the eyes of Manuel "Mannie" Garcia O'Kelly-Davis, a freeborn son of Lunar 'settlers' who comes to interact with a suddenly sentient computer Mycroft, or Mike as he likes to be called. He's the head honcho computer who controls the majority of the Lunar complexes and their functions. His sudden self-awareness is unprecedented and only Mannie talks to him, becoming one of his oldest friends.
However, Mannie is unsuspectingly drawn into a larger conspiracy when he attends a political rally which gets raided by the troops of the Lunar Authority. Suddenly caught up in a manhunt, he has no choice but to go into hiding alongside his new revolutionary comrades Wyoming "Wyoh" Knott, and Professor Bernardo de la Paz. When informed by Mike that the moon, which exports hydroponic wheat to Earth - in seven short years famine will be stalked by famine in a resource collapse, they decide that they must free Luna from Earth based tyranny. The revolution has begun!
A revolution framed through the eyes of someone who is not a revolutionary is a clever trick, as he serves as a conduit for the audience to be shown the methods of revolt which will bring Luna freedom. We have an in depth look at how the revolution is planned, and then helmed around the person of "Adam Selene" who is Mike simply manipulating his abilities as the great computer to make himself look like someone else and the ostensible leader of the whole revolt. From organizing cells of dissidents to creating false broadcasts for Earth consumption it is a meticulously well planned operation, with Mike planning things down to the decimal points!
For a brief aside, Mike as a computer and character works so well. As I noted elsewhere, the idea of him simply being plugged in and becoming sentient is a pretty common theme in modern AI thinking, but his inability to completely understand humor or many other human nuances is a pretty good look at how alien and unlike us any actual machine intelligence would probably end up being. As a character it also makes him both relatable and just on the line for being alien. What is even better though is that say unlike Rudi from the Emberverse and Merlin from Safehold, he is not infallible. While he is an immense help to the revolution on Luna and in accomplishing other goals, he has a set of limitations which actually build tension rather than deflate it. It's wonderfully well done and very refreshing compared to many modern takes on the same idea.
Of course, we also get a chance to look at Heinlein's concepts for Lunar society. It is one descended from prisoners imported very much against their will to work the Lunar surface and it was overwhelmingly male. It has led to one where people are unflinchingly polite as crossing a line could easily get you 'eliminated' by your fellows. And you better not think of touching a woman! The men outnumber women still three to one (better than the old days!!) and so anyone who so much as touches a woman against her consent will be mobbed and murdered before he can so much as twitch. It creates a society which depends on group marriages and line marriages to survive. Polyamory is a way of life by necessity. Very true to much of Heinlein's free love ideals. It's a unique frontier society, one that makes an interesting case for itself.
Reputation is important, and men live and die by their reputations. Indeed, holding ones family up is quite important. In economic terms, barter is, outside deals with the Authority, the order of the day. It's basically an unregulated free economy. It is also a remarkably tolerant and integrated one. Mannie is mixed race, and in a later event when he goes to Earth this is contrasted with the more intolerant culture of the North American Directorate, especially in Kentucky. It's a chance for commentary on events of the time, and shows itself off as pretty progressive.
The dialect of the Loonies is also delightful to read. They have numerous loan words from Russian and Chinese, and these are liberally sprinkled in adding a great flavor to the people. It takes some eking out, but once you catch on it is amazing to read!
But of course this being a novel of revolution, politics is pretty front and center. Compared to a more preachy novel like Starship Troopers, this one is fairly tame in expanding on Heinlein's political thought. Here we have an attempt at building an new, almost stateless, society. The politics in the book are very much built around the ideas espoused by Professor de la Paz. In the modern day, the story is somewhat understood as the tale of a libertarian revolution. Interestingly, the story itself precedes the common understanding of modern libertarianism, and the Professor calls himself a "Rational Anarchist" when describing his political theory. It can be best summed up with two quotes:
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.
And
I will accept any rules that you feel necessary to your freedom. I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.
