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.