When Mike was installed in Luna, he was pure thinkum, a flexible logic...He computed ballistics for pilotless freighters and controlled their catapult. This kept him busy less than one percent of time and Luna Authority never believed in idle hands. They kept hooking hardware into him—decision-action boxes to let him boss other computers, bank on bank of additional memories, more banks of associational neural nets, another tubful of twelve-digit random numbers, a greatly augmented temporary memory. Human brain has around ten-to-the-tenth neurons. By third year Mike had better than one and a half times that number of neuristors.
And woke up.
Just in case some might have a little trouble parsing all that technical mumbo-jumbo, what Mannie the first-person narrator is describing is a computer familiarly known as the HOLMES FOUR but nicknamed “Mike” by Mannie. Further translation reveals that Mike was installed on the moon to oversee a lunar project for which the computer was clearly overqualified and so programmers, in their infinite wisdom, kept giving it more tasks and upgrading the power required to do them until one day, without warning—and known only to Mannie—the computer named Mike achieved consciousness. And you don’t even have to be familiar with science fiction to know that is something destined to cause problems for somebody down the road.
“As to basic structure, a revolution starts as a conspiracy therefore structure is small, secret, and organized as to minimize damage by betrayal—since there always are betrayals. One solution is the cell system and so far nothing better has been invented.”
At is most basic level, distilled down from all the tangential narrative components, this novel exists primarily as a handbook for starting a revolution. The Professor is the brains of the outfit and he is more than readily equipped to get a revolution started. Of course, once things get started, everything must be adaptable because there is no telling how things will evolve—not the assertion that in all cases there will be rats—but without the proper foundation, none of that stuff which comes later will matter because the revolution won’t get to that point because it won’t really be a revolution at all. A riot perhaps, and maybe and uprising and, with a lot of luck, it may even be possible to make to the level of an insurrection. But there are rules that must be followed to move such half-hearted efforts to the stage of revolution and the first segment of this novel is perhaps as efficient as any non-fiction handbook on how to carry things out.
"Oh, Tanstaafl. Means `There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.’”
The novel is separated into three sections with the final section titled “Book Three: Tanstaafl!” When Mannie uses the term in its acronym state at one point, another character remarks that it is new to him and wonders what it means. To which Mannie gives this reply. In the wake of the novel’s success, this term was adopted as the unofficial slogan of political-economic ideology known libertarianism even though the phrase had existed along the fringes of the mainstream for decades. Heinlein did not coin the phrase, but his integration of the acronym, the phrase, and the espousal of libertarian ideas as part of the novel’s narrative did much to thrust it into popular usage. Libertarianism is a political philosophy that usually aligns with conservative political ideals and this definitely makes sense in light of the author’s notably hard-right-wing political stance in what is has now become arguably his most famous work Starship Troopers.
