Stranger in a Strange Land (Uncut Edition)

This review is of the extended second edition ("Original Uncut") of Heinlein's seminal cultural satire Stranger in a Strange Land. Avoid it. It is inferior to the first edition, having been subjected to reversion of all of the author's edits that had tightened up the original manuscript without losing any significant content. (In fact, a few items were added in that edit, and these are consequently missing from the longer edition.) The editorial apparatus of this posthumous reissue falsely suggests that integral content was removed from the manuscript for its first publication, in deference to public mores. The longer book is in fact a crass commercial ploy, intended to get readers of the author's most popular work to buy it a second show more time, after it had already stayed in print continuously for thirty years. show less

I read the unedited version of Stranger in a Strange Land, which returns over 60,000 words to the manuscript. While it might be interesting to see what was cut to make it commercially viable in 1961 (and there are editions that highlight the differences), the novel doesn't merit a second reading when so many other books remain on my reading list.

Valentine Michael Smith, the illegitimate child of two adulterous astronauts sent on a colonizing mission to Mars, returns to Earth after twenty years as an orphan under Martian care. His beliefs and customs derive from conditions on Mars—the sharing of water, for example, establishes a lifelong brotherhood between the sharers due to its scarcity on his home planet. He also possesses show more supernatural powers, a fact which—unconvincingly—remains hidden from the general population for the bulk of the book. Chief among his powers is the ability to "twist" objects (including humans), a process which erases their existence. Since life is eternal on Mars and communication with the "discorporated" (i.e. dead) is not only possible but common, Smith tends to be indiscrete with this ability and holds no moral qualms about its use.

Through his childlike protagonist's attempts to "grok" (understand) humanity, Heinlein as author questions many of the social customs and norms of his time. Smith investigates a megachurch that predates but is eerily reminiscent of the hypocrisy of Jim and Tammy Bakker's PTL Club; subsequently he founds his own Church of All Worlds. Members of the church become water brothers, address each other with the phrase "Thou art God" and practice a utopic, guilt-free version of polyamory. Indeed, the inner circle shares Smith's childlike qualities and the church closely resembles a cult. Fortuitously, Smith is wealthy (due to his agreement to relinquish his claims on his rights to Mars with Earth's government, the Federation of Free States) and he and his compatriots enjoy unrestricted freedom to spread their message.

Stranger in a Strange Land can be loosely read allegorically, if one views the Martians as gods. They deliberately send Smith to Earth to observe our culture; his reports will determine whether the planet and its inhabitants are allowed to continue to exist (the Martians have discorporated another planet they found unworthy). Discorporated Martians are essentially omniscient and border on omnipotent. Even without taking this perspective, the novel is an interesting read as a forerunner of the sixties counter-culture, absent the influence of drugs. show less

Remember what you wore to the prom? Remember your haircut in high school? Embarrassing to look back on, aren't they? I read Stranger in a Strange Land when it was first published. I was blown away by the open attitudes, the mystical powers, and, of course, the sex. Is that why I overlooked the misogynist attitudes, the endless pontification, and the facile plotline? The first third of the book is still fairly readable, but when we are introduced to Jubal Harshaw (i.e. Robert Heinlein in a lawyer suit), the novel sinks swiftly. Jubal never stops talking. And his ideas are never questioned. All women love sex all the time. Violating the laws of physics are easy if you think the "right" way. Any technology after the buggy whip is show more incomprehensible by a normal human being. A Muslim character even remarks that the women are properly in the background, how nice, Meanwhile I am howling and throwing the book against the wall. I did finish reading it all, for proper documentation, so now I can agree that this book marked the end of Heinlein's career as a writer. Admittedly his later books are much worse, but all the hallmarks of a lazy and pompous man are shown here in black and white. show less

Oh, Stranger in a Strange Land. How do I loathe thee? Let me count the ways.

Three! There are three ways. Ah ha ha ha haaa.

