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*** And the ''real'' real surprise is that the whole point of the Revolution was to sucker Earth into {{spoiler|destroying the main catapult}}, thus preventing {{spoiler|grain from being shipped}} and saving the Loonies from the coming {{spoiler|ecological collapse.}}
* [[Swiss Army Appendage]]: Mannie has the ability to swap out his prosthetic left arm for other models bearing useful tools. No [[Arm Cannon|guns]], though; number seven, whatever it is, is implied to work as a pretty serviceable club, however.
* [[Technology Marches On]]: Mike invents computer-generated imagery, to the shock and surprise of the humans around him, who never imagined such a thing could be possible. (He even gives himself a digital screen appearance as a human, and takes quite a while adjusting the CGI to achieve full realism.) Meanwhile, in the real world, it takes a bank of supercomputers and a none-too-small team of professionals to achieve the same result, and they take a somewhat longer time. Of course, it can be argued that Mike, having hookups across Luna, as well as having access to a large chunk of everything humanity has ever written down, is both a bank of supercomputers and a team of professionals. And it helps that he can think far faster than a human.
** It's specifically mentioned in the text that in order to fake one single video image in real-time, Mike had to co-opt ''virtually all of the spare computing capacity on Luna''.
** Manny protests that what Mike was attempting was impossible: this would require thousands, maybe ''millions'' of calculations per second. This is called a megahertz; the Intel 8086 was released a mere decade after the book and in a single chip represented virtually the entire processing power on Luna more than a century hence as Heinlein imagined it. To be fair, Moore's Law only was articulated in popular press a year before the book and the full impact of the transistor revolution had yet to be felt or even named as such.
** This trope affects pretty much all of Heinlein's relatively near-future fiction, particularly computers and calculating devices of all kinds.
* [[Terminally Dependent Society]]
* [[Theme Naming]]: Sherlock Holmes characters for Mike.
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