Stranger in a strange land
Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
I bought this book and had read about two-thirds of this original uncut version when I left it on a bus. I thought of buying another copy to see what happened in the end, but I didn’t think it was all that good, so I left it. Then when I saw a copy in the library I thought it was my chance to find out what happened, so I took it out and re-read it from the beginning because after 27 years I’d forgotten too much to just pick it up where I left off. And having reached the end, my verdict is unchanged. It’s not really worth paying good money for.The first half is OK, and I’d give it 3 stars on the GoodReads Scale. The second half is excruciatingly boring and preachy, and would get 1 star from me, so 2 stars for the whole thing.
The story concerns the first manned expedition to Mars, which disappears without trace. The second expedition finds there was a survivor — a child of two of the crew members who was born on Mars and named Michael Alexander Smith, and was brought up by Martians after his parents died. The second expedition brought him, now a young adult, back to earth, where he suffers from culture shock, and is perceived as a threat by vested interests on earth, and so is kept incommunicado by the government.
The book was at least partly responsible for starting a New Religious Movement (NRM), the Church of All Worlds, and perhaps the best comment on that comes from Drawing Down the Moon by Diane Adler:
The Church of All Worlds has been called everything from ‘a sub-culture science-fiction Grok-flock’ to ‘a bunch of crazy hippie freaks.’ But the real origins of CAW lead back to a small group of friends who, along with untold numbers of middle-class high school and college students in the late 1950s and early 1960s, became infatuated with the romantic, heroic, compelling right-wing ideas of Ayn Rand. It is a sign of the peculiarity of North American consciousness that thousands of young students, at one time or another, have become possessed by her novels – Atlas shrugged, The Fountainhead, and Anthem. Jerome Tucille, in his witty, tongue-in-cheek tour of the libertarian right, It usually begins with Ayn Rand, could not have been more precise in his choice of title. He noted that Rand’s works were particularly appealing ‘to those in the process of escaping a regimented religious background.’ Despite the author’s rigid philosophy of Objectivism, she stirred a libertarian impulse, and Atlas shrugged became a ‘New Marxism of the Right’.
And the second half of Stranger in a Strange Land is like nothing so much as John Galt’s speech from Atlas Shrugged, only about three times as long.
It was written in the late 1950s, and is stamped with American culture of that period, including their vision of the future. This included future technology — flying cars, yes, but no personal computers, no cell phones, no digital photography. It is also full of the male chauvinist piggery of the period, though some of the language seems strange for a novel set in the USA — lots of “chaps” and “blokes” around. I didn’t know there were so many of those in the US, either back in the 1950s or now.
Notes from underground 
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