Stranger in a Strange Land

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"Stranger in a Strange Land" is also the title of a song by Iron Maiden.

Image:Stranger in a Strange Land Cover.jpg

Stranger in a Strange Land is a 1961 science fiction novel by Robert A. Heinlein. It tells the story of Valentine Michael Smith, a human raised by Martians on Mars, as he returns to Earth in early adulthood. The novel explores his interaction with — and eventual transformation of — Earth culture. The title of the book is a quotation of Moses.Template:Ref

The book was a breakthrough best-seller, attracting many readers who would not ordinarily have read a work of science fiction. Late-1960s counterculture was influenced by its themes of sexual freedom and liberation.Template:Ref

Much of the novel is didactic, consisting of long speeches by the character Jubal Harshaw, a fiction writer with training as a lawyer and medical doctor, who acts as Heinlein's mouthpiece and alter ego, presenting many points of view that typify Heinlein's opinions as expressed in his works in general. This is less of a dramatic flaw than in other novels containing Heinlein mouthpieces (e.g., The Cat Who Walks Through Walls and Time Enough for Love), since Harshaw's hardheaded Mark Twain-style realism is effectively contrasted against Smith's mystical and alien point of view, and Harshaw is often proved wrong. Smith eventually enshrines Harshaw as the patron saint of the church he founds (much to Harshaw's initial chagrin.)

When Heinlein first wrote Stranger, his editors required him to cut it from its original 220,000-word length, and to remove a sex scene. The final result was near 160,000 words, and this version, published in 1961, received a Hugo Award. After Heinlein's death in 1988, his wife Virginia found a market for the original edition, which was published in 1991. As with Podkayne of Mars, critics disagree whether Heinlein's preferred version, published later, is in fact better than the one originally published.

Contents

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Impact

Like many influential works of literature, Stranger made a contribution to the language: specifically, the word "grok." In Heinlein's invented Martian language, "grok" literally means "to drink" and figuratively means "to understand," "to love," or "to be one with." This word rapidly became common parlance among SciFi fans, hippies, and computer hackers, and has since entered the Oxford English Dictionary among others.

A central element of the second half of the novel is the religious movement founded by Smith, the "Church of All Worlds." This church is an initiatory mystery religion, blending elements of paganism and revivalism with psychic training and instruction in the Martian language. In 1968, a group of neopagans inspired by Stranger took it upon themselves to found a religious group with this name, modeled in many ways after the fictional organization. Their Church of All Worlds remains an active part of the neopagan community today.

Stranger was written in part as a deliberate attempt to challenge social mores. In the course of the story, Heinlein uses Smith's open-mindedness to reevaluate such institutions as religion, money, monogamy, and the fear of death. Heinlein completed writing it ten years after he had (uncharacteristically) plotted it out in detail. He later wrote "I had been in no hurry to finish it, as that story could not be published commercially until the public mores changed. I could see them changing and it turned out that I had timed it right."Template:Ref

On a lighter note, Stranger contains an early description of the waterbed, an invention which made its real-world debut a few years later in 1968. Charles Hall, who brought a waterbed design to the United States Patent Office, was refused a patent on the grounds that Heinlein's descriptions in Stranger and another novel, Double Star, constituted prior art. Template:Ref

Heinlein reportedly named his main character "Smith" because of a speech he made at a science fiction convention regarding the unpronounceable names assigned to extraterrestrials. After describing the importance of establishing a dramatic difference between humans and aliens, Heinlein concluded, "Besides, whoever heard of a Martian named Smith?" ("A Martian Named Smith" was both Heinlein's working title for the book and the name of the screenplay being started by Harshaw at the end.)

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Plot

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

The story portrays Valentine Michael Smith's adaptation to, and understanding of, humans and their culture, which is portrayed as an amplified version of consumerist and media-driven 20th-century America. Smith is the son of two astronauts, raised by Martians on Mars, until he is taken "home" to Earth, where he is effectively imprisoned in a hospital by the government. He is initially rescued from the hospital by nurse Gillian Boardman as part of a plan formulated by a popular newspaper columnist.

