Kalfu, a petro of Papa Legba, who controls all crossings between this world and the world of the spirits, is such a one. Papa Legba—who, back in West Africa, before he came to Haiti and the rites of Voodoo, was most definitely a trickster—is wise and can be kindly, though you would be ill advised to trust him. Kalfu, also known as Carrefour, is, like Voodoo’s other petros, demonic. Not the pale Moon; the dark Moon, red and spiteful, drunk on a mixture of rum and gunpowder. He lets chaos and ill fortune through the crossroads. You should expect no kindness from him.
The destruction brought by dark Moons need not be fiery. It can be watery, as most Moons can. Water, too, flows; water, too, reflects; water, too, shines silver; water, too, changes and hides and destroys. Gilgamesh, king and hero, wailed like a woman in labour as the great flood rose around him. Inanna, the moon goddess, blamed herself and tried to make amends.
But the waters of the Moon bring life, too. Drinking water through which moonlight has shone can help a woman to conceive. Indeed, in many cultures moonlight in and of itself can impregnate; virtuous young women around the world have been advised to avoid it. It was Gabriel, who is the power of God, and who in the Kabbalah is the angel of the Moon, who appeared to Mary at the annunciation.
At the other end of his life, Christ, like the Moon, left the world for two nights before returning.
After conception, the influence of the Moon may be unhappy; it creates mooncalves, which are abominations or abortions, poorly formed. But by some sea coasts you can only be born as the Moon pulls in the tide, just as you can only die as the tide withdraws.
The moonlight of Khonshu, whose name means “traveller”, brought fertility to the animals and women of Egypt alike. A deity who saw through that which he started, Khonshu was also the god of blood and the placenta—the blood of enemies being a placenta for the king—and of childbirth, too. In Marvel comics, the great hybrid mythopoeia of our days, Khonshu has come to inhabit the soul of Marc Spector, a Jewish mercenary who has thus become Moon Knight. He is a curious, unstable creation—an inversion, in a way, of Batman. Batman was born in the pearly moonlight of violence done to his loved ones; Moon Knight was born of the violence Spector inflicted on those whom others loved. Moon Knight’s multiple identities are within his own damaged psyche, not a play-acting playboy’s disguise. Batman seeks darkness; Moon Knight would rather shine than hide, protected not by shadows but by the fear his unlooked-for presence evokes.
Antagonism between bats and the Moon is not unique to comic books. The Alur of the Congo tell of a time when the Moon came, by invitation, to dine with the bats as a friend. But the Moon insisted on eating a morsel the bats did not want him to eat, which was ill mannered. The bats have, ever since, hung upside down to show the Moon their displeasure, and their arses.
- VIII -
THE UNWORLD
MANUEL GARCIA O’KELLY IS A COMPUTER REPAIRMAN, A revolutionary, an ambassador, an ice miner, a farmer, the only friend of an artificial intelligence, a doting polygamous husband to polyandrous wives and a cyborg. He is also, before all of these things, a prisoner. This is because the Moon on which Manny lives is a prison.
“The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress” (1967), narrated by Manny and written by Robert Heinlein, was the most influential novel about the Moon published in the 20th century. Written while the Apollo programme was at its peak, and a human Moon seemed truly possible, it is the thrilling story of a revolution’s success against overwhelming odds. The book plays science-fictional strangeness—a conscious computer with multiple personalities, Manny’s detachable, replaceable, special-purpose arms—against a largely familiar story. Like the first major Moon novel of pulp science fiction, “The Birth of a New Republic” (1931), by Jack Williamson and Miles Breuer, “The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress” is clearly and self-consciously based on the American Revolution. At the same time, it takes the Moon back to the realm of satire and political speculation, creating and destroying a utopia that has proved particularly beguiling to libertarians, including those in Silicon Valley.*
It is feted as a political novel about freedom. At the same time, it is the reverse—a novel about constraint and the impossibility of politics on the unworld Moon.
