A slow start but a story relevant today.

Classic Heinlein perfectly written a real fun read.

There are multiple layers to this book. I first read it 50 years ago and enjoyed it just as much this time. Can a computer become self-aware? If so, how? Would it be so much more than its designers imagined? Shifting gears, this is a story about a libertarian society revolting after being exploited. Suspension of disbelief is harder at 65 than at 15, but the main characters are just as interesting. Heinlein raises some questions about the American experiment that I didn’t appreciate until recently. In short - if this book doesn’t start you thinking, you can’t or just don’t want to.

He really understood.

I was so moved by *Stranger in a Strange Land* that the inspiration stayed with me for weeks. I searched for books by the same author and came on this one. l was puzzled and disappointed. Firstly, the languaging was difficult and choppy, making the reading of it unpleasant to my inner ear. Then, there was so much boring detail about the revolution and its machinery that my eyes glazed over. I have to give the author some credit for having created such a richly detailed world. I just wasn’t interested in all of the details. Most of all though, I objected to the philosophy of the book. Maybe I expected too much, after S in a S Land. Also, I’d read a review of this book that claimed the reviewer had based his whole life on the philosophy contained in this book. Good Lord I hope not. Such a casual readiness to eliminate people for minor, sometimes unconscious infractions, and a willingness to live without any written rules (only the cultural ones for which one could be cheerfully eliminated). Finally, the revolution was accomplished through subterfuge, propaganda and misrepresentation of everything. The idea seems to be that the means justify the ends, which… is exactly the underlying assumption of the organizations from which they were seceding. Again, I suppose if you’re accepting that assumption (that everyone is a power-hungry liar, so you must be the same) then the protagonists were successful in the end. I was just expecting something a little more inspiring. :(