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Stranger in a Strange Land
by Robert Heinlein
by Ted Gioia
Two years after his novel Starship Troopers, which incurred
charges that he was a militarist, Heinlein offered up Stranger in a
Strange Land, which would establish him as a free love guru of the
hippie generation. That must be like attending West Point in the
morning, and leading a protest at Berkeley in the afternoon.
Certainly somebody must be confused
here—either Heinlein or his critics?
But those who try to force Heinlein into
an ideological corner are missing half
the fun. This is science fiction, after all,
and it is supposed to be provocative.
Does anyone really think Asimov
wanted to live as a citizen on the
Foundation planet of Trantor? Was
Herbert advocating large sandworms
as his preferred form of mass transit?
Did Burgess go out tolchocking with
his droogs? Hardly! But Heinlein’s
narrative voice is so powerful and
insinuating, readers are tempted to read his fictions as manifestos
for a better way of life.
Nowhere is this more evident than in Stranger in a Strange Land.
The hero of the tale, Valentine Michael Smith, is a human who was
abandoned as an infant on Mars and raised by Martians. He
returns to Earth as a young man, where he is immediately
institutionalized and isolated by a hostile government. According
to a quirk in international and inter-galactic law, Smith controls
the wealth left behind by the first expeditionary party that visited
the Red Planet, of which he is sole survivor. This includes rights to
a valuable patent, which may be worth hundreds of millions of
dollars.
But Smith is as innocent as a babe in the Martian woods, and only
the intervention of a group of new-found friends prevents him
from handing over these rights. With the help of journalist Ben
Caxton, nurse Gillian Boardman and lawyer Jubal Harshaw,
among others, Smith is sprung from his hospital internment and
assisted in securing his fabulous wealth. We have seen this plot
twist before—for example, in serious fiction such as Dostoevsky’s
The Idiot or its popular film equivalent Forrest Gump: the naïve
but good-hearted simpleton overcomes the scheming and
obstacles of an indifferent or hostile society.
This part of the story might have made for a reasonably
interesting novel in its own right. But Heinlein is merely warming
up for his main act. Once Valentine Michael Smith is rich and free
to reach for all the gusto he can, he sets up a free love
organization—sort of a cross between Amway, a swingers party
and a UFO cult. I’m not sure what wavelengths Heinlein was
tapping into when he wrote this novel in the 1950s and early
1960s—after all Esalen would not be founded until the year after
the novel was published, bra-burning wouldn’t kick in for another
seven years, and the Summer of Love was not even the glimmer of
a wisp of a dream. But our author was clearly wired into the
impending social changes that would sweep the country in the
aftermath of the Kennedy assassination.
To some degree, Heinlein helped pave the way. And he certainly
contributed to the jargon and concepts of the time. He gave us the
word “grok” (a Martian term meaning to understand in a deep and
thorough way)—a veritable gift to all later Scrabble players and
crossword puzzle constructors. He anticipated the water bed, an
essential accoutrement for all those under the sway of flower
power. He invented the water sharing ritual fifteen years before
Perrier opened up its first US office. Yes, he may have been old
enough to join AARP, but Heinlein knew more about the essence
of the Sixties generation than any of their parents were able to
grok.
But for all its anticipation of the future, Heinlein is not without his
debt to the past. Stranger in a Strange Land often reads like a pulp
fiction novel, especially whenever Jubal Harshaw is on the scene.
Harshaw talks like he has just strolled into these pages after being
evicted from a bad Mickey Spillane novel. He keeps spouting off
comments such as “Kiss girls all you want to—it beats the hell out
of card games.” In the parlance of creative writing workshops, this
is known as hard-boiled prose. Heinlein is a master of the style, so
one can understand his reluctance to experiment with other
techniques; but it is a tremendous mis-match with the subject
matter of Stranger in a Strange Land. At a time when other
authors who were shaping the sixties zeitgeist—Ken Kesey, Tom
Wolfe, Hunter Thompson—were also creating fresh new ways of
expressing themselves in prose, Heinlein was still wedded to the
writing conventions of the 1930s and 1940s.
Many of Heinlein’s most ardent fans are admirers of Harshaw, who
to some degree is a stand-in for the author in this story. But for all
his hard-boiled wisdom, Harshaw is one of the most confusing
characters in the annals of science fiction. At various sections of
the book, Harshaw is a lawyer, a doctor, a political lobbyist, or a
pulp fiction writer, depending on the circumstances. He may be
old and infirm, but he has a harem of women at his beck and
command—who cook, clean and know stenography. What is this
all about? In short, Harshaw is less a character than some type of
wish fulfillment on Heinlein’s part.
But we forgive Heinlein these excesses. Stranger in a Strange Land
is a magical, surprising book, and Michael Valentine Smith is (in
contrast to Harshaw) a fresh character type, unconstrained by
Raymond Chandler-esque precedents. He is also unconstrained
by Freudian, Marxian, Jungian, religious, parental or other
"baggage" (may I use the 1960s term?). As a result, Smith is more
than a character. He is prototype of an alternative personality
structure. The question of whether we can remake the human
personality from the ground up has been pondered by Plato,
Rousseau, Marx and many other great thinkers who shaped
Western thought. Fiction is another technique for exploring this
human capacity for reinvention—although few writers have been
as daring as Heinlein in embracing this potential of storytelling.
Such conceptual risk-taking more than compensates for the
formulaic aspects of Stranger in a Strange Land and ensures that
this book will continue to spur discussion and debate in a way that
few science fiction books of the 1960s—or any era, for that
matter—can match.