Two of these are about sex. So let's talk about sex, bay-bee. Heinlein wrote Stranger over the course of about a decade back in the 1950s and early 1960s. He dawdled because he didn't believe that the world was ready for such an orgy-fest of a novel, but with the advent of the salacious sixties he decided the time was right and published. Sounds pretty forward thinking, right? Alas not. Certainly not the aspects that fall under the remit of science fiction. The story seems to be set around the beginning of the twenty-first century, but the technology on show is obviously born of a clunky 1950s imagination. We have show more the usual flying cars and a permanent base on Mars, but little else seems to have advanced. And, despite the book's “controversial” reputation for its sexuality, that aspect is terribly steeped in 1950s American notions too. The shockingly futuristic group that the second half of the story turns around embrace nudity, open marriages, and getting jiggy in front of one another. Hurrah for them. So what are my two gripes with this side of the story? Well for all their happiness with sharing everything, Heinlein still refers to homosexuality as a “wrongness”. It's fine for one man to telepathically enter another man's head while the latter chap is “growing closer” to a lady so both men can enjoy it, but it's a big no-no for one man to enter another man in any other part of his body. The other problem I had actually made me angry enough to throw down the book and lament to my flatmate: “God! This book is horrible.” That came with the infamous moment when Heinlein has his female protagonist casually suggest that nine times out of ten, rape is the woman's fault. There's also plenty of casual sexism strewn through the text, and the attempts to paint it as otherwise are fairly transparent. A typical exchange goes thus.

“Run off to the kitchen now, sweetheart, the men are talking,” said the man with a cheeky smile.
“Oh you,” said the woman rolling her eyes. Then she ran off to the kitchen, because the men were talking.

The third problem to cause me anguish deals with the other major theme: religion. The book has been labelled blasphemous by some over zealous types. The basic tack taken by the novel is the same as that in E.M. Forster's short story Mr Andrews, that being: what if all religions are basically correct, but that human contact and closeness on Earth is the true source of happiness. Indeed, the glimpses of Heaven that Heinlein gives us portray it as a petty bureaucracy making the Universe tick, where everyone seems to have been cowed out of their Earthly faults by time rather than goodness. There's a caveat though, and therein lies my dispute. Heinlein seems to suggest that most religions are essentially true and harmless, if wrong in many ways, and by “most religions” I mean the Western Abrahamic ones. Eastern religions, particularly Hinduism, are roundly disparaged throughout. Which is odd. The church that the main characters form talks of God and is set up in a kind of hierarchical circle system like a fictional Christian church elsewhere in the story, and given the protagonist's implied true identity and messianic qualities there's little avoiding the conclusion that the Judeo-Christian-Islamic camp is considered the “right” one. But what are the values espoused by this church? Pantheism and reincarnation? I'm fairly certain they're Eastern religious values. And on one page the Hindu sacred texts are reviled for their depravity, on the next two characters say “Let's role play Shiva and Kali and see how many pages of the kama sutra we can get through!” Egads, it's appalling stuff.

While the above issues tainted my enjoyment they were all either brief half-sentences or else notions too large and book-encompassing to really get to me for too long. Ignoring Heinlein's hopeless attempts at progressivism, the actual story is okay, if nothing special. The first half is a kind of dry legal story about a man born a literal world away who happens to have inherited both political and financial power, and lots of it. The attempts to teach this naïf about the world and people around him and to defuse the problems inherent in his inheritance take up a great deal of the book. Then they're dealt with awfully fast and the story marches on to the second half, wherein the man from Mars finally completes his education and understands humanity, before trying to teach the world how to be better.

For such a long book it's a bit short of substance. The vast majority of it is one character, Jubal Harshaw, delivering chapter-long soliloquies on the law or philosophy or religion. I was reminded of Ian Malcolm's morphine-monologues on evolution and extinction in [b:The Lost World|8650|The Lost World (Jurassic Park, #2)|Michael Crichton|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1386864575s/8650.jpg|1212784]. Except Malcolm's ramblings had a reason—he was having painful surgery under various drugs and being made to talk to take his mind off it. Heinlein seems to have written Harshaw's long speeches and then fleshed out the chapter with incidental dialogue from other characters, prompting the speech here and there. Moreover Malcolm's lectures were interesting, Harshaw's less so; but then I'm more interested in evolutionary theory than legal theory, so that's probably to be expected.

