The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress
Set in 2075, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress takes place in a lunar colony populated by exiled convicts and their descendants, who supply grain to a hungry Earth on terms that are slowly bleeding them out. The narrator Manuel O'Kelly Davis is a computer technician who realizes that the colony's central computer, called Mike, has woken up and become self-aware. Together with the agitator Wyoming Knott and the old academic Professor de la Paz, Manny helps Mike plan and execute a lunar revolution against the Earth-controlled authority. Heinlein writes the book in a clipped, idiomatic English meant to suggest a future lunar dialect, and uses the plot to lay out his ideas about self-government, family, and the use of force. It won the Hugo Award for best novel and is widely treated as one of Heinlein's strongest later books. Musk has cited it as inspiration for using a linear accelerator on the Moon.
Also by Robert A. Heinlein
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What you might want to know about The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
A lunar penal colony stages a revolution against Earth with the help of a self-aware computer and a one-armed engineer.
In a 2021 post on X about lunar mass drivers, Musk called the novel a great book and pointed to its description of a linear accelerator on the Moon.
It is one of his major late novels, often grouped with Stranger in a Strange Land and Starship Troopers as his most influential books.
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress was written by Robert A. Heinlein, published in 1966 by G.P. Putnam's Sons.
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress is 382 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress takes most readers 6 to 8 hours to finish.
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.