1984, Orwell

Brave New World, Huxley

Animal Farm, Orwell

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Heinlein

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Persig

Cat's Cradle, Vonnegut

Catch-22, Heller

The first 3-4 books of the Foundation Series, Asimov

The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien

Dune (first book only), The Fountains of Paradise by Arthur Clark, Robert Heinlein (Starship Troopers, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Stranger in a Strange Land), Uplift Series by David Brim, The Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanly Robinson, Ann Leckies books are really interesting new sf.

"The phrase and the acronym are central to Robert Heinlein's 1966 science-fiction novel The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, which helped popularize it."

> Heinlein wrote a book in favor of polyamory ("Stranger in a Strange Land")

See also: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

>If you are a freedom lover foremost perhaps you should work more on making the issue seperate from right vs left rhetorics.

I have tried. It simply doesn't work. Proudly censorious authoritarian leftists. They see themselves as the good guys saving the world, and if that means free speech has to go, then so be it.

I'm reminded of this quote:

>“There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him.”

― Robert A. Heinlein, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress

Robert Heinlein’s The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress explored this concept of the low cost of transporting packages from the lunar surface to earth. Now mind you the “packages” were moon rocks shot by catapult at the Earth in a war of independence, but still a really interesting plot point. Everyone should read this book!

I've read many many books that have changed my life.

That's probably one reason why I read.

To say that Pound's translation of the Analects was more profoundly important than the Tao and Faulkner's The Town and Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and The Hobbit from my youth and The Three Little Pigs read nearly nightly to a child doesn't make sense.

Sometimes I walk through Castaneda's world.

Sometimes Knuth's.

Other's I am in my head with Vonnegut.

Profoundness is out in the world.

And many books point to it.

If you read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress his views come across as more libertarian and individualist than conservative. Ditto for Job.

I never saw much in the way of social conservatism in his writing (the religious right would probably be horrified by some of his work), but he was clearly opposed to collectivism.

I haven’t got around to Stranger in a Strange Land - which is weird because that’s his most populist book.

I’m thinking of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. It had group marriages, but the marriage practices were ordained by custom and tradition. Not 20th century custom and tradition, but custom and tradition none the less.

>An author’s intent doesn’t change what an author actually said

This is an odd view of communication. It works for whole stories, e.g. you can decouple Heinlein from his books and claim that The Moon is a Harsh Mistress primarily says something other than Heinlein actually had in mind, artistically speaking, but it's a very odd stance for single words. Communication is two-way, it has everything to do with both the speaker and listener. Words don't have any meaning except for what the speaker and listener assign to them. There is no "what the author actually said", there is only what they intended to say (and how it was interpreted).

In the role of listener/reader, your whole job is to figure out what the author intended. Otherwise I'm not sure we agree on what reading even is.