In retrospect, Robert A. Heinlein's STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND seems quaintly sub-adult in its message, not much of a story, a very average "didactic" novel. In its decade, be it admitted, the turbulent 1960s and early 1970s, STRANGER was on everyone's lips. Even today, in 2011, it is selling more strongly than probably 90% of the books still in print. What was its astonishing appeal 30 and 40 years ago? What gives it staying power, even if fading?
From what I gather, it was kids in 7th grade and higher and college students sophomore or younger who were initially most represented among those turned on by STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND. The novel "liberated" them, taught them to "think for themselves." Today those same people may vaguely recall STRANGER as a seminal book in their growing up but forget the reasons why it moved them. Historians of American culture build careers by probing cultural phenomena such as STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND, comic books, anime, the noir and other fashions in writing as providing insights into what nowadays seems an increasingly ancient American -- largely juvenile -- mind set.
An American raised as a Martian on Mars by Martians is brought back in young adulthood to Earth by a follow-on expedition to the earlier one of which young Valentine Michael "Mike" Smith is the only survivor. Mentally, physically and emotionally, Smith is less cross-culturally prepared to become a mainstream human among humans than is a Peace Corps volunteer for coping with baboons in the outback of Burkina Faso.
As the Mars expedition's sole survivor and heir of wealthy parents, Smith has claims to colossal wealth, which crooked politicians wish to deny him. He also has no experience of other earth people, especially earth women.
In the remainder of STRANGER IN STRANGE LAND Smith first demonstrates alien skills such as "grokking" persons and objects, i. e., cognitively reaching their inner cores through empathetic attention paying. Mars is a dry planet and water is rare. When a nurse brings him a glass of water, Smith is bound to her through Martian water-sharing ritual. He then begins consciously to share with and teach to earth men his skills, attitudes and values. Mike taps into latent human critical abilities, making Martian values so appealing as to inspire previous non-noticers of what they have been doing all their lives to overthrow traditional values such as walking around clothed rather than nude, having sex monogamously and without guilt. Smith teaches that generally doing what one jolly well pleases is good. This culminates in Smith's new-fangled religion. the Church of All The Worlds.
In the 60s STRANGER introduced young people to systematic noticing what they were doing and then asking "why." They grokked. They proclaimed themselves "only an egg" and assured their chums that "You are God." They solemnly shared water with one another. Socrates had done a suprerficially similar but more philosophical thing with the youth of Athens and paid for it with his life. So in the end would Mike Smith, consciously sacrificing himself to a mob with an eye to toughening up his followers to face a vague threat from Martian Ancients. For those ancients would surely do unspecified bad things to earth people once they started paying the disgusting earthlings more heed.
The book is clumsily written, abounds with cliches, postures and rhetorical strutting, one dimensional characters and is of interest primarily to literary historians. Readers would do better to tackle some Socratic dialogs of Plato or a handful tales of C.S. Lewis, take up Rudyard Kipling's JUST SO STORIES or even the Mars tales of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Ray Bradbury. Far, far better, in my opinion, might they do. -OOO-
