Stranger in a Strange Land
by Robert Heinlein
read: circa 1994
Guardian 1000 Novels, Hugo Award
I don't re-read a lot of books, but I've read Stranger in a Strange Land at least two or three times. I wrote a paper on it for high school English class, one of the longest papers I've ever written on a novel. The subject was religion, and even at the time it seemed like an obvious choice; Valentine Michael Smith parallels Jesus Christ, and Stranger in a Strange Land is the story of him creating a new, superior church.
It's been a while, so a lot of the details of Stranger in a Strange Land are fuzzy. I guess the adjective that comes to mind is "Heinlein-y." Robert Heinlein has a lot of interesting characteristics as a writer, and even the negative ones are often charming. He repeatedly suggests open relationships as superior to monogamy. His male characters often seem like thinly-veiled representations of himself, and his women ... well, it's hard to say. Some of my friends had a spirited Google Plus debate about whether Heinlein's writing is sexist. On the one hand, he does sometimes create strong female characters, like the titular heroine of Friday, but they're always ... Heinlein-y. They are strong, but within certain constraints. It's like Heinlein has a tension between a liberal open-mindedness and a need to project a Hemingwayesque masculinity.
I'm not explaining this very well; it's hard to explain. Just read one of Robert Heinlein's books. You might as well start with Stranger in a Strange Land; it's his best.
I just finished Farnham's Freehold and have decided to stop reading Heinlein. Stranger In A Strange Land was such a perfectly affecting novel, from which I took a couple of hard lessons about empathy and the nature of laughter. His notions of gender are in literature are a bit at odds with the lore about the man, but after doing Moon Is A Harsh Mistress and FF in short order, I've decided that further reading can only do more harm than good. I think his up and down style and ability to rehash central concepts plays very strongly into his characters, their flaws and foibles all being shockingly human, but somehow it seems to wash out the strength of my impressions after the pained glory of SