The light marriages are still there.
I think this is supposed to be "line marriages."
The catapult is still there...The idea is this sort of Ferris wheel thing that takes it up over the gravity well and drops to Earth.
Oh, God, no! The lunar catapult is a
linear
motor. [link] Like a railgun [link]
for cargo containers. See also: [link]
Maybe he was thinking of Artsutanov's rotating skyhook. See [link] and [link]
But that is a
very
different launch device than what is used in TMiaHM, and one impossible to protect from attack.
I've given the citizens of Luna ocular 'ident stamps,' which are the equivalent of prisoner tattoos, and Mike finds a way into the personalized signature of people, so he can show himself to you, but no one else can see him. So that's maybe the thing I added.
I don't understand this part. Is he saying Mike will appear to Manny (and the audience), but will be invisible to passers-by?
Geek high five!
t slaps DCP
::high-fives Betsy back::
I was twelve the first time I read TMiaHM, so making sense of how the catapult worked was much more important to me than figuring out why different forms of marriage were considered scandalous.
I'm a lot older now, and I have more confidence that a linear motor would work as a lunar catapult than a line marriage would work anywhere, but at least Heinlein explained them both well enough that I remember them.
I still can't get my head around the idea of Mike manifesting in some way other than as a voice over the telephone or an image in a video screen.
I can't get around Wyoh prancing around in a too tight dress and giggling like an empty headed hole, and yet, that's how Heinlen wrote it.
Yet, sad to say, not an unrealistic character. I've met people just like that.
She's presented as the model woman, though. That's the issue.
I don't remember her as The Model Woman. I remember her as The Unlikely Revolutionary, and the audience surrogate for most of Prof and Manny's exposition sequences.
I don't remember her as The Model Woman. I remember her as The Unlikely Revolutionary, and the audience surrogate for most of Prof and Manny's exposition sequences.
This is more what I read into the story.
Wyoh was a young woman at the time, too. Basically I saw Manny and Mike as the prime characters, Le Paz and Wyoh as secondary.
I would be interested in corroberation for TMW, as I am often puzzled by the seething hate some people have towards RAH.