In 2075, when the novel begins, the Earth has been using the Moon as a penal colony for almost a century, both for political prisoners and non-political ones: it is never clear whether Manny’s grandfather, shipped up for violence from Johannesburg, was the former or the latter. This might seem a costly way to dispose of convicts. But their labour, growing grain in fusion-lit caverns from hard-mined ice, is valuable, and escape is impossible. Not only does the Earth control all the spaceships; life on the Moon imposes physiological fetters of its own. Anyone who stays there for more than a few months can never adapt again to life on Earth.
Transportation is thus a life sentence, even if a transportee’s formal incarceration lasts just a few years. The Loonies who live in Luna City, Novy Leningrad, Churchill, Tycho Under, Hong Kong Luna and the Moon’s other “warrens”, whether they are old lags or their similarly weakened descendants, are stuck there, fragments of cultures from all over the Earth
On the Moon the erratic is the rule. The regolith is always a mixture of the nearby and the far flung.
now sundered from it. Manny, fit and determined, can visit Earth, but it is very hard, and he cannot stay long. Thanks to his prison planet, his body is a cage.
Yet at the start of the novel Manny is also free—and so are his fellow Loonies. The Lunar Authority, represented in its bunker in Mare Crisium by the Protector of the Lunar Colonies, universally known as the warden, cares no more about what they get up to in the warrens than a honey badger would. The Loonies’ prison has no guards. They can do anything they like as long as they can afford it, as long as their peers will let them and as long as they sell grain to the Authority at the Authority’s fixed price. They get what they pay for in life, and expect nothing more; their motto is TANSTAAFL, There Ain’t No Such Thing as a Free Lunch.*
The Loonies have no call on any state assistance—but neither do they owe any tax to the state. Indeed, they are, for most practical purposes, stateless; no government puts legal restraints on their behaviour. Instead, there is custom, as harsh as the Moon itself. “Zero pressure”, as Manny explains, “is no place for bad manners.” Accidents are lethal—and so are “accidents”. Transgressions against either common sense or common decency are, by the time the novel is set, rare. “Attrition ran 70 percent in early years,” Manny explains, “but those who lived were nice people. Not tame, not soft, Luna is not for them. But well-behaved.” The badly behaved—a category which includes any man who touches a woman without her consent—face the popular justice of “elimination” through the nearest airlock.
The civic code becomes an uncontested feature of the environment, an aspect of the Moon itself. As Professor Bernado de la Paz—“Prof”—the book’s Benjamin Franklin, or possibly Lenin, puts it when addressing the Authority:
Luna herself is a stern schoolmistress; those who have lived through her harsh lessons have no cause to feel ashamed. In Luna City a man may leave purse unguarded or home unlocked and feel no fear.… I wonder if this is true in Denver?
When Stu, a tourist, offends some local lads by putting his arm around a girl, Manny explains the situation and its risks to him in the Russian-influenced, pronoun-poor, Loonie syntax employed throughout the book:
We don’t have laws. Never been allowed to. Have customs, but aren’t written and aren’t enforced—or could say they are self-enforcing because are simply way things have to be, conditions being what they are. Could say our customs are natural laws because are way people have to behave to stay alive. When you made a pass at Tish you were violating a natural law… and almost caused you to breathe vacuum.
The natural law, here, is not simply the one that says that blood boils when the air pressure falls to zero. It is economic—a law of comparative value. Women are scarce on Luna; most convicts a
re men. This “fact of nature” underlies both the novel forms of marriage on offer and the huge emphasis put on consent. Anyone who does as Stu did and does not have the good fortune to find a thoughtful fellow like Manny to step in on his behalf will be eliminated.
