The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress

In 2075 Luna is a penal colony that has outlived its sentence, worked by the descendants of transportees and governed by an Authority that buys grain at fixed prices and sends nothing back. Manuel Garcia O'Kelly Davis is a computer technician with one arm and no politics, whose principal secret is that the machine running the colony's systems has woken up and would like to be called Mike. Through Mike, Manny falls in with the old academic Bernardo de la Paz and the agitator Wyoming Knott, and a revolution begins to assemble itself: cell structures, forged identities, careful lies, and a computer capable of inventing a public face for a leader who does not exist. Earth will not permit secession, and Luna's only real weapon is gravity and a catapult built to throw wheat. Heinlein writes the whole thing in Manny's clipped Loonie dialect, part Russian, part Australian, wholly convincing, and pauses often to argue about currency, family structure and the price of air. It remains the most persuasive account in the genre of how a revolution is actually organised, and of what it costs the people who do the organising.