The protagonist's growth as a human being is all a bit artificial too. He ambles around for a hundred or so pages, not understanding anything (or not “grokking” anything, as the novel pointlessly writes each time) and then—Bam!—he suddenly gets it, gains a level, and repeats. The first time this happens it's losing his virginity that triggers it, the second time it's seeing chimpanzees hitting each other in a zoo. It's awkward at best and, if this were just a story about a man from Mars learning to be a man on Earth, then it would fall flat on its face. For all these myriad faults, though, Stranger in a Strange Land somehow manages to claw its way into mediocrity. Quite why it's considered a classic of science fiction utterly baffles me, but maybe if I understood that I would understand humanity in its totality, and that would be a very dull day indeed. show less

Oh, Stranger in a Strange Land. How do I loathe thee? Let me count the ways.

Three! There are three ways. Ah ha ha ha haaa.

Two of these are about sex. So let's talk about sex, bay-bee. Heinlein wrote Stranger over the course of about a decade back in the 1950s and early 1960s. He dawdled because he didn't believe that the world was ready for such an orgy-fest of a novel, but with the advent of the salacious sixties he decided the time was right and published. Sounds pretty forward thinking, right? Alas not. Certainly not the aspects that fall under the remit of science fiction. The story seems to be set around the beginning of the twenty-first century, but the technology on show is obviously born of a clunky 1950s imagination. We have show more the usual flying cars and a permanent base on Mars, but little else seems to have advanced. And, despite the book's “controversial” reputation for its sexuality, that aspect is terribly steeped in 1950s American notions too. The shockingly futuristic group that the second half of the story turns around embrace nudity, open marriages, and getting jiggy in front of one another. Hurrah for them. So what are my two gripes with this side of the story? Well for all their happiness with sharing everything, Heinlein still refers to homosexuality as a “wrongness”. It's fine for one man to telepathically enter another man's head while the latter chap is “growing closer” to a lady so both men can enjoy it, but it's a big no-no for one man to enter another man in any other part of his body. The other problem I had actually made me angry enough to throw down the book and lament to my flatmate: “God! This book is horrible.” That came with the infamous moment when Heinlein has his female protagonist casually suggest that nine times out of ten, rape is the woman's fault. There's also plenty of casual sexism strewn through the text, and the attempts to paint it as otherwise are fairly transparent. A typical exchange goes thus.

“Run off to the kitchen now, sweetheart, the men are talking,” said the man with a cheeky smile.
“Oh you,” said the woman rolling her eyes. Then she ran off to the kitchen, because the men were talking.

The third problem to cause me anguish deals with the other major theme: religion. The book has been labelled blasphemous by some over zealous types. The basic tack taken by the novel is the same as that in E.M. Forster's short story Mr Andrews, that being: what if all religions are basically correct, but that human contact and closeness on Earth is the true source of happiness. Indeed, the glimpses of Heaven that Heinlein gives us portray it as a petty bureaucracy making the Universe tick, where everyone seems to have been cowed out of their Earthly faults by time rather than goodness. There's a caveat though, and therein lies my dispute. Heinlein seems to suggest that most religions are essentially true and harmless, if wrong in many ways, and by “most religions” I mean the Western Abrahamic ones. Eastern religions, particularly Hinduism, are roundly disparaged throughout. Which is odd. The church that the main characters form talks of God and is set up in a kind of hierarchical circle system like a fictional Christian church elsewhere in the story, and given the protagonist's implied true identity and messianic qualities there's little avoiding the conclusion that the Judeo-Christian-Islamic camp is considered the “right” one. But what are the values espoused by this church? Pantheism and reincarnation? I'm fairly certain they're Eastern religious values. And on one page the Hindu sacred texts are reviled for their depravity, on the next two characters say “Let's role play Shiva and Kali and see how many pages of the kama sutra we can get through!” Egads, it's appalling stuff.

