Stranger in a Strange Land, by Robert Heinlein

The opening third of Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein (1961) is a remarkable fictional study in cultural difference.  The two cultures are those of humans on the earth (and their subcultures) and of Martians.  The premise: a human baby born on Mars whose parents die soon after his birth is raised by Martians.  Twenty years later he is recovered by an earth expedition and returned to the planet where his parents were born.  Raised by Martians, he thinks and acts like a Martian.  On the planet of his species he is literally a stranger, as the title suggests.  Most of the fictional efforts I have read that try to explain alien cultures have failed.  They lack imagination.  Heinlein’s attempt is more successful.  He imagines a Martian civilization whose inhabitants pass through seven different forms during their lifetime.  They have only one sex.  They communicate through touch, odor, and finally through language. They don’t understand such earthly concepts as love, property, or death.  They are fundamentally unlike humans.

The young man who comes back to earth takes on the name Michael. 

The novel is marked by the gender attitudes of its day.  Which is to say, men hold dominant roles, for the most part, while women tend to be more passive.  The doctor Jubal Harshaw, who is a central character in the novel, is a genius whose intellect is difficult to believe.  Still, it is a given in the novel, and one has to accept it.  He has surrounded himself with four young and beautiful women who serve him and obey his every command.  He does not have sex with them.  They are skilled and intelligent, they have ideas of their own and speak well, but they behave as women from 1960 might have behaved—domestic, subservient.  Yet at the same time they speak up for themselves and complain when Dr. Harshaw says something insulting.  They are also highly sexual.  To me, the novel is deeply sexist, but not misogynistic.

The second two-thirds of the novel become increasingly scattered and unlikely.  After studying all the religions of the world, Michael founds a religion of his own.  To belong, one has to learn Martian.  Free and open sex with members of the church is an expectation, a way of “growing closer” to church members who have “drunk the water.” On Mars, drinking water is almost a sacrament, a way of permanently bonding oneself to those with whom he or she drinks.  The novel ends with a conclusion that clearly ties Michael to Christ.  He sacrifices himself.

Much of the novel consists of monologues, mainly by Dr. Harshaw, but by others as well, explaining various philosophical concepts.  This is a tiresome way to narrate a novel.  At times Stranger in a Strange Land is more a philosophical treatise, a preposterous one, than a work of fiction. In the end, it disappointed me.  I also had remembered for forty years an ending that in fact was not in the novel—it obviously must be in another book.

This was a cult novel in the 1960s.  I read it in a philosophy class.  Its concern with giving up on received ideas and preconceptions and social institutions, its focus on open love, was attractive to young people of that decade.