Stranger in a Strange Land
by Robert A. Heinlein
Summary
The first human expedition to Mars died, but a child was born there and raised by Martians. Twenty five years later a second mission brings Valentine Michael Smith back to Earth, where he is legally the owner of Mars under an existing precedent, heir to several fortunes, and physically unable to manage a gravity well.
He is also not culturally human. He has Martian mental disciplines: he can stop his heart, discorporate at will, and make objects and people he judges wrong simply cease to exist, and he finds human concepts of ownership, jealousy, clothing and religion baffling. The word he uses for full comprehension is grok, which means to drink, and which entered English from this novel.
A nurse smuggles him out of government custody to Jubal Harshaw, a wealthy lawyer, doctor and popular novelist who lives in the Poconos with three secretaries and holds forth at length on everything, and who is transparently Heinlein's mouthpiece.
The second half turns into something else. Mike founds a church, teaches the disciplines, and builds a community organised around shared water, group marriage and the abolition of sexual jealousy, and the culture around it reacts as cultures do.
Jubal is either the best or the worst thing in it depending on your patience for a character who is always right, and the long stretches in which he lectures visitors on art, law, religion and human nature are where most readers either settle in or give up.
Around four hundred pages in the original edition, talky, provocative and dated in places, particularly in its handling of women and of homosexuality.
It became a countercultural document in a way Heinlein, a conservative in most respects, found uncomfortable. Best for readers who want the argument rather than the plot, and a landmark that is more interesting than it is good.
Historical Context & Significance
Stranger in a Strange Land won the 1962 Hugo Award for Best Novel and became the first science fiction novel to reach the New York Times bestseller list.
It escaped the genre almost immediately. Communes formed around it, the Church of All Worlds took shape in 1962 among readers of the book, adopting its structure and vocabulary, and was chartered as a church in 1968, and grok passed into general use and later into software and technology jargon.
Robert A. Heinlein's publisher required substantial cuts before publication, and the manuscript he originally submitted, about sixty thousand words longer, was finally published in 1991 by his widow Virginia. Readers disagree about which is better, with a common verdict that the cut version is tighter and the uncut one more completely itself.