Stranger in a Strange Land
Robert A. Heinlein, 1961
Ace Books
528 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780441788385
Summary
One of the greats in science fiction writing and winner of the 1962 Hugo Award for Best Novel.
It is 25 years after a space launch from Earth landed on Mars—never to return. Now a second expedition heads out to learn what happened and returns home with the Man From Mars. Valentine Michael Smith is human, born from parents of the original expedition...but raised by Martians.
Confronted by the many oddities of a strange new land, Mike must learn to adapt to Earth—not only its atmosphere, but its language and cultural practices. Aided by nurse Gillian Boardman and reporter Ben Caxton, Mikes eludes World Government agents who may be trying to kill him. He finds refuge in the home of Jubal Harshaw, a well-known doctor, lawyer, and writer. Jubal offers protection and wisdom, standing in as a father to Mike.
Mike is the classic outsider viewing and commenting on society's pervading culture—a culture familiar to the book's readers. With considerable wit and humor, Heinlein portrays a futurist civilization gone awry. Consumerism, gambling, sexuality, alcoholism, and hyper-religiosity represent the new norm for Earthlings. Will Mike be Earth's nemesis...or its savior? (From LitLovers.)
Author Bio
• Birth—July 7, 1907
• Raised—Kansas City, Missouri, USA ,
• Death—May 8, 1988
• Where—Carmel, California, USA
• Education—B.S., U.S. Naval Academy
• Awards—4 Hugo Awards; Science Fiction Writers Grand Master
Robert Anson Heinlein was an American science fiction writer. Often called the "dean of science fiction writers," he was one of the most influential and controversial authors of the genre in his time. He set a standard for scientific and engineering plausibility, and helped to raise the genre's standards of literary quality.
He was one of the first science fiction writers to break into mainstream magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post in the late 1940s and was one of the best-selling science fiction novelists for decades. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke are known as the "Big Three" of science fiction.
Heinlein was a notable writer of science fiction short stories and one of a group of writers who came to prominence under the editorship of John W. Campbell, Jr. in his Astounding Science Fiction magazine. Heinlein, however, denied that Campbell influenced his writing to any great degree.
Within the framework of his science fiction stories, Heinlein repeatedly addressed certain social themes: the importance of individual liberty and self-reliance, the obligation individuals owe to their societies, the influence of organized religion on culture and government, and the tendency of society to repress nonconformist thought. He also speculated on the influence of space travel on human cultural practices.
Heinlein was named the first Science Fiction Writers Grand Master in 1974 He won Hugo Awards for four of his novels; in addition, fifty years after publication, three of his works were awarded "Retro Hugos"—awards given retrospectively for publication years when there were no Hugo Awards. In his fiction Heinlein coined words that have become part of the English language, including "grok" and "waldo," and he popularized the terms "TANSTAAFL" and space marine.
Early years
Heinlein was born to Rex Ivar Heinlein (an accountant) and Bam Lyle Heinlein, in Butler, Missouri. His childhood was spent in Kansas City, Missouri. The outlook and values of this time and place (in his own words, "The Bible Belt") had a definite influence on his fiction, especially his later works, as he drew heavily upon his childhood in establishing the setting and cultural atmosphere in works like Time Enough for Love and To Sail Beyond the Sunset. He often broke with many of the Bible Belt's values and mores—especially in regard to religion and sexual morality—both in his writing and in his personal life.
Heinlein graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, in 1929 with a B.S degree in naval engineering and served as an officer in the Navy. He was assigned to the new aircraft carrier USS Lexington in 1931, where he worked in radio communications, then in its earlier phases, with the carrier's aircraft. He also served aboard the destroyer USS Roper in 1933 and 1934, reaching the rank of lieutenant.
In 1934, Heinlein was discharged from the Navy due to pulmonary tuberculosis. During a lengthy hospitalization, he developed a design for a waterbed.
