Robert Anson Heinlein

The epic saga of an earthling, born and educated on Mars, who arrives on our planet with superhuman powers and a total ignorance of the mores of man.

Stranger in a Strange Land

Robert A. Heinlein

The original uncut edition of STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND by Hugo Award winner Robert A Heinlein - one of the most beloved, celebrated science-fiction novels of all time. Epic, ambitious and entertaining, STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND caused controversy and uproar when it was first published and is still topical and challenging today. Twenty-five years ago, the first manned mission to Mars was lost, and all hands presumed dead. But someone survived... Born on the doomed spaceship and raised by the Martians who saved his life, Valentine Michael Smith has never seen a human being until the day a second expedition to Mars discovers him. Upon his return to Earth, a young nurse named Jill Boardman sneaks into Smith's hospital room and shares a glass of water with him, a simple act for her but a sacred ritual on Mars. Now, connected by an incredible bond, Smith, Jill and a writer named Jubal must fight to protect a right we all take for granted: the right to love.

anjali

The concept of a Martian - a human being by birth, but in essence, a Martian - rehabilitated on Earth is an arresting idea, and a great canvas. In Heinlein’s work, this canvas is mainly coloured through lens of social commentary and a new moral philosophy that became a manifesto for the counter cultural movements of the 60s.

Although divided in 5 main parts, the novel can really be said to be composed of halves. The first half is where the narration is the focus, the story keeps moving and there is a real sense of ‘happening.’ The second half lags in terms of action but brings out the core concepts and ideas of the novel in full, successively developing from satire, taking on government and civilisation, to the formulation of a new philosophy which underlined the beginning of the Free Love movement that came in later in the decade.

Typically, Heinlein employs the use of two main characters as the main propogator’s of his thought and ideas. They are, of course, Jubal Harshaw and Mike himself. 

Sex

The core of Heinlein’s philosophy lies in sex, and how sex is perceived and ought to be perceived amongst humanity. When Mike, the man from Mars discovers that human beings share something that has no equivalent in the Martian culture, he is fascinated. On Mars, there is no distinction of ‘male’ and ‘female’ as such. The female equivalents are mere ‘nymphs’, who, by any accounts, do not figure into much prominence. However, as Mike discovers, things are different on Earth. Men and women co-exist. The male and the female are distinct, yet harmonise with each other. Sex is the basis for this harmony, the basis for all humanity. Sex is important. Sex is good. 

This is where Heinlein goes a step further for his time; his attitude towards sex in belief and practice were radically different from existing social norms for his time. To Heinlein, and consequently Mike, sex is not a commodity, to be hoarded and practised in the privacy of two individuals behind closed doors. Instead, sex is shared goodness, to be given and taken and exchanged at large. Where Mike comes from, jealousy as a concept does not exist. This lack of jealousy, lack of possessiveness manifest themselves in his attitude towards sex. Because jealousy doesn’t exist, polygamy is no problem. 

Jubal explains Mike philosophy in contrast with religious indictments. The Bible declares: Though shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife. But this, as Jubal wryly observes, is a natural impossibility. As long as men continue to live, they continue to be subject to their desires, whether physical or otherwise. Mike and his philosophy are exactly opposite. What the Church is saying is don’t eye your neighbour’s wife, full stop. What Mike is saying is: You want to covet my wife? Take her! And have some good rocking sex while you’re at it.

For Mike, sex isn’t off-hands and restricted between two people. Love and sex, intertwined as they are, deserve to be shared among people, their goodness shared across all people in the Nest. 
Far from something to be ashamed of or to be guilty about, sex was a goodness, to be cherished and enjoyed and shared.

Of course, this is almost a line-by-line blue print of the hippie movement that came in later during the 60s. This book was published much before it happened, and was there just at the right time when it did. The Free Love movement of the 1960s underscores Mike’s philosophy.

Heinlein's thesis of religion

While everyone was busy having orgies, it did not escape Heinlein to incorporate commentary on religion as well. This he does through the portrayal of the religious order, the Fosterites, who are of the Christian denomination but differ widely in essentials. While Christians unnecessarily torment themselves with original sin, Fosterites embrace it, accept it, and get ready to put it behind themselves. The ultimate aim of life according to Fosterites is to be happy.
 
