Madison, WI -- August 9, 2007


Reading The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, by Heinlein. It’s his second time reading it. Why twice? He likes all the political theory that’s slipped in with the good stuff. It’s about a revolution and the main character is skeptical, then becomes part of it. One of the main characters would be ISO, good spirit, but a little naïve, which is how he thinks of the ISO.

His friend, who was sitting at his laptop, added that the book also has a computer that is self-aware, which is intriguing. It’s lonely and it tries to get people to talk to it, changing its voice and mannerisms depending on who it talks to. The main character encounters the computer to deal with a joke the computer played after becoming self-aware—billing someone an extra billion dollars. Funny!

His favorite book of all time--Stranger in a Strange Land, by Ray Bradbury.

His own book—it’d be Agitprop, that is agitational propaganda, and it would regard how authority is legitimized. If traditional methods to legitimize authority are not legit, what do we do? How do we do it? He believes it’s not possible to legitimize authority on the scale that we try to. Smaller communities should legitimize themselves?

3 comments:

bibliotecaria said...

Just to note a correction for anyone who might look up the book -- Stranger in a strange land is also by Robert Heinlein, not Ray Bradbury. It was a very intriguing book, but I liked Moon is a... better. (Librarian here; can't help it when I encounter these types of errors on something I have read.)

Duncan Mitchel said...

I noticed that too; I'm wondering whether the error is our dear blogger's or the young man's.

Sonya Worthy said...

Hmmmm. I could go back and look at my notes to find out, but I'm guessing it was my mistake. I made a lot of them when I was on the road, scrambling to do the posts. I try to look things up now that I'm back in San Francisco, because I never know how anything is spelled, but sometimes errors still creep in. Thanks for the heads up!