YMMV / The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress

• Alternate Character Interpretation: Stock exchange fraud, rigged voting, hypocritical "anarchists" who deride "government knows best" philosophy right up until they form a shadow cabinet that "knows better" than the government they helped construct; not to mention the strategic use of weapons of mass destruction to terrorize the Earth's population into caving to their demands after they asphyxiated the previous "head of state" into a vegetable state... Our heroes, ladies and gentlemen! To his credit, Mannie frequently lampshades just how far the dirty realities of the revolution differed from the heroic story told in later history books, and Prof gleefully admits that he considers all rules merely excuses, even for those who claim to be bound by them or believe in them. And the asphyxiation was almost certainly an accident.
• He's Just Hiding: Proven in later books, when The World as Myth became unified.
• Memetic Mutation: Tanstaafl has lasted into the Internet Era as a popular piece of jargon, especially among engineers and economists, since it expresses an essential, universally-applicable concept in a simple, memorable acronym. The expression was in use in the 1930s, but this novel made it popular.
• Once Original, Now Common: As noted on the main page, the book pretty much invented things like Colony Dropping and virtual acting, but nowadays those things are so commonplace in science fiction that the book's presentation of these concepts is unlikely to even raise an eyebrow, much less come across as brilliantly fresh.
• Values Dissonance:
  • The reasons Luna society treats women as it does are carefully explained in the text, but how Stu (an earthling) treats women on Earth shows that sexual attitudes on Earth in 2076 are pretty much the same as they were in the late 1960s, when the book was written.
  • It's a major character point that Wyoming considers herself a failure because she failed to have a healthy child. Nobody in the book even suggests that she should think of herself in terms that don't revolve around her womb. This can't be chalked up to the differences between Luna and Earth.

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