Stranger in a Strange Land

Stranger in a Strange Land is a pretty famous book.  I’m pretty ignorant of sci-fi as a whole and, while I didn’t know anything about it, it was a book I’d heard of before.  Regardless, my expectations were very high.  I’ve said it before, but sci-fi’s never been my favourite genre and, yes, that’s been challenged quite a lot this year by authors like John Wyndham.  I think the amount of sci-fi I’ve enjoyed recently just heightened my expectations for Robert Heinlein’s epic.  And, I’m a bit sorry to say, it doesn’t quite deliver in the way that I thought it would.

The book itself is the story of Michael Valentine Smith, a human who through a series of unlikely events ends up being raised on Mars.  By Martians; naturally.  Anyway, through a further series of plot contrivances, Mike is brought to Earth, discovered to be incredibly wealthy, broken out of hospital, and becomes a celebrity.  It all ends, as interplanetary travel is wont to do, with a cult.  It’s one of those cults built around an enigmatic figure and far more women than men.  This ends up about as well as you can imagine.

I didn’t enjoy this book.  I’m not too sure of the reasons for this, because there is a lot in there that I good and the concept itself is a fascinating one.  I think part of me was hoping for a fish-out-of-water version of The Running Man (a fairly trashy Stephen King/ Richard Bachman novel about a man who is part of a game show in which contestants are hunted and killed, made into an equally trashy Arnold Schwarzenegger film).  Instead, Stranger in a Strange Land is alternatively, an essay in fictional legalese, a discussion of human religion, cultural and economic philosophy, and the fear of death.  It’s a bit shallow and vacuous, but I really just wanted a bit more action. 

Another major issue I had with the book was how old fashioned it was.  It’s always amazing in sci-fi that predicts the future to see what people get right and what they get wrong.  Heinlein, like most, misses out on mobile phones.  This is forgivable.  The parts that I really object to are the bits about women, most notably in the work place.  One of the key characters, Jill, is a nurse and the way her male colleagues treat her is quite frankly disgusting.  It’s literally not okay to refer to a colleague as, “Dimples.”  There are other off hand remarks that show, even though the book was during it it, Heinlein was unable to predict the success of the Civil Rights Movement, also LGBT rights.  It’s sad that in 1961, people thought manned missions to Mars more likely than actual human equality.  I wish I could say that Heinlein also missed on predicting an end to Islamophobia, but it would feel like I’m doing our culture too much of a kindness. 

In all, I didn’t love this book.  It felt like it didn’t know exactly what it wanted to be.  This is a problem when the book is 220,000 words long.  It took me so long to read and it was so difficult to motivate myself to read it at times, which was the biggest problem I found with it.  I know when it was originally published, Heinlein’s editor’s made him cut around 60,000 words and I can see why.  Stranger in a Strange Land is a mission.  There is part of me that is curious about which parts were cut and which remained (the sex cult parts by the sound of it) but mostly I’m just so relieved that the book is over, that I can read something else, that I can’t bring myself to care particularly.  It’s a thing I hate to say about a book, but my favourite part (aside from a spot on paragraph or so about the symbolic nature of money) was that feeling when I’d finished it.

I’ve just started on Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan.  It’s much shorter than Stranger in a Strange Land.