Afterwards, Boardman and Smith move in with Jubal Harshaw, an eccentric millionaire. Harshaw's five employees, along with Gillian, teach Smith human customs and behavior (including sex), which he initially doesn't understand. He demonstrates his psychic abilities and superhuman intelligence, which are coupled with a childlike naïveté. When Jubal is trying to explain religion to him, Smith understands the concept of God only as "one who groks", which includes every living person, plant, and animal. Due to his education on a different planet, many human concepts, such as war, clothing, and jealousy are strange to him. The government eventually steps in because of the danger posed by Smith's hypothetical claim to ownership of the planet Mars. They are forced to sign a treaty because of the threat of media exposure.

Later, Smith moves out with Gillian and joins a traveling circus as a magician, but although his "magic" is real -- levitation and teleportation -- he is a failure as an entertainer because of his inability to understand people. He eventually learns to understand people when he realizes that most humor is based on laughing at distress or indignities suffered by others. To help humanity better themselves, he begins a church/school dedicated to the teaching of the Martian language, inner discipline, paranormal abilities, immortality, and to spiritual and sexual bonding, under the concept that all people are God, and should love each other. He challenges traditional values such as monogamy and property, and blames the world's problems on people's refusal to grok each other. The church gains a small following, but is besieged and eventually destroyed. In a last conversation with Harshaw, Smith fears that people will not accept a nonviolent path because humanity must have violence for "weeding out" the unfit; Harshaw tells him that if he has faith in the movement he has started and their ability to show people what is possible through self-discipline, that in all likelihood they will eventually take over the world. A mob gathers while they talk; Smith goes out to talk to them and is brutally killed. Smith is explicitly portrayed as a modern Prometheus, and implicitly as a messianic figure; in the ending of the book, it is implied that he is in reality the archangel Michael, who has assumed human form.

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Criticism

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Lack of psychological realism

Two related criticisms that have been made are that the book steps outside the bounds of psychological realism, and that it advocates a utopia which cannot actually be achieved without knowledge of the fictitious Martian language or similarly fanciful supernatural powers. However, some critics, including Patterson and Thornton, argue that the story is to be understood not as a psychologically realistic novel but as a qualitatively different form, the narrative satire. Heinlein described the story, in a letter to his agent, as "a Cabellesque satire of sex and religion," suggesting that it be evaluated on the same terms as such intentionally unrealistic stories as Cabell's Jurgen: A Comedy of justice. The expectation, then, is that when the scene shifts to a discussion between a dead person's soul and an archangel, the reader doesn't even need to suspend his sense of disbelief, because the story has never invited belief in its realism in the first place. Similarly, if there is no expectation that the book should be taken as a realistic prescription for a utopia, then the utopia's impracticability is not a defect in the story.

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Characterization and motivation

Heinlein's novelistic output before Stranger in a Strange Land had consisted mostly of juvenile fiction rooted in the pulp tradition, whereas Stranger was intended as a venture into a more highbrow literary landscape. Ironically, however, one of the main reasons critic Alexei Panshin faults the book is for its poor characterization --- a weakness usually considered more typical of pulp SF. Mike is not human, Jubal functions as a mouthpiece for the authorial voice, Jubal's three secretaries are interchangeable cardboard cutouts, and Jill is used simply as a devil's advocate against more enlightened points of view. Writes Panshin,

Which secretary sleeps with Mike his first time out? They are so lacking in definition that it is impossible to tell. Jill Boardman supposedly loves Ben Caxton, but won't sleep with him. She will, however, go off around the country with Mike on a sleep-in basis. Why? I can't say. At any time it would not surprise me for her to unscrew her foot and stick it in her ear --- she is capable of anything.
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Homosexuality and gender roles

To modern readers, some statements in the book may seem to convey a sense of misogyny or homophobia. For example:

...[Jill] had explained homosexuality, after Mike had read about it and failed to grok -- and had given him rules for avoiding passes; she knew that Mike, pretty as he was, would attract such. He had followed her advice and had made his face more masculine, instead of the androgynous beauty he had had. But Jill was not sure that Mike would refuse a pass, say, from Duke -- fortunately Mike's male water brothers were decidedly masculine, just as his others were very female women. Jill suspected that Mike would grok a 'wrongness' in the poor in-betweeners anyhow -- they would never be offered water. Template:Fact