These ideas hew very close to libertarian socialist philosophy (especially radical ideas of minarchism where the state is hardly needed) and in that vein the story is interpreted through numerous different philosophies as representing their ideals. However, anarchy and libertarianism can be a slippery subject. The story itself probably can have its politics boiled down to the acronym TANSTAAFL. There ain't no such thing as a free lunch. Though sometimes erroneously credited to Heinlein, it is a phrase dating back to the 1930s. This can roughly be translated down to, nothing comes for free, or there's always a hidden cost. Which is always going to be a good way to describe revolution.
But these hardly distract from the story. The revolution of course is not bloodless or simple, and it really does turn around in numerous surprising ways. It managed to surprise me a few years later how much I had forgotten about the intrigues of the revolution and the delicate and difficult decisions being made in the messier parts. (Indeed one interesting sub-plot revolves around keeping an eye on Terran scientists so they don't send a message back to Earth). These little details really sucked me into the book, and made rereading it so much more enjoyable.
Despite being written in 1966, three years before the first man would walk on the moon in 1969, it gets a remarkable number of things right. The cities are built underground in caverns to protect them from meteor strikes, the microgravity requires a certain way of walking and landing and communicating on the moon is done through hard landlines between the different settlements. The strain of living in low gravity and then experiencing Earth's higher gravity is also explored quite well. Though he did get some things wrong as science marched on, it managed to be remarkably prescient about many modern theories of living permanently on the moon.
Adding all this into the human element, the people who make up our main cast and supporting cast and the eventual love they come to have for each other, makes the revolution completely heart wrenching in its aftermath. I won't spoil any details, but it doesn't give our characters everything they might have wanted.
It is deservedly known as a science fiction classic. I would honestly recommend this to anyone who loves good science fiction, for it manages to tell an amazing story in a now very familiar location. If you've never read this book before, go pick it up and enjoy it!
I originally read this sci-fi classic way back in high school, I loved it then and I certainly love it now! It is a classic story of science fiction, one of Robert Heinlein's best works IMO. A story of politics, life on the moon and the desire of the Loonies, as they affectionately call themselves, for liberation from the Earth based Lunar Authority. By any stretch of the imagination, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress!
The story is told through the eyes of Manuel "Mannie" Garcia O'Kelly-Davis, a freeborn son of Lunar 'settlers' who comes to interact with a suddenly sentient computer Mycroft, or Mike as he likes to be called. He's the head honcho computer who controls the majority of the Lunar complexes and their functions. His sudden self-awareness is unprecedented and only Mannie talks to him, becoming one of his oldest friends.
However, Mannie is unsuspectingly drawn into a larger conspiracy when he attends a political rally which gets raided by the troops of the Lunar Authority. Suddenly caught up in a manhunt, he has no choice but to go into hiding alongside his new revolutionary comrades Wyoming "Wyoh" Knott, and Professor Bernardo de la Paz. When informed by Mike that the moon, which exports hydroponic wheat to Earth - in seven short years famine will be stalked by famine in a resource collapse, they decide that they must free Luna from Earth based tyranny. The revolution has begun!
A revolution framed through the eyes of someone who is not a revolutionary is a clever trick, as he serves as a conduit for the audience to be shown the methods of revolt which will bring Luna freedom. We have an in depth look at how the revolution is planned, and then helmed around the person of "Adam Selene" who is Mike simply manipulating his abilities as the great computer to make himself look like someone else and the ostensible leader of the whole revolt. From organizing cells of dissidents to creating false broadcasts for Earth consumption it is a meticulously well planned operation, with Mike planning things down to the decimal points!
For a brief aside, Mike as a computer and character works so well. As I noted elsewhere, the idea of him simply being plugged in and becoming sentient is a pretty common theme in modern AI thinking, but his inability to completely understand humor or many other human nuances is a pretty good look at how alien and unlike us any actual machine intelligence would probably end up being. As a character it also makes him both relatable and just on the line for being alien. What is even better though is that say unlike Rudi from the Emberverse and Merlin from Safehold, he is not infallible. While he is an immense help to the revolution on Luna and in accomplishing other goals, he has a set of limitations which actually build tension rather than deflate it. It's wonderfully well done and very refreshing compared to many modern takes on the same idea.