Heinlein criticises Christianity’s doublespeak. Christianity and Islam are quick to mete out judgement to their followers, to dictate moral, social, political and sexual rules and judgments to their followers. Yet, at the same time, their scriptures are full of inconsistencies and sexual deviance. A case in point in Lot’s offering of his two virgin daughters to a mob banging on his door. Lot trades his young daughters so as to have ‘the mob stop banging on the door.’ This is the God who complies with such an act, who rewards this morality while simultaneously frowning upon a million other things. Such a God is a hypocrite.

Fosterism then, as a religion seeks to eliminate this bias, to do away once and for all with the doublespeak and hypocrisy of religion. However, their unabashed glorying in happiness and hedonistic pleasure is initially disquieting to Jubal and Jill.

Conclusion

I can see why Stranger in a Strange land became such a landmark novel when it was published. It must have provoked and outraged and shocked people of its time - it still does today, in certain places and among certain people. However, any hope of life on Mars, our direct neighbour, let alone a civilisation as highly advanced as the one portrayed in the novel, in light of successive Martian expeditions over the decades is rendered unrealistic at best. 

There are also some major flaws with the book, most particularly Heinlein’s portrayal of women. Women are either shown as passive and ‘go-along-with-what-he’s-saying-and-doing’, like Miriam, Dorcas and Anne, or manipulative and controlling, like Mrs. Douglas and Patty and, to some extent, Jill. My main gripe with Heinlein was Jill saying, ‘Nine out of ten times, when a woman gets raped, it’s her own fault.’

However, all these things considered, the redeeming hallmarks of Stranger are its social commentary and its original ideas about religion and civilisation, which, in the post-60s, post-hippiedom world might strike us as tired and tested, but which were strikingly original and timely for the time it was published in. If you can put aside the 50s-60s attitudinal drawbacks behind, this is a quintessential science fiction read.

Eric Smith

This book was such a disappointment. It started out promising and devolved into a weird tryst on romantic sex being the only really valuable thing about humanity. Also, it features some antiquated gems like the line, "Nine times out of ten if a girl gets raped it's partly her fault."

rumbledethumps

I don't even know where to start this review. The sexism? The bigotry? The tiresome, droning sermons given by the characters? 

I've heard others claim that Heinlein was simply a man of his time, and we should take this into consideration when a Muslim character is endearingly nicknamed Stinky, or when Jill says the oft-quoted, "Nine times out of ten, if a girl gets raped, it's partly her fault." But, I've read plenty of other SF works from the same time period, and Heinlein is an anomaly.

Even if you could ignore the sexism and the bigotry, the rest of the book is simply uninteresting. The future of his world is just the 1950s with flying cars and Mars missions, where reporters are either winchells or lipmanns (a reference that was probably outdated by the time of the 1968 reissue). Male characters (because "these women did not chatter, did not intrude into sober talk of men, but were quick with food and drink") frequently orate during regular conversation, espousing their ideas about things only tangentially related to the conversation.

I really do not understand how this book has survived as a "classic" of science fiction.

Apiecalypse Jen

Gavin

It's a strange read, bloated, full of chauvinist banter. It's like George Bernard Shaw wrote a script for the 50s sitcom 'Bewitched'. There are only two female characters: a megalomanaical shrew, and a nubile and devoted secretary (it's just there happens to be 7 copies of the latter character).

I appreciate his building up a cynical, scientific-humanist world, then tearing it down abruptly at the start of the second book, where two archangels comment on the scene below.

The Muslim linguist character is interesting but borderline (his differences emphasised, often mocked - his nickname is "Stinky"! - but also brilliant and accepted by all the protagonists):

  [Mahmoud] held a vast but carefully concealed distaste for all things American. Their incredible polytheistic babel of religions... their cooking, their manners, their bastard architecture and sickly arts... and their blind, pathetic, arrogant beleief in their superiority. Their women most of all, their immodest, assertive women, with their gaunt, starved bodies which nevertheless reminded him disturbingly of houris (...)

(If that made you cringe you ain't seen nothing. It is so easy to show this book in a terrible light:

  Nine times out of ten, if a girl gets raped, it's partly her own fault. That tenth time - well all right. Give him the heave ho into the bottomless pit.


  Support for the arts - *merde*! A government-supported artist is an incompetent whore.

)

I read the modern, unabridged cut and regret it. The last two sections are flabby and pretty much skimmable, if not skippable.

(As is my new policy, I read this precisely because it was denounced on the internet. Though it turns out the denouncer is actually a critical fan, and the article is entirely fair.)