Another passage concerns the mail that the man from Mars receives:

After looking over a bushel or so of Mike's first class mail Jubal set up a list of categories: ... G. Proposals of marriage and propositions not quite so formal ... Jill brought a letter, category "G," to Jubal. More than half of the ladies and other females (plus misguided males) who supplied this category included pictures alleged to be of themselves; some left little to the imagination, as did the letters themselves in many cases. This letter [from a woman] enclosed a picture which managed not only to leave nothing to the imagination, but started over by stimulating fresh imaginings.Template:Ref

One critic writes:

These days the "heresy" is centered more on the characters' provincial attitudes towards gay men ("poor in-betweeners" whose "wrongness" denies them water-kinship) and all women ("Nine times out of ten, if a girl gets raped, it's at least partly her own fault," Jill says to Michael, when instructing him not to defend her too strenuously against such an assault). (Tasha Robinson, "Humanity, through a glass brightly"Template:Ref)

However, these passages both deal with the prudish character Jill, who is used as a dramatic foil for Mike and Jubal's less parochial views. A major thread of the story is Smith's gradual persuasion of Jill to grow beyond her inhibitions, embrace her previously suppressed exhibitionistic nature, and learn to understand other people's sexuality (e.g., Duke's interest in pornography). The passage about the letter deals with Jill's inclination to shield Mike from it, and she is overruled by the wiser Jubal (additionally, the "misguided males" could be misguided only in that they are unaware that Mike is strictly heterosexual). The quote concerning "wrongness" in the "poor in-betweeners" likewise portrays the unenlightened character Jill's speculation about what Mike would think of homosexuality, not Mike's actual attitudes.

On the other hand, just because some of these negative views of homosexuality occur in the thoughts and words of the characters, rather than coming from the authorial voice, that doesn't mean that they were not intended to express Heinlein's views. As Brooks Peck put it, "Heinlein loved to pontificate through the mouths of his characters," and Jubal is clearly often acting as a mouthpiece for Heinlein's own views. Also, the remark about "misguided males" is part of the book's exposition, not its dialogue or the representation of a character's thoughts.

Even so, similar comments about homosexuality may be found in 1966's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.

Later chapters in the novel, depicting the workings of the Church of All Worlds, in fact have a number of references, some more obvious than others, that the sexual bonding that occurs between water-brothers is not limited to male/female. Ben, who has become a water brother but who has not received the training that normal church members receive, comments at one point that two men are kissing, but nothing about the act seems out of place or unmasculine. By the novel's end, it seems to promote a kind of general bisexuality, implying that sexual bonding can occur between any water-brothers, regardless of gender. This is, however, not directly stated so much as implied, and other interpretations are possible.

A more general discussion of Heinlein's attitudes on sexuality, homosexuality, gender roles, and sexual freedom is given in the article on Heinlein.

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Editions

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References

  • Alexei Panshin. 1968. Heinlein in Dimension. Chicago: Advent Publishers. ISBN 0911682120
  • William H. Patterson, Jr. and Andrew Thornton. 2001. The Martian Named Smith: Critical Perspectives on Robert A. Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land. Sacramento: Nitrosyncretic Press. ISBN 0967987423.
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Notes

  1. Template:Note Moses flees ancient Egypt, where he has lived all his life, because Pharaoh learns that he has killed an Egyptian who was beating a Hebrew. He marries Zippo'rah. Exodus 2:22: "And she [Zippo'rah] bare him a son, and he called his name Gershom: for he said, I have been a stranger in a strange land." KJV Wikisource
  2. Template:Note The story that Stranger in a Strange Land was used as inspiration by Charles Manson appears to be an urban folk tale; although some of Manson's followers had read the book, Manson himself later said that he had not. It is true that other individuals formed a quasi-religious organization called the Church Of All Worlds, after the religion founded by the primary characters in Stranger, but Heinlein had nothing to do with this, either, so far as is known. See http://www.heinleinsociety.org/rah/faqworks.html.
  3. Template:Note Expanded Universe, pg. 403.
  4. Template:Note ebbs.english.vt.edu
  5. Template:Note Ace 1991 edition, p. 287
  6. Template:Note Classic SF, Issue 164
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External links

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