While the above issues tainted my enjoyment they were all either brief half-sentences or else notions too large and book-encompassing to really get to me for too long. Ignoring Heinlein's hopeless attempts at progressivism, the actual story is okay, if nothing special. The first half is a kind of dry legal story about a man born a literal world away who happens to have inherited both political and financial power, and lots of it. The attempts to teach this naïf about the world and people around him and to defuse the problems inherent in his inheritance take up a great deal of the book. Then they're dealt with awfully fast and the story marches on to the second half, wherein the man from Mars finally completes his education and understands humanity, before trying to teach the world how to be better.

For such a long book it's a bit short of substance. The vast majority of it is one character, Jubal Harshaw, delivering chapter-long soliloquies on the law or philosophy or religion. I was reminded of Ian Malcolm's morphine-monologues on evolution and extinction in [b:The Lost World|8650|The Lost World (Jurassic Park, #2)|Michael Crichton|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1386864575s/8650.jpg|1212784]. Except Malcolm's ramblings had a reason—he was having painful surgery under various drugs and being made to talk to take his mind off it. Heinlein seems to have written Harshaw's long speeches and then fleshed out the chapter with incidental dialogue from other characters, prompting the speech here and there. Moreover Malcolm's lectures were interesting, Harshaw's less so; but then I'm more interested in evolutionary theory than legal theory, so that's probably to be expected.

The protagonist's growth as a human being is all a bit artificial too. He ambles around for a hundred or so pages, not understanding anything (or not “grokking” anything, as the novel pointlessly writes each time) and then—Bam!—he suddenly gets it, gains a level, and repeats. The first time this happens it's losing his virginity that triggers it, the second time it's seeing chimpanzees hitting each other in a zoo. It's awkward at best and, if this were just a story about a man from Mars learning to be a man on Earth, then it would fall flat on its face. For all these myriad faults, though, Stranger in a Strange Land somehow manages to claw its way into mediocrity. Quite why it's considered a classic of science fiction utterly baffles me, but maybe if I understood that I would understand humanity in its totality, and that would be a very dull day indeed. show less

This one transformed and cemented me as a young adult, totally screwing me up and enlightening me at the same time, showing me that living in a crazy christian culture doesn't mean I have to stay there, or that great imagery can be used soooooo damn subversively. :)

And above or below that, it was a fantastic tale of striving for wisdom, learning that semantics MEANS something, and that I can be blown away by the fact that so much philosophy and striving and understanding, (read Grok,) could be thrown into one single novel and still be a wild tale.

So why all the hate, Ya'll? Oh good ole' Jubal is a stand-in for Heinlein's soapbox tendencies, sure, but he's also a wild character in the sense that he is what he is. He loves women, but says show more awful things, but on the other hand, these women respect him enough to throw him in the pool and blow raspberries at him, too. As we all should, today, to all men who act as a Mad Man from 1962, all heavy-drinking, heavy-opinions, and "apparently" sexist. But no one really believes that about him when they get to know him. He's a good man and a loudmouth author and all his other progressive ideas like equality between the sexes are SHOWN to us, repeatedly and repeatedly, by actions and deeds and a closer look at all the philosophies. It's the difference between expression and reality. He expresses as the time allows, but in reality he supports everyone. That's Jubal for you.

But he's not even the main character, just the most loud one.

Mike is. He's an alien, yo, born of man but raised by Martians with heavy-ass psychic powers, yo. And he's innocent of mankind, too.

This is his story. Who tries to capitalize on the man who owns Mars, who protects him, how he learns to adapt and later to understand us crazy humans, and what he does with his gifts.

