Revolt on the Moon

Revolt on the Moon (original title: The Moon has Harsh Mistress ) is a Romance of Robert A. Heinlein published in 1966.

Heinlein had been made treat of “fascistic” with the exit of Stars, attention! (see the dedication, for example). With Revolt on the moon , it passes for an anarchistic .

Revolt on the Moon is one of the showpieces of the work of Heinlein, and this for several reasons:

It described there the emergence of an artificial intelligence on the basis of critical mass of inter-connected computers, this topic is recurring in cognitive sciences: it is based on the assumption of need for the existence of a minimum capacity of data processing to reveal " the intelligence". Obviously, this topic occults the problem of the specific organization which such an entity must probably have, as Dijkstra noted it: the question of knowing if the computers can think is of the same order as that to know if the submarines can swim. Heinlein binds the emergence of the intelligence to it to that of humor, another recurrent theme.
It described a revolutionary organization occults there whose operation is based almost entirely on the use of information technologies (telephone, listening, voice recognition, synthesis imitating a speaker, database, control of remote systems, plannings complex, simulations, etc)
It described there a society based on very simple principles founders, a kind of return at least rousseauist, with a very high level of tolerance: mix races, polygamy, homosexuality, etc but a justice of expeditious street.

This book popularized the Loglan (the ancestor of the Lojban), a formal artificial language.

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