Comparison of Dune and SiaSL: Both are didactic as hell. Both use magical superhumans to drive the plot in an otherwise sciency setting. Both use a religion their founders do not believe in to obtain power. Both treat water as sacred. Both include cannibals for similar reasons. However, they are deeply different where it matters: Dune is a thing book, SiaSL is a people book. 


First third 4/5, second two-thirds 2/5.

[Library]

Robert Heinlein's Hugo Award-winning all-time masterpiece, the brilliant novel that grew from a cult favorite to a bestseller to a science fiction classic. Raised by Martians on Mars, Valentine Michael Smith is a human who has never seen another member of his species. Sent to Earth, he is a stranger who must learn what it is to be a man. But his own beliefs and his powers far exceed the limits of humankind, and as he teaches them about grokking and water-sharing, he also inspires a transformation that will alter Earth’s inhabitants forever...

Matthew Rasnake

I'm afraid I haven't grokked it in fullness yet. Waiting will fulfill.

Nelson Zagalo

Cada vez me convenço mais que os livros de maior sucesso, que vendem milhões, são livros que as pessoas compram com múltiplos fins, excepto o da sua leitura. “Stranger in a Strange Land” parece-me ser um desses casos. Um livro que se apresenta como de Ficção Científica, mas que de científico tem zero, e que deveria antes apresentar-se nas prateleiras das “Ciências” do Esotérico.

A razão porque vendeu tanto é, em parte, explicável. Saiu em 1961, passou totalmente despercebido. Apesar de receber o prémio Hugo em 1962, as várias análises da época foram bastante destrutivas, e o livro acabou por passar ao esquecimento. Em 1968 com o ressurgimento em força do Programa Apollo da NASA, com o lançamento do primeiro americano no espaço, o livro foi reeditado, mesmo a tempo da loucura que seria o ano 1969 com a chegada à Lua. E é assim que o livro acaba a ser o primeiro livro de FC a entrar na lista do The New York Times Bestsellers, ultrapassando a marca dos 100 mil livros vendidos. Desde então, o facto de ter sido o primeiro livro FC bestseler do NY tem servido fortemente a promoção levando-o a vender mais 5 milhões.

Por mais mal que se diga, se o livro vendeu bem e ainda por cima tem um prémio Hugo, o mais importante da FC, alguma coisa deve existir no livro. Foi isto mesmo que também pensei, contudo, nem sempre os prémios tudo explicam, mais ainda no caso do Hugo que na altura ainda nem 10 anos tinha de existência. Depois, Heinlein na altura era já um grande nome do meio, com uma grande quantidade de contos publicados e alguns livros. Aliás Heinlein costuma surgir ao lado de Isaac Asimov e Arthur C. Clarke como os três grandes da ficção literária de FC. Contudo, só o consigo equiparar em pioneirismo, tudo o resto deixa muito a desejar, basta pensar no livro que precede este, "Starship Troopers" (1959).

Vejamos então ao que vem “Stranger in a Strange Land”. A premissa surgiu de uma ideia da sua esposa, Ginny Heinlein, depois de ler “The Jungle Book” (1894) de Rudyard Kipling. A ideia assentaria numa personagem que em vez de ter sido criada por animais, teria sido criada por marcianos. Uma premissa que se parece estimulante à partida, peca por um problema de base, a ausência de qualquer conhecimento sobre marcianos. Se no Livro da Selva, Kipling procura fusionar as características dos animais com as dos humanos, no caso de Heinlein, não existindo marcianos, resta-lhe fusionar humanos com humanos.

Assim sendo, e de modo a minorar a desconfiança do alcance do seu texto, Heinlein vem dizer que na verdade não tinha feito um livro de ficção científica, mas antes uma “sátira sociopolítica sobre o sexo e a religião na cultura contemporânea”, com o que mais concordo. Na verdade já tivemos algo parecido no passado, naquele que é hoje tido como o primeiro livro de FC, “As Viagens de Gulliver” (1726), e que Heinlein cita a meio do seu livro. Então o que os diferencia? Em essência, a ciência.

Como Heinlein não usa qualquer base científica sobre a potencial vida em Marte, ou qualquer outro planeta, o que nos apresenta limita-se a dois mundos idênticos, com ideologias políticas distintas. Mas percebendo a insuficiência desse embate, e seguindo Swift, que coloca em confronto ideias sociopolíticas, mas a partir de posicionamentos distintos (pessoas muito pequenas, pessoas muito grandes ou pessoas racionalistas), Heinlein vai optar por embarcar no oposto, e gisar os marcianos enquanto pessoas esotéricas, desenhando toda uma sociedade baseada no misticismo, superstição e inexplicável, fazendo mesmo uso da astrologia para conduzir muito do seu enredo.