The novel could be an indictment of modern times, a brew-on of absurdity when it comes to religion and religious thinking, a wildly prescient vision of the sexual liberation movement just a few years down the road, (or perhaps the seminal novel that informed the sixties love movements,) or it could be a wonderful shout-out to us all to start trying to UNDERSTAND one another, for grok's sake.

So I think it's wonderfully delicious. You know. To say that Heinlein is a sexist reactionary? When he, like, is the spirit of the sixties? Huh, water-brother? You Grok?

This is easily one of my favorite, if not my most favorite Heinlein, not just because it got into my soul when I was a kid, but because it's just one of those works that lives and breathes and still brings a big smile to my face. :) Oh, and it's one of my top 100 works of all time and it won the Hugo of '62, not that anyone really cares, because it just SPEAKS to so many people. :)

That's controversy for you. :) show less

It's a worthwhile exercise to reread a book that you first read 40 years ago--if you can stand to. I'm still interested in Heinlein, whose massive (if disturbingly flawed) biography prompted me to revisit his most famous novel. I've long been curious about the "original uncut version" released in 1991; the bio explained that Heinlein spent months laboriously cutting the book to meet the publisher's arbitrary word limit. I'm happy to report that the uncut version is so much better than the original edition that I'm surprised the cut version is still in print. To meet the tight word count, Heinlein didn't just remove soliloquies and non-essentials; he eliminated scenes and shortened others that, as first written, had been more of a show more pleasure to read. The book made enough of an impression on me as a teenager that I was able to identify differences even after all these years.

Of course, the idiosyncrasies and anachronisms that mark all of Heinlein's writing have only become more noticeable over the years. Heinlein was famously good at anticipating future technologies (with the notable exception of microchips), but he was hopeless at predicting changes to society and mores--in fact, he didn't even try. His future society (undated, but judging from references to the timeframes of certain characters' childhoods, is meant to be somewhere in the 1990s) is much like that of the pre-beatnik '50s, complete with grotesquely cheesy advertising, traveling carnivals, and Puritan hypocrisies. Women who are married work at being wives. Unmarried women work as secretaries, nurses, or performers, and are the continual target of what comes off now as offensively sexualized condescension, although it was then considered benign, and none of the female characters are in the least offended by it. (There's a case to be made that Heinlein's view of the sexes had its origin not in the '50s, but in the '20s, when he came of age. I should add that if you're likely to be offended by what your great-grandfather might have said—about rape, for example—you'll be grossly offended here.) It's that 1950s world of the future, not the futuristic overlays of flying cars and world government that it's combined with, that now seems the most mind-bendingly unbelievable.

But if you can get past the fifties-with-jetpacks setting, it's a remarkably engrossing novel: the closest that Heinlein, a proud commercial artist, ever came to creating literature. The characters have more complexity than in most of his other books, and their personal and situational dilemmas are convincing. The central idea--the "what if?" that must lie at the heart of every successful science fiction story--can be put this way: What if all human beings are capable of seemingly superhuman, even supernatural powers, and need only the insight that comes from learning a foreign language--Martian--to unlock them? What if the learning of this language also means that one necessarily becomes free of neuroses, jealousy, and all urge to harm? A human baby, the newborn survivor of an Earth expedition, is raised by Martians and brought back to Earth at the age of 25. At first a helpless political pawn, he comes to maturity at the same time that he learns the customs of his biological people, and devotes his life to sharing what he alone, of all the humans on Earth, understands about human potential.

Before the plot comes to its only plausible conclusion, we've been drawn into what is possibly the most warmly pleasant Utopian community in fiction.

This is an adventure story and a philosophical provocation in one. Although in parts it's so retrograde as to challenge your suspension of disbelief, it's astoundingly beyond the bounds of the conventional thought of its pre-Mad Man era, whose tiny black-and-white televisions broadcasted shows presented by chain-smoking, narrow-tied pitchmen. And if ultimately, its implied prescription for the human condition doesn't match what we've since learned about the variety of human experience, the book will still entertain you and make you think twice about what you know. show less