No character that Manny approves of objects to this way of living; Heinlein presents its alignment of civic and environmental harmony as utopian. As such it is a very 20th-century, science-fictional utopia,
societies that made sense because they had to, a world in which things had their rightful place
not so much in that it is set on a Moon reached by rocketry but in its idea of a society that has to be the way that it is, given its technology and physical environment. The idea that scientific realities and technological and social responses to them are the fundamental shapers of human life, that there are ways things must be, given the supposed facts, is one of the foundations of science fiction as practiced in the 20th century and of the sort of thinking about the future it endorsed and encouraged. It was a belief that the future of both nature and society was law-bound in this way that allowed H. G. Wells to argue for its “systematic exploration”.
This paradoxical freedom for things to be as they must is what many enthusiasts for human expansion into space want today—unsurprisingly, since even those not themselves shaped by science fiction live in an ambience which is essentially science-fictional. What other way of talking about life beyond the Earth is there? People who see a new space frontier, whether it be in orbit, on Mars, or on the Moon, as an economic good also see it as something more. They see it as offering a new, or they might say old, sort of liberty, one where they will be subject only to the say-so of the universe and their peers, of a way of living beyond “politics”—“The word… nerds use whenever they feel impatient about the human realities of an organization,” as a character of Neal Stephenson’s puts it in “Seveneves” (2015), a dark novel of survival in the rubble of a demolished Moon above the inferno of a ruined Earth.
Manny starts off “The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress” enjoying exactly this sort of frontier liberty, resolutely apolitical, reliant purely on his family, his own enterprise and the enterprise of other private individuals; it is this which libertarians like about the book. He is unoppressed by his incarceration. But the political revolution he is swept up in brings with it law, tax and government, the things that libertarians most want to minimise or do without. At the book’s end, Manny is more discontented than he was at its beginning.
Why, then, is there a revolution? Because the rules of life, as conceived on Earth, make life on the Moon impossible. In this, I think Heinlein reaches a deep truth, though I do not understand it in the same way that he does. The Moon is not, and cannot be, a world like the Earth, because
And all this happens simply because it can.
the Moon cannot do the effortless but obligatory things that the Earth can and must. Humans cannot live on the Moon as they have lived on the Earth because the Moon lacks that which makes the Earth a world. Part of that worldliness is a once-natural environment which contains the human economy that has grown up within it. On the unworld, the containment is the other way around.
THE LOONIES’ REVOLUTION IS BOTH ECONOMIC AND ECOLOGICAL. The words’ common root lies in oikos, the ancient Greek concept of the household and its management. This sort of management, Hannah Arendt argues in her critique of totalitarianism, is a management from within, fundamentally participatory and unlike the politics of the state, which seeks to govern from without. She traces the seeds of totalitarianism to Plato’s attempt to impose techne—craft—on oikos, suggesting that the governance of the systems we find ourselves in, systems of home and life, could be a skill to be used by the skilled rather than a process for all to involve themselves in through free-flowing discussion and self-willed action.
The Lunar Authority is not typically totalitarian, in that it does not care at all what those whom it oppresses think, and is broadly indifferent to most of what they do, too. It is totalitarian, though, in that it constrains the economic and biophysical basis of their lives in a purely instrumental way. In most of the warrens, the Authority sets the price of water, electricity and air and has a monopoly on imported technology, too. The oikos of economy and ecology has been replaced by its technical control—and that control is heedless.
The reason that Wyoming Knott, the revolutionary with whom Manny falls in love, wants to overthrow the Authority is so that the Loonies can sell all their produce to the highest bidder in a free market. Prof seems to agree with her, speaking of “the most basic human right, the right to bargain in a free marketplace”. In fact, he deeply disagrees. Economics must take second place to ecology because the Moon faces Malthusian doom. Shipping food to the Earth and getting nothing back—no replacement for the carbon, nitrogen,
endless spacey cake and endless Earthly eating
phosphorus and so on that the grain shipped down the gravity well contains—means that the Moon’s otherwise-closed ecology has a gaping hole in it, as frightening as an air-sucking meteorite puncture in a hab. The stuff of life is leaking away.
