Writers steal, that’s a fact.  You can call it an homage, revisionism or Fried Wild Peacock, but the fact is the roots of almost every popular written work can be traced to some other writer’s creation or an event the writer experienced.  What makes the work interesting is what happens to the source material once the writer pushes it through the filter of his or her imagination.   That’s when you get parodies, like Bored of the Rings or revisions like Wicked or Wide Sargasso Sea.   With Robert Heilein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, you get a recounting of what the American Revolution could have been like, if America had been in outer space.

It goes like this: after creating a life-sustaining habitat on the moon, mankind initially developed the sphere as a planetary sized Alcatraz for its criminals and political malcontents.  No guards or monitoring are needed since the prisoners cannot escape and Earthlings enjoy a serene existence with their agitators gone.   Decades after transportation been halted, the descendents of the original settlers (Lunar colonists or “Loonies”) now supply Earth’s population with food.  Of course a lot of technology is used to run the colony and one of those descendants, Manny O’Kelly-Davis is the technician to the moon’s largest computer, the HOLMES IV.

Think of the HOLMES IV as an enormous server that looks after all of the transactions needed to exist on the moon.  (Now remember this book was written before the age of servers, networks and cloud computing).   Given the computer’s capabilities and sedentary nature, Manny  renamed his charge Mycroft after Sherlock’s smarter brother then shortens it to Mike.  By programming it, testing it and tinkering with the computer, Manny has learned something about Mike that no one else knows: the computer’s self-aware.

It’s Mike’s abilities that twist this traditional story.   Mike performs the calculations that demonstrate the lunar colonists must break away from their earth-bound governors to avoid starving themselves to death.  Mike is also instrumental in developing the revolutionary organization necessary to overthrow earth’s sovereign government and the tactics necessary for winning a revolutionary war.  To Mike, this is a fun intellectual exercise that lets him interface with more people (he’s a friendly computer) but to Manny and the Lunar colonists, Mike is their secret weapon and their strongest chance to achieve freedom.  The book is good enough that when the battle begins, you’ll care what happens to the computer.

Heinlein introduced many pet ideas into this novel, like sentient machines and line marriage but the essential story is repeated time and again in history.  When one group exploits the resources of another and gives little or no return, the victimized group will eventually declares a need for self-governance and revolt.  It’s happened before and it will happen again.  Heinlein just imagined how it will happen once we move out into the stars.

On reflection, this book may not be stolen material.  Perhaps, as Willa Cather wrote, there are only two or three human stories and we go on repeating them as if we were the first.  If so, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is the story of each culture’s need for self-governance.  Heinlein just set it in a culture we haven’t created yet.