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Stranger in a Strange Land, in detail
Valentine Michael Smith is the first human born on Mars and raised by Martians. When he is brought back to Earth as an adult, he arrives with Martian mental abilities — including telekinesis and total memory — and absolutely no framework for understanding what human beings are doing or why. The novel follows his education by a skeptical nurse named Jill and a worldly old journalist named Jubal Harshaw, and his eventual attempt to found a religion that could teach humans to "grok" — to understand completely, to become one with what one perceives.
The novel is partly social satire, partly countercultural manifesto, partly philosophical exploration of what religion does and whether a better one is possible. Heinlein is using Mike's alien innocence the way Voltaire used Candide — as a lens to make American culture visible by describing it from outside. The sexual politics, the critique of monogamy and possessiveness, and the communal "water-brotherhood" Mike establishes read as a direct anticipation of 1960s counterculture, despite being published in 1961.
This is a long, discursive novel — the original manuscript was even longer, and a restored version released in 1991 is about 60,000 words longer than the original. Large sections are occupied by Jubal Harshaw's extended monologues about religion, politics, and human nature. Heinlein is an essayist in a novelist's clothing, and he is not shy about it. The narrative energy comes in waves rather than as sustained propulsion.
Stranger in a Strange Land is historically important and intellectually stimulating but genuinely uneven. It helped establish a template for countercultural science fiction and introduced "grok" into the English language. Readers who enjoy idea-dense fiction and are willing to accept a lumpy narrative structure will find it rewarding. Readers who want tightly plotted novels, or who bristle at dated gender dynamics — women in the novel are drawn with much less complexity than the men — will find it a more ambivalent experience.
The big ideas
- 1.
Grok — to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes part of the observed — entered the English language from this novel and remains one of science fiction's most useful coinages.
- 2.
Heinlein uses the Martian-raised human as a device to estrange familiar social institutions: marriage, religion, property, government are all rendered strange by someone encountering them fresh.
- 3.
The novel anticipates the counterculture by arguing that possessiveness, jealousy, and the instinct to control others' sexuality are learned rather than innate.
