The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

There are many books that are called classics, some of them even justifiably. For example, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, which I recently reread. Robert Heinlein postulates a revolt at a penal colony, which organizes itself on libertarian principles with the help of a self-aware computer. The wrinkle is that the penal colony is on the Moon, and anyone sent there can't come back because their body has acclimated to the lower gravity.  This includes the guards and administrators. The Moon is hydroponically growing a large chunk of the grain needed in Asia, and literally drop shipping it via catapault back to Earth. The Loonies defend themselves with a superior understanding of their environment and gravity, and by the simple expedient of dropping rocks on Earth via the selfsame catapault. It is well-told, tightly-plotted, with appropriate suspense, including side discussions of Heinlein's alternatives to monogamy. If you haven't read it, make the time. If you have, it's time to re-read it.

    Alas, I read the Tor/Orbit reprint, which suffers from the perennial problem displayed by Tor: there was no human intervention between the optical character recognition of the text and printing the bound volume. This means there are innumerable typoes which would have been avoided by the simple expedient of proofreading. The most annoying example was references to "flat money" instead of "fiat money." (Those pesky "fl" and "fi" ligatures were obviously invented by medieval type designers just to confuse the OCR software.)