How to Conduct a Revolution
The narrative structure of the book is a tale of how a revolution is inspired, planned, and implemented. It is, basically, a kind of how-to handbook for staging an organized revolt against an authoritarian power. The first section of the book sets the stage for carrying out the uprising by focusing the grass roots communication system that seeds a ground already fertile for raising a revolutionary crop. The rest of the book basically carries forth that process of thought into action.
Political Complexity of a Social Union
Robert Heinlein by this point in his career had already become infamous as one of the most hardcore conservative writers in American fiction and not that was limited to science fiction. Starship Troopers, his signature work at the time, is considered an unabashedly polemical novel expressing right-wing ideology. It is exceedingly unexpected, then, that in this novel Heinlein presents a portrait of a society that is sympathetic to multiple political ideologies which seem to stand in direct opposition to each other. Professor La Paz declares himself to be a “Rational Anarchist” who accepts that some form of governmental control is necessary which in itself makes him a figure of internal opposition against his own ideology. The story upholds certain tenets of social liberalism while at the same supporting the great white hope of conservative economics: a pure unregulated free market. Infamously, the last section of the book bears a subtitle acronym standing for “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch” which was almost immediately adopted as a libertarian slogan in the wake of the book’s publication.
The Coming of the Computer Age
A master computer named after Sherlock Holmes is basically in complete charge of operating the lunar penal colony which is the central setting of the story. Eventually, it is discovered that this computer, named HOLMES IV, has evolved to the point of attaining self-awareness. The narrator alone has discovered this secret, becomes friends with the computer and rechristens him with the nickname Mike in honor of Sherlock’s smarter brother, Mycroft. It is through this strange relationship of the narrator (Mannie) and Mike that the novel is most prescient about the coming age of the computer. Mannie and Mike develop a relationship that is really best described as symbiotic in which the computer is as dependent upon humans as humans are dependent upon computers and how that symbiosis reflects of the world of today should not need any explanation.