This article was originally published on Blogcritics.
by Robert Heinlein
by Ted Gioia
Two years after his novel Starship Troopers, which incurred
charges that he was a militarist, Heinlein offered up Stranger in a
Strange Land, which would establish him as a free love guru of the
hippie generation. That must be like attending West Point in the
morning, and leading a protest at Berkeley in the afternoon.
Certainly somebody must be confused
here—either Heinlein or his critics?
But those who try to force Heinlein into
an ideological corner are missing half
the fun. This is science fiction, after all,
and it is supposed to be provocative.
Does anyone really think Asimov
wanted to live as a citizen on the
Foundation planet of Trantor? Was
Herbert advocating large sandworms
as his preferred form of mass transit?
Did Burgess go out tolchocking with
his droogs? Hardly! But Heinlein’s
narrative voice is so powerful and
insinuating, readers are tempted to read his fictions as manifestos
for a better way of life.
Nowhere is this more evident than in Stranger in a Strange Land.
The hero of the tale, Valentine Michael Smith, is a human who was
abandoned as an infant on Mars and raised by Martians. He
returns to Earth as a young man, where he is immediately
institutionalized and isolated by a hostile government. According
to a quirk in international and inter-galactic law, Smith controls
the wealth left behind by the first expeditionary party that visited
the Red Planet, of which he is sole survivor. This includes rights to
a valuable patent, which may be worth hundreds of millions of
dollars.
But Smith is as innocent as a babe in the Martian woods, and only
the intervention of a group of new-found friends prevents him
from handing over these rights. With the help of journalist Ben
Caxton, nurse Gillian Boardman and lawyer Jubal Harshaw,
among others, Smith is sprung from his hospital internment and
assisted in securing his fabulous wealth. We have seen this plot
twist before—for example, in serious fiction such as Dostoevsky’s
The Idiot or its popular film equivalent Forrest Gump: the naïve
but good-hearted simpleton overcomes the scheming and
obstacles of an indifferent or hostile society.
This part of the story might have made for a reasonably
interesting novel in its own right. But Heinlein is merely warming
up for his main act. Once Valentine Michael Smith is rich and free
to reach for all the gusto he can, he sets up a free love
organization—sort of a cross between Amway, a swingers party
and a UFO cult. I’m not sure what wavelengths Heinlein was
tapping into when he wrote this novel in the 1950s and early
1960s—after all Esalen would not be founded until the year after
the novel was published, bra-burning wouldn’t kick in for another
seven years, and the Summer of Love was not even the glimmer of
a wisp of a dream. But our author was clearly wired into the
impending social changes that would sweep the country in the
aftermath of the Kennedy assassination.
To some degree, Heinlein helped pave the way. And he certainly
contributed to the jargon and concepts of the time. He gave us the
word “grok” (a Martian term meaning to understand in a deep and
thorough way)—a veritable gift to all later Scrabble players and
crossword puzzle constructors. He anticipated the water bed, an
essential accoutrement for all those under the sway of flower
power. He invented the water sharing ritual fifteen years before
Perrier opened up its first US office. Yes, he may have been old
enough to join AARP, but Heinlein knew more about the essence
of the Sixties generation than any of their parents were able to
grok.
But for all its anticipation of the future, Heinlein is not without his
debt to the past. Stranger in a Strange Land often reads like a pulp
fiction novel, especially whenever Jubal Harshaw is on the scene.
Harshaw talks like he has just strolled into these pages after being
evicted from a bad Mickey Spillane novel. He keeps spouting off
comments such as “Kiss girls all you want to—it beats the hell out
of card games.” In the parlance of creative writing workshops, this
is known as hard-boiled prose. Heinlein is a master of the style, so
one can understand his reluctance to experiment with other
techniques; but it is a tremendous mis-match with the subject
matter of Stranger in a Strange Land. At a time when other
authors who were shaping the sixties zeitgeist—Ken Kesey, Tom
Wolfe, Hunter Thompson—were also creating fresh new ways of
expressing themselves in prose, Heinlein was still wedded to the
writing conventions of the 1930s and 1940s.
Many of Heinlein’s most ardent fans are admirers of Harshaw, who
to some degree is a stand-in for the author in this story. But for all
his hard-boiled wisdom, Harshaw is one of the most confusing
characters in the annals of science fiction. At various sections of
the book, Harshaw is a lawyer, a doctor, a political lobbyist, or a
pulp fiction writer, depending on the circumstances. He may be
old and infirm, but he has a harem of women at his beck and
command—who cook, clean and know stenography. What is this
all about? In short, Harshaw is less a character than some type of
wish fulfillment on Heinlein’s part.
But we forgive Heinlein these excesses. Stranger in a Strange Land
is a magical, surprising book, and Michael Valentine Smith is (in
contrast to Harshaw) a fresh character type, unconstrained by
Raymond Chandler-esque precedents. He is also unconstrained
by Freudian, Marxian, Jungian, religious, parental or other
"baggage" (may I use the 1960s term?). As a result, Smith is more
than a character. He is prototype of an alternative personality
structure. The question of whether we can remake the human
personality from the ground up has been pondered by Plato,
Rousseau, Marx and many other great thinkers who shaped
Western thought. Fiction is another technique for exploring this
human capacity for reinvention—although few writers have been
as daring as Heinlein in embracing this potential of storytelling.
Such conceptual risk-taking more than compensates for the
formulaic aspects of Stranger in a Strange Land and ensures that
this book will continue to spur discussion and debate in a way that
few science fiction books of the 1960s—or any era, for that
matter—can match.
This article was originally published on Blogcritics.
Conceptual Fiction