Of course, we also get a chance to look at Heinlein's concepts for Lunar society. It is one descended from prisoners imported very much against their will to work the Lunar surface and it was overwhelmingly male. It has led to one where people are unflinchingly polite as crossing a line could easily get you 'eliminated' by your fellows. And you better not think of touching a woman! The men outnumber women still three to one (better than the old days!!) and so anyone who so much as touches a woman against her consent will be mobbed and murdered before he can so much as twitch. It creates a society which depends on group marriages and line marriages to survive. Polyamory is a way of life by necessity. Very true to much of Heinlein's free love ideals. It's a unique frontier society, one that makes an interesting case for itself.
Reputation is important, and men live and die by their reputations. Indeed, holding ones family up is quite important. In economic terms, barter is, outside deals with the Authority, the order of the day. It's basically an unregulated free economy. It is also a remarkably tolerant and integrated one. Mannie is mixed race, and in a later event when he goes to Earth this is contrasted with the more intolerant culture of the North American Directorate, especially in Kentucky. It's a chance for commentary on events of the time, and shows itself off as pretty progressive.
The dialect of the Loonies is also delightful to read. They have numerous loan words from Russian and Chinese, and these are liberally sprinkled in adding a great flavor to the people. It takes some eking out, but once you catch on it is amazing to read!
But of course this being a novel of revolution, politics is pretty front and center. Compared to a more preachy novel like Starship Troopers, this one is fairly tame in expanding on Heinlein's political thought. Here we have an attempt at building an new, almost stateless, society. The politics in the book are very much built around the ideas espoused by Professor de la Paz. In the modern day, the story is somewhat understood as the tale of a libertarian revolution. Interestingly, the story itself precedes the common understanding of modern libertarianism, and the Professor calls himself a "Rational Anarchist" when describing his political theory. It can be best summed up with two quotes:
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.
And
I will accept any rules that you feel necessary to your freedom. I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.
These ideas hew very close to libertarian socialist philosophy (especially radical ideas of minarchism where the state is hardly needed) and in that vein the story is interpreted through numerous different philosophies as representing their ideals. However, anarchy and libertarianism can be a slippery subject. The story itself probably can have its politics boiled down to the acronym TANSTAAFL. There ain't no such thing as a free lunch. Though sometimes erroneously credited to Heinlein, it is a phrase dating back to the 1930s. This can roughly be translated down to, nothing comes for free, or there's always a hidden cost. Which is always going to be a good way to describe revolution.
But these hardly distract from the story. The revolution of course is not bloodless or simple, and it really does turn around in numerous surprising ways. It managed to surprise me a few years later how much I had forgotten about the intrigues of the revolution and the delicate and difficult decisions being made in the messier parts. (Indeed one interesting sub-plot revolves around keeping an eye on Terran scientists so they don't send a message back to Earth). These little details really sucked me into the book, and made rereading it so much more enjoyable.
Despite being written in 1966, three years before the first man would walk on the moon in 1969, it gets a remarkable number of things right. The cities are built underground in caverns to protect them from meteor strikes, the microgravity requires a certain way of walking and landing and communicating on the moon is done through hard landlines between the different settlements. The strain of living in low gravity and then experiencing Earth's higher gravity is also explored quite well. Though he did get some things wrong as science marched on, it managed to be remarkably prescient about many modern theories of living permanently on the moon.
Adding all this into the human element, the people who make up our main cast and supporting cast and the eventual love they come to have for each other, makes the revolution completely heart wrenching in its aftermath. I won't spoil any details, but it doesn't give our characters everything they might have wanted.
It is deservedly known as a science fiction classic. I would honestly recommend this to anyone who loves good science fiction, for it manages to tell an amazing story in a now very familiar location. If you've never read this book before, go pick it up and enjoy it!
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