The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress is a 1966 science fiction novel by American writer Robert A. Heinlein about a lunar colony's revolt against absentee rule from Earth.

The Warden holds power through the Federated Nations' Lunar Authority, but his main responsibility is to ensure delivery of vital wheat shipments to Earth; he seldom intervenes in the affairs of the discharged and free-born population, allowing a virtual anarchist or self-regulated pioneer society to develop.

Mannie also introduces Wyoh to his mentor, the elderly Professor ("Prof") Bernardo de la Paz, a former political exile and esteemed Lunar educator.

Mannie, Wyoh, and Prof create a covert cell organization protected by Mike, who controls the telephone and other systems, acts as secretary and becomes "Adam Selene, Chairman of the Committee for Free Luna."

Following the failed raid on the political meeting, the Lunar Authority sends convict-troops to 'police' the colony, creating friction and unrest, which the revolutionaries encourage; when six troopers commit a rape and double-murder, anti-Authority riots erupt.

Mike impersonates the Warden and others in messages to Earth, to give the revolutionaries time to organize their preparations, while Prof sets up an "ad hoc Congress" to distract and contain various "self-appointed political scientists" (nicknamed "yammerheads") and serve the Committee's ends.

Prof reveals that the purpose of the mission was not to convince Terra to recognize Luna's independence, which was considered an unattainable goal at that point, but to sow division while unifying their own people, and they were successful.

Public opinion on Earth has become fragmented; news of Mannie's arrest, coupled with an attempt to bribe him into becoming the next Warden of an enslaved Luna, unify the normally apolitical Loonies.

The Federated Nations of Earth send an infantry force to subdue the Lunar revolution but the troops, with superior arms but no experience in low-gravity underground combat, are wiped out by Loony men, women and children, who suffer three times the number of casualties, among them Mannie's youngest wife.

When Mannie asks him why he bought it, the Professor relates a parable, implying that self-government is an illusion caused by failure to understand reality: Once there was a man who held a political make-work job ... shining a brass cannon around a courthouse.

[9] Algis Budrys of Galaxy Science Fiction in 1966 praised The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, citing "Heinlein's expertise for dirt-level politics, snappy dialogue and a sense of an actual living society."

Budrys suggested that the story may actually be Mike manipulating humans without their knowledge to improve its situation, which would explain why the computer no longer communicates with them after the revolution succeeds.

"[12] Leigh Kimmel of The Billion Light-Year Bookshelf said that the novel is "the work of the man at the height of his powers, confident in his abilities and in the editorial respect he enjoys, and thus free to take significant risks in writing a novel that would stretch the boundaries of the genre as they stood at the time."

Kimmel cited Heinlein's "colloquial language ... an extrapolated lunar creole that has arisen from the forced intersection of multiple cultures and languages in the lunar penal colonies"; the protagonist's disability; "the frank treatment of alternative family structures"; and "the computer which suddenly wakes up to full artificial intelligence, but rather than becoming a Monster that threatens human society and must be destroyed as the primary Quest of the story, instead befriends the protagonist and seeks to become ever more human, a sort of digital Pinocchio.

"[13] Adam Roberts said of the novel: "It is really quite hard to respond to this masterful book, except by engaging with its political content; and yet we need to make the effort to see past the ideological to the formal and thematic if we are fully to appreciate the splendour of Heinlein's achievement here.

He said that it "represents Robert Heinlein at his finest, giving him scope for the armchair philosophizing that increasingly dominated his mature work, but marrying his polemics to a smartly conceived plot packed with considerable drama."