Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

I finished it! I liked it more than I thought I would.

Spoilers below.

The end was sooo sad. Mike, the computer, stopped talking. Nobody knows whether he is too scared to talk again or if he lost the capacity to talk when part of him was blown away.

Is he really a sexist author? As a man, I'm not as sensitive to sexism as women are, but in the battle scenes, the men were fighting and the women were there for morale and didn't do any fighting. He had a strong female protagonist though, and she was instrumental in the plot as well as good-looking.
"Women are amazing creatures - sweet, soft, gentle, and far more savage than we are." (148)

I like how he makes fun of our society, like on page 161 where he discusses the woman who wanted a long list of insane rules made into laws. Also, the stupidity of the Earth dwellers who put Mannie in jail for being polygamous (um, Puritanical, much?). And ESPECIALLY the idiots who went to the sites that they knew would be bombed, and the idiots who were outraged by the death of those idiots.

"I used to question Mike's endless reading of fiction, wondering what notions he was getting. But turned out he got a better feeling for human life from stories than he had been able to garner from facts; fiction gave him a gestalt of life, one taken for granted by a human; he lives it." (109)

I would think that fiction doesn't give a good idea of what normal human life. Most fiction is far from real, everything is happy in the end and the characters all have this hunky-dory lifestyle in which any two people can fall in love. Also, it doesn't present a normal life, it presents only the events in each character's life that are relevant to the plot. It's like that Wierd Al song "Stuck in the Drive-Through," look it up on youtube and you'll see what I mean.

What are your thoughts? What are some good, thought-provoking scifi books you have read that deal with artificial intelligence?