Lana has a lot of time on her hands. As we quickly learn in "Beyond The Sea", the third episode of Black Mirror's latest series, the young bride (played by Kate Mara) has recently moved to a remote farm with her son and her husband, Cliff Stanfield (played by Breaking Bad’s Aaron Paul). She's struggling to adapt to the change.
But it’s not the rural remoteness or lack of friends that’s really bothering her; it’s the fact that her husband is actually a mechanical replicant of Cliff. His real human body, you see, is currently orbiting a few hundred miles overhead in a space shuttle as an astronaut on a six-year mission. Despite being set in a parallel version of the ‘60s, technology – via some computer-chipped dog tags and a sofa-like machine – has advanced to the point that Cliff’s soul is able to jump back into his body on Earth every so often, allowing the ‘real’ Cliff to hang out with his family, go huntin’ and fishin’ and other wholesome outdoor activities.
Weird? Yes. And that’s before things begin to get really dark, when Cliff’s colleague, David Ross (played by Josh Hartnett) becomes uncomfortably embedded in the (real) married couple’s lives.
Unfortunately for lonely Lana, technology hasn’t advanced to the point that Candy Crush becomes a viable time-killer. So she gets stuck into a good book, and if you look closely at the cover, you'll see that she’s reading the 1966 novel The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, by Robert A. Heinlein.
Needless to say, this is no coincidence. The prop will likely have been carefully placed there by Charlie Brooker as a little nod to the sci-fi heads, and the writer has previous form for slipping literary references into his anthology series. In 2019’s "Bandersnatch", the main character can be seen with a poster of the Philip K. Dick novel Ubik on his wall. As for the tome Lana’s reading, Heinlein has been called “the greatest science fiction writer of the modern age” and the book – which won the Hugo Award for best novel in 1967 – is generally regarded as a classic of the genre.
The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress
So what’s it about? Well, like in the episode, it imagines a time (the year 2075) where people are sent into space, although in the novel they’re not in a space station, but in a new colony on the moon. It's called Luna (probably not a coincidence that it’s one letter off Lana’s name) and was formerly made up of prisoners and political exiles. Now its population of three million “Loonies” as they’re known, is controlled by the Earth, which is known as Terra. In Luna, men outnumber women by two to one so polyamory is the norm – something that David in the Black Mirror episode seems to land upon as well.
In the book, although the anarchistic population of Luna is controlled by The Warden, the infrastructure and machinery in society is run by a super computer, known as Holmes IV, AKA Mike. Over the years it has managed to achieve sentience, and eventually befriends a computer technician called Manuel Garcia (also known as Mannie). The super computer encourages Mannie and his friends to battle the Warden and the Lunar Authority to seize power and declare independence from the Earth. In the book, riots erupt following assaults and murders, which is similar to the plot of Beyond The Sea, when all the chaos starts spinning out from a bout of terrible violence.
As much a political tale as a sci-fi yarn, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress explores how libertarian ideals might play out amidst great leaps forward in technology. Both the book and the episode ask: what’s really more destructive for our future, humanity or technology?
Black Mirror series six is streaming on Netflix now.
