Ever stare up at the night sky and wonder what it would be like to live on the Moon? You know, just hopping around and seeing Earth when you crane your head back instead of a glowing white circle. It's been a cool minute since we first landed up there, and it kind of seems like we should be living, working, and vacationing in lunar locations by this point. Or so Robert A. Heinlein seemed to be thinking when he published The Moon is a Harsh Mistress in 1966.

Though released in the swinging sixties, the story is set in 2075. It follows Mannie, a Luna computer technician, and Mike, Luna's super computer who gains self-awareness. To promote Mike's study of humanity, Mannie attends a Sons of Revolution meeting and accidently becomes entangled in an insurrection when the Lunar Authority crashes the party to arrest the revolutionaries. Oops.

Mannie soon learns that Luna will exhaust its resources in seven years under the existing system, resorting to cannibalism shortly thereafter. Not down with that, he teams up with Mike and rebels Wyoming Knotts and Professor Paz to plan a revolution that will turn Luna into a free state. And the rest, as they say, is future history.

Harsh Mistress gained huge popular after its release. Science fiction fans found the novel's imagining of life on the moon fascinating, and the book was nominated for the 1966 Nebula Award and the 1967 Hugo Award. Although it did not win the Nebula, it did take home the Hugo, making it Heinlein's fourth Hugo win, an achievement not yet surpassed by any other author.

But Harsh Mistress also massed readers outside science fiction circles, too. With its exploration of laissez-faire capitalism, individualism, and insistence of extremely limited government, Heinlein's novel became a fan favorite for the libertarian movement. Other readers, however, have panned the novel for sugarcoating unrestrained capitalism, saying it glosses over such systematic pitfalls as monopolies and labor exploitation. Pretty different takes on the same book, right?

To this day, the novel remains a source of political controversy and has made Heinlein an author both praised and criticized in equal measure. So grab a copy and decide for yourself whether Heinlein is a visionary, a villain, or something in between.

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress isn't really a novel. Sure, it has a plot and characters like a novel, and if novels quacked, it would probably quack, too—but Heinlein's work here reads more like a treatise than a novel true.

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress's treatise topic of choice is political philosophy. This book imagines a hypothetical revolution that strives to assert personal freedom over law, banishing all forms of government in favor of individual choice—or, as it is labeled in the novel, "Rational Anarchism."

There's a catch to treatises, though: Only philosophy professors and students really dig these things, and few others think a treatise on electromagnetism or political philosophy make for a relaxing, poolside read. In other words, treatises don't usually hang out at the top of bestseller lists.

In a spoonful of sugar moment, Heinlein genetically spliced his treatise with the DNA of a science fiction novel. For us readers, then, this means we get all the mind-expanding exploration of a political treatise disguised with the engaging character relations, action-packed scenes, and suspenseful intrigue of a novel, helping us think about political philosophy without all the boringness of, well, thinking about political philosophy.

But likely the best reason to care about this novel is provided by Professor Paz in the novel itself. When Prof addresses the new Luna Congress, he asks them to "distrust the obvious, suspect the traditional" (22.39) and not to "reject the idea merely because it seems preposterous—think about it" (22.41). And we argue, dear Shmoopers, that anything granting us the opportunity to think in new and original ways is worth caring about. And if it's a political philosophy treatise dressed up as a sci-fi novel? That just means the medicine goes down that much easier.