After his discharge, Heinlein attended a few weeks of graduate classes in mathematics and physics at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), but he soon quit, either because of his health or from a desire to enter politics.
Heinlein supported himself at several occupations, including real estate sales and silver mining, but for some years found money in short supply. He became active in Upton Sinclair's socialist End Poverty in California movement in the early 1930s. When Sinclair gained the Democratic nomination for Governor of California in 1934, Heinlein worked actively in the campaign.
Heinlein himself ran for the California State Assembly in 1938, but he was unsuccessful. In 1954, he wrote, "many Americans ... were asserting loudly that McCarthy had created a 'reign of terror.' Are you terrified? I am not, and I have in my background much political activity well to the left of Senator McCarthy's position."
Author
While not destitute after the campaign—he had a small disability pension from the Navy—Heinlein turned to writing in order to pay off his mortgage. His first published story, "Life-Line", was printed in the August 1939 issue of Astounding Science-Fiction. Another story, Misfit, followed in November—and Heinlein was quickly acknowledged as a leader of the new movement toward "social" science fiction.
During World War II, he did aeronautical engineering for the U.S. Navy, also recruiting Isaac Asimov and L. Sprague de Camp to work at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard in Pennsylvania. He also wrote for Boys' Life in 1952.
As the war wound down in 1945, Heinlein began re-evaluating his career. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, along with the outbreak of the Cold War, galvanized him to write nonfiction on political topics. In addition, he wanted to break into better-paying markets. He published four influential short stories for The Saturday Evening Post, making him the first science fiction writer to break out of the "pulp ghetto."
In 1950, the movie Destination Moon, a documentary-like film, won an Academy Award for special effects. Heinlein had invented many of the effects; he had also written both story and scenario and co-written the script. He also embarked on a series of juvenile Sci Fi novels for the Charles Scribner's Sons publishing company that went from 1947 through 1959—at the rate of one book each autumn, in time for Christmas presents to teenagers.
In 1948, Heinlein married Virginia "Ginny" Gerstenfeld, his third wife, to whom he would remain married until his death forty years later. Ginny undoubtedly served as a model for many of his intelligent, fiercely independent female characters. She was also the first reader of his manuscripts and was reputed to be a better engineer than Heinlein himself.
Isaac Asimov believed that Heinlein made a swing to the right politically at the same time he married Ginny. Tramp Royale contains two lengthy apologias for the McCarthy hearings. The Heinleins formed the small "Patrick Henry League" in 1958, and they worked in the 1964 Barry Goldwater Presidential campaign. After seeing a full-page ad demanding a halt to nuclear weapons testing, Heinlein spent the next several weeks writing and publishing works that lambasted "Communist-line goals concealed in idealistic-sounding nonsense" and urged Americans not to become "soft-headed."
In 1959, after Scribner rejected one of his juvenile novels as too controversial, Heinlein felt released from the constraints of writing novels for children. He began to write a series of challenging books that redrew the boundaries of science fiction, including his best-known work, Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966).
Later life and death
Beginning in 1970 Heinlein had a series of health crises, broken by strenuous periods of activity in his hobby of stonemasonry. The decade began with a life-threatening attack of peritonitis, recovery from which required more than two years. As soon as he was well enough to write again, he began work on Time Enough for Love (1973), which introduced many of the themes found in his later fiction.
While vacationing in Tahiti in early 1978, he suffered a transient ischemic attack. Over the next few months, he became more and more exhausted, and his health again began to decline. The problem was determined to be a blocked carotid artery, and he had one of the earliest known carotid bypass operations to correct it. Heinlein and Virginia had been smokers, and smoking appears often in his fiction, as do fictitious strikable self-lighting cigarettes.
Asked to appear before a Joint Committee of the U.S. House and Senate in 1983, he testified on his belief that spin-offs from space technology were benefiting the infirm and the elderly. Heinlein's surgical treatment re-energized him, and he wrote five novels from 1980 until he died in his sleep from emphysema and heart failure on May 8, 1988.
