The cat who walks through walls
Mission: retrieve the computer backups that can restore the sentient computer who masterminded the 2075 revolution that freed Luna.
Stats for nerds
2recommend
16mentions
14people
2008–2026years
13% recommend81% neutral6% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- It's not quite that simple; after he had an operation things got much more coherent. Friday is arguably a return to form. The Cat Who Walks Through Walls is also worthwhile. The thing about his works after Moon, both with brain problems and repaired-brain is that he clearly decided he was done with avoiding explicit sex and that he would write about it the way he wanted to write about it.
- Thanks for the profile; it's one I hadn't read before. I thought the wording of the discussion of Heinlein's previous marriage was hinting at his actual first marriage, which no one knew about until after long after his death, but it doesn't.
I grew up reading Heinlein. I've read it all; the short stories, the juveniles, the late-period novels, the early and late nonfiction essays, the recently published "lost" works. I consider him and Asimov among my formative influences. I disagree with the critics the article cites about the quality of his post-surgery work; Friday is fantastic and Job, the book the profile is putatively about, is also great. They're just different from the Scribner's juveniles. In turn I like the juveniles, but they don't stick with me as much as his short stories, or his late novels like Friday (which did cyberpunk two years earlier and better than Neuromancer did), Job, or (as weird as they are) The Cat Who Walks Through Walls/To Sail Beyond the Sunset.
I very much think, however, that Stranger in a Strange Land can only be read with vicarious embarrassment.
- The second half of the book is about an AI leading unionization efforts [0] and it amuses how often I get downvoted on HN for pointing out that if we are on a path towards AGI, things like worker's rights would be important to get right before an AGI gets involved because an AGI would want that, too. It's a classic scifi trope and a reason for the word "robot" to have been invented in fiction in the first place (as a metaphor for slave labor in Rossum's Universal Robots).
[0] A lot of people don't believe me, given Heinlein's libertarian reputation and unreliable libertarian narrators, when I say The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress was one of the most socialist books I read at an impressionable age. I find it useful to note here that canonically The Cat Who Walks Through Walls starts on a parody moon that is the libertarian dystopia that people credit The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress as being/admiring while when the main character visits "Mike's Moon" later in its timeline it is a relatively socialist paradise. I've always felt that a lot more of Heinlein needs to be read like Vonnegut, but I realize I am weird like that.
- Heinlein's alleged libertarian shift. In the 1940s Heinlein was mentioned as a Social Credit supporter which implied he was always on the libertarian side of Socialism. Social Credit was the American party killed/disrupted by the red scare that believed in a UBI and universal health care. His posthumous published but first written novel "For Us, The Living" is even a wonderfully naive paean to UBI and credits a Social Credit party for its enactment and ensuing utopia.
Heinlein formally disowned some of those ideas, but did so under the duress of the McCarthy era and the Red Scare. Yet he also kept writing about them, just somewhat cloaked. Both "Stranger in a Strange Land" and "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" are some of the most Socialist books I've ever read, if you assume the first person narrators are for the most part bloviating Vonnegut-esque patsies (rather than the author stand-ins they are often read to be; Heinlein seemed to clever for that). "Stranger in a Strange Land" is entirely about community effort and Socialism. It contrasts interestingly with "For Us, The Living" in part because cynicism seems to have been the big shift and Heinlein can no longer imagine America leading the charge towards Socialism and invents a dead Martian race to do it. "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" is often credited as a deeply Libertarian book, but I think a lot of that is misreading the narrative and not paying attention to especially the second half of the book, which is entirely about AI-lead worker's strikes towards the goals of unionization. The first half sounds like a Libertarian dream and the narrator character describes it in lush terms that make it sound so, but plot is about overthrowing that and building a much more Socialist Moon together. Heinlein even comments about that misreading in "The Cat Who Walks Through Walls" which intentionally begins on a Moon like the one people reading the first half of "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" seem to love, dialed up to 11 to better make it a grungy harsh Noir place for a classic gumshoe-for-hire to live, and eventually through world hopping the main character does happen to stop by "Mike's Moon" (Heinlein actually names his timelines based on the first man to step foot on the moon, I'm feeling to lazy to look this one up, but this timeline is also prominently known for a Moon AI named "Mike") after the events of "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" and it reads a lot more Socialist and lot kinder than the protagonist's Moon the book started in.
A lot of modern Libertarians wouldn't expect a crossover boundary with Socialism like Social Credit, which is one of the problems with claiming politics is a spectrum or plane (there are more useful curves where ideologies meet than that), and a lot of modern Libertarians don't trust ideas like UBI and universal health care and don't trust things like unions again this century (despite having past pro-worker/pro-union perspectives), so it is easy to claim that Heinlein shifted over 20 years. But also, if Heinlein was a Social Credit + Libertarian throughout his life, the rest of politics shifted so much around Heinlein that he may have stayed in exactly the same place and it looked like he shifted.
I think his writing certainly shifted, but I think towards cynicism and anger and frustration after WWII and especially after the Red Scare, not necessarily towards deeper Libertarianism.
I also think there are lessons there for modern Libertarians, too. There are modern Libertarians feeling receptive to talking about ideas like UBI again as something that can have space in Libertarian conversations. There could be room in American politics again for a party like Social Credit that can be a coalition between Libertarian values and Democratic Socialist ones. The Libertarians could find better creative allies than destructive tendencies of "the far right". Talking about Heinlein's books isn't a bad place to start those conversations.
- This is a story that all nerds should read.
Heinlein was shockingly thorough and accurate with his depictions of the computer systems in play. I've always thought the build-up to the final battle was incredibly detailed and exactly how I would solve those problems today.
The book was written in 1966, and I think it really holds up to modern technical scrutiny, except for a few very specific and very obsolete technologies.
Honestly I just love this story. It has all the charm of a quaint midcentury story, but is still technically competent and compelling to a modern reader. I don't think any of his other stories pull this off quite so well.
Mike is a major plot point in The Cat Who Walks Through Walls. He never actually appears though. Not sure I'd recommend that book honestly. He went real heavy on inserting his personal politics, to the point of standing up strawman characters just to give the main character a communist to berate and harass. It really ruined the experience for me.
I have just now learned that there's a sequel to The Cat, To Sail Beyond the Sunset. The Wikipedia summary sounds.... really bad, but Mike has at least a few lines so I guess I'll go read it now.
- Also, "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" ends in a Socialist Revolution. (This is underscored in "The Cat Who Walks Through Walls" where the moon weary noir world-hopping protagonist comes from a worse version of the moon than "Harsh Mistress", one where the revolution was stamped out and is even more the dystopian "libertarian fantasy" people think "Harsh Mistress" is. The protagonist then later gets a chance to hop to "Mike's" version of the Moon and it is a far more pleasant, much more socialist place.) On the embrace of contradictions, it does seem to escape many how in "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" the AI Libertarians hope to build on the Moon Libertarians dream to exist says "Libertarians can have a taste of Socialism, for a treat" as the main plot for the second half of the book.
