The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress

And he wrote, he wrote a series of books and one of them is called the powers of the earth.

And it is a it is a play on Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, but completely different.

But but just so much fun to read.

Just really fun.

Mike.

[laughs] That's a, that's a reference to, uh, Robert Heinlein's Moon Is a Harsh Mistress.

Ah, is it?

Where Mike was the com- Mike was the computer-

uh 2023 was the first book and last year 25 was the second book uh yeah and i was just going to comment that i think there's a lot of crossover between sci-fi and bitcoin and cypherpunk mentality you know there's the cyberpunk genre of fiction you know like philip k dick and uh William Gibson, Verna Vinge, that kind of stuff.

A lot of those writers were kind of libertarian minded and even go back to classic sci-fi of Asimov and who was I think of Ray Bradbury and things like The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.

Those are all quite, again, freedom minded writers.

you know the people who are imagining futures beyond the trappings of of society closing in i think in the 1950s 60s writers and thinkers started to see hang on you know we're We're getting the benefit of more centralized societies.

That one, the Moon one.

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.

Have you read that one? No, the main character in it has like Russian, he's of Russian descent and he talks, he's written like the way he would talk, like somebody who speaks, who's learned English and is of Soviet descent.

And it's really difficult to read.

But if they fear the individual, they are absolutely paralyzed by the concept of an entire society of unapologetic, heavily armed, highly intelligent revolutionaries.

Which leads us to Robert A. Heinlein's 1966 epic, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.

This is a towering achievement of science fiction.

And arguably Heinlein's finest integration of political philosophy and narrative momentum.

Which is an incredibly cinematic climax.

It is.

So why hasn't it been filmed? I mean, the phrase the moon is a harsh mistress is practically part of our cultural lexicon.

The reason it stalls in development is that Heinlein's personal politics are the skeletal structure of the narrative.

Hello, glad to be here.

And we are going to look at SAASS 600 through the book, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein.

So last month, we talked about 601 Strategic Foundations through looking at Joe Abercrombie's The Heroes, and today we're going past that, even though the number is back one, to SAASS 600, Foundations of Military Theory, and how those theories are going to play out in space and time in, uh, The Moon is a Harsh, Harsh Mistress.

The good news is that I get to be a part of this.

... very, very happy.

Okay, so we're gonna grapple with the question that SAASS 600 does, which is, what is war? Is strategy timeless, or is it a product of context? And how do the new domains alter a war s- or war, generally, character without changing its nature? And this is a great lab test, the classical theories against some extreme technological paradigms, which Robert Heinlein really liked to do, especially in his later work.

So Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, it was the book that came out, and the second really big novel that came out, the first one being Starship Troopers.

And then after that, he started just racking up the a- awards.