At that time, he had been putting together the early notes for another World as Myth novel. Several of his other works have been published posthumously.
After his death, his wife Virginia Heinlein issued a compilation of Heinlein's correspondence and notes into a somewhat autobiographical examination of his career, published in 1989 under the title Grumbles from the Grave.
Heinlein's archive is housed by the Special Collections department of McHenry Library at the University of California at Santa Cruz. The collection includes manuscript drafts, correspondence, photographs and artifacts. A substantial portion of the archive has been digitized and it is available online through the Robert A. and Virginia Heinlein Archives.
A complete collection of Heinlein's published work, conformed and copy-edited by several Heinlein scholars, including biographer William H. Patterson, was published by the Heinlein Trust as the "Virginia Edition," after his wife. (Adapted from Wikipedi. Retrieved 9/29/2013.)
Book Reviews
[D]isastrous mishmash of science fiction, laborious humor, dreary social satire and cheap eroticism"; he characterized Stranger as "puerile and ludicrous", saying "when a non-stop orgy is combined with a lot of preposterous chatter, it becomes unendurable, an affront to the patience and intelligence of readers"
Orville Prescott - New York Times (August 4, 1961)
'[D]isturbing, shocking and entertaining.... It sparkles and crackles and produces goose bumps of apprehension and dissatisfaction with the human race.... The best of his many books. (Back cover, 1968 paperback edition.)
Washington Post
[I]n some ways emblematic of the Sixties... It fit the iconoclastic mood of the time, attacking human folly under several guises, especially in the person or persons of the Establishment: government, the military, organized religion. By many of its readers, too, it was taken to advocate a religion of love, and of incalculable power, which could revolutionize human affairs and bring about an apocalyptic change, presumably for the better.
David N. Samuelson - Critical Encounters: Writers and Themes in Science Fiction
[T]he values of the sixties could hardly have found a more congenial expression.
Robert Scholes and Eric S. Rabkin - Science Fiction: History, Science, Vision
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also, consider these LitLovers talking points to start a discussion for Stranger in a Strange Land:
1. The title of Heinlein's novel is taken from Exodus 2:22 in the Old Testament.
And she bare him a son, and he called his name Gershom: for he said, I have been a stranger in a strange land.
Why might Heinlein have used the verse? Is there a larger Biblical relationship to the novel?
2. How does Earth in Heinlein's unspecified future differ from the Earth we know today?
3. Aside from language, what are the cultural differences between life on Mars and life on Earth? What must Mike learn in order to adapt to life among humans, e.g., religion, war, and, sex? What else?
4. What does it mean to be a "water brother"?
5. Mike explains that God is "one who groks," and from there he goes on to reveal the Martian concept of life as "Thou art God." Explain! What does "grok" mean?
6. How is human sexuality portrayed in this book? In what way does Mike's sexual awakening parallel his spiritual growth?
7. What is the fourth dimension—where Mike sends the government agents chasing him?
8. Talk about Mike's psychic powers. How has he come by them? How does Jill eventually learn to use them?
9. Talk about the Fosterites— their religious concepts and practices. What is their interest in Mike?
10. SPOILER ALERT: What do you suppose occurs in the private confrontation between Mike and Digby, after which Digby disappears? Why has the author withheld that information?
11. Follow-up to Question 10: Why does Mike feel that he made the best decision possible under the circumstances?
12. How would you describe the Church of All Worlds? What is its central message? What is its appeal? Why do people who initially reject the message later become devoted followers, including Ben?
13. Mike worries that humanity has become stuck in its own unhappiness and strife. What do you think?
14. Is Heinlein's novel anti-feminist? Or does it offer an empowering message for women?
15. SPOILER ALERT: Why does Mike decide to sacrifice himself at the novel's end?
16. SPOILER ALERT Is this a religious book? Is it anti-religious or blasphemous? Does the story parallel the life of Jesus? Or the archangel Michael?
17. What does this book satirize?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)