On the topic of the old masters of science fiction, if I didn’t mention Robert Heinlein, I would be doing you a disservice. Unlike Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, each of Heinlein’s novels is a single world unto itself, with core of the book tied to a few philosophical ideas meant to encourage debate in the reader. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, for instance, spends more time exploring the ideas of government structure, military service, and voting privilege, than it spends on space marines fighting giant spiders. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is probably the most accessible of these novels, and its central theme regards libertarian-ism and economics.
The setting of this novel is the moon in the year 2075, which has been colonized as an orbital prison colony for undesirables of an united Earth government. As decades have passed since the founding of the colony, the small initial population of exiled colonists have grown into a new nation with its own language and culture. However, as the moon is legally owned by Earth, a large majority of food and other products are taken from the lunar colony as a tax to feed the billions still on Earth. Through the eyes of Manuel Garcia O’Kelly, a lowly computer technician narrating the novel in Russianized-English, this high tax spawns an odd rebellion lead by an old professor, a sentient AI, and a young revolutionary. The path to which this small group pursues their revolution is extraordinarily creative, and explores the vast possibilities that outer space lends to conflict and government.
As an endnote, the mishmash of Russianized-English can seem a bit weird, or even disorienting at first, yet as the novel goes on it becomes much more understandable.
Here are some ways to pick up this novel:
SDSU Sci Fi 