“The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress” is thus an environmental novel. Indeed it is an Anthropocene one, as long as one remembers that the Moon’s branch of the Anthropocene is an inversion of the Earth’s, as well as an extension of it. The Earth’s Anthropocene is a breaking down of the environment’s prior encapsulation of the economy. On the Moon, it is the reverse. When a living environment arrived there, it did so in a curiously shaped aluminium box which marked the greatest single achievement of the Earth’s greatest economy—always already encapsulated. The biochemical leakage which drives the Loonies’ revolution is the failure of that encapsulation.
In the logic of the novel TANSTAAFL is taken as a fact of ecology as well as economics, a homely truth that the oikos must manage; everything is an exchange. In “The Closing Circle” (1971), a book that articulated much of the environmental concern of the post-“Earthrise” environmental movement, Barry Commoner used the same acronym in much the same way, going so far as to make TANSTAAFL one of his “four laws of ecology”.* It served as a punchy summary of the idea that in a world of endless cycles, replenishment must be arranged for any resource taken, space made for any waste. Circles must be closed.
Prof sees the implication of this for the Loonies. The flow of scarce organic matter from the Moon to the Earth means the Moon is paying the cost of the Earth’s seemingly free lunch. If this goes on, he predicts, there will be shortages, then food riots, then cannibalism. The only solution is to enlarge the ecology—to get the nutrients shipped down to the Earth returned, if only as refuse, gram for gram and tonne for tonne. But the realities of delta-v—3km/s from Moon to Earth, 15km/s from Earth to Moon—mean that, within the Authority’s economic logic, this ecological necessity cannot be brought about.
The book thus highlights the way in which a lunar frontier can never be like the frontiers of the Earth. People who like the frontier analogy see those on the Earth as places where the human contest with the environment is particularly challenging and rewarding. But the frontiers of the Age of Being Explored by Europeans were also places for the appropriation of environmental processes from those whose lives were already enmeshed in them.
Humans, and those who write their history, frequently forget process when they think of place. They often hold that, in the words of the historian Robin Collingwood, “all history properly so called is the history of human affairs”, and the environments in which it takes place merely the stage sets against which those affairs play out. But this is wrong.
The soil in an area of prairie or forest or farm is not just a thing to be measured in hectares; it is life’s engagement with growth and decay, the transformation of the organic to the inorganic and vice versa. Places are made of such processes of engagement. Places are the falling of the rain, the shining of the sun and the growth those things bring—not just the coordinates where they take place. Th
ey are the ways those processes change, both predictably and not. How people live in a place is how they live within and around these processes, how they entangle themselves in the lives of plants and animals and the land itself, as well as each other. The Anthropocene is a way of applying this truth to the changed and changing world of contemporary capitalism.
One of the reasons for seeing the Age of Being Explored by Europeans as the dawn of the Anthropocene is that it was a time when, as Jason Moore argues in “Capitalism in the Web of Life” (2015), capitalism grew by appropriating the land’s processes from those living in, on and through them, especially in the Americas. Inside capitalism, proletariats were exploited; outside capitalism, human lives and natural bounty were taken and reshaped.
The European facility with the organization of markets, and the organization of violence, was used to re-engineer lands formerly held by indigenous peoples. Frequently unsustainable forms of forestry and farming were introduced to make them productive. People, commoditized as labour, were moved from the farmsteads of one continent to the plantations of another, there to transform the sunshine that was absorbed by those plantations into the cheap calories which fed the workers in metropolitan factories. This appropriation allowed, literally and metaphorically, some very lunches which looked very cheap, if you set aside moral and environmental costs: cheap energy, cheap food, cheap labour, cheap nature. It was at least in part—Moore, I think, would say entirely—by refashioning flows taking place outside the market to provide “cheaps” of this sort within it that the market was able to grow. And as the exploited world expanded, new realms of appropriation had to be found outside it, lest the system stall.
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