Só isto seria suficiente para atirar o livro por terra, mas é todo o restante enredo que é também tão pobre e subdesenvolvido. Temos um adulto de 25 anos que nasceu em Marte, mas filho de humanos que para lá viajaram numa nave. Esta pessoa vai depois apresentar poderes de telepatia e telecinese, apesar de biologicamente ser um simples humano que viveu toda a vida em Marte. Ou seja, Heinlein não consegue delimitar o seu trabalho, passando entre o social, o psicológico e o físico como se tudo fosse igual. Acabamos por perceber porque assim é, o foco do seu interesse nunca foi os marcianos, mas antes e só projetar os seus ideais sociais, defender por meio de uma historieta, uma quantidade de banalidades, pseudo-filosóficas, sobre a religião e o sexo, apresentando assim uma espécie de sociedade pré-New Age.

Para agravar tudo isto, o livro inicial tinha sido fortemente editado e reduzido em mais de 60 mil palavras, mas depois de Heinlein morrer a sua esposa encontrou a versão não editada, e resolveu publicá-la, dizendo que era a versão em que o marido sempre tinha acreditado. Assim, para quem quiser ler hoje estas desventuras, tem de sofrer mais uma centena de páginas em que nada acontece, a não ser montes de diálogos inconsequentes, em que se discutem banalidades do quotidiano, e que podem sim, servir a quem quiser traçar os hábitos à época, anos 1960, apesar do livro supostamente ser passado no futuro.


Publicado em Virtual Illusion (http://virtual-illusion.blogspot.pt/2...).

Todd Luallen

Some have criticized the categorizing of this book as Science fiction - stating that it is actually more philosophy than sci-fi. I agree that that this book is heavy on the philosophy and light (very light) on the science. But I do think it fits the "fiction" title quite well.

One of the definitions of "fiction" is: a belief or statement that is false, but that is often held to be true because it is expedient to do so.

I think this definition fits the content of this book quite well.

This book is definitely a product of it's time, but is also very heavy handed in the social commentary department. And, as is typical, the arguments for the society that Heinlein idealizes in this fictional tale, are one-sided at best, and juvenile at worst. 

If you've never read Heinlein, take a glance at his wikipedia page and you'll get a good idea of what topics you'll find in this book. I gave it 3 stars because I do like his conversational writing style and the quick banter that his characters utilize. But I struggled to listen to criticisms of religion that are typically found on a playground, while also being presented with the apparent benefits of nudism and polygamy.

Adam

Having loved Starship Troopers (the movie), this one was always only my list to read. The story, thought of by Heinleins Wife, is simple -- take The Jungle Book, but make the man from Mars. The story went in unexpected places -- to politics, metaphysics, sex and commune lifestyles. I see why this one was such a big hit in the 60s.

Nadine 

Science fiction of this type inevitably cannot transcend its time and mores. Books like this are a reason I tend to prefer SciFi written by women as some of the overly sexist & male ideation is less in those. 
Interesting on its parody of religion, and ideas on time, meditation etc.

Elli

Read for my speculative Fiction Book Club. Stranger in a Strange Land feels like a thought experiment more than a novel. As a novel it does a poor job. The characters are mostly one note Jubal and Mike feel like the only ones who get any real character development. The most interesting plot happens in the first 70-100 pages of the book and after that everything just sort of falls into place for the characters and everything they do/attempt seems to mostly just work out for them. It's didactic in a way that makes it tiresome. Jubal gives long lectures on religion, language, etc. I can enjoy a didactic novel but Jubal just seems so impressed with himself that I just found myself wanting to shut the book just to shut him up even if I did technically mostly agree with him.

As a thought experiment, it has some good/very modern ideas that I found got buried under the rampant sexism and homophobia. I can understand how it would have felt radical at the time, but especially for me (a young, non-binary, queer, non-monogamous person) it didn't offer me much of anything new to think about. For me it feels more like a time capsule for the 1960s and early sci-fi than a story that still has things to offer. 

Erlank Pienaar

Classic Sci-fi. Prophetic and psychologically extraordinaire.
Must read.

Les Reynolds

So weird. Started out interesting, but the last 1/2 was a chore, and it ended with a whimper. Most of it just felt like an excuse to rail about religion, expound on the virtues of "free love", and fantasize about it.

Stranger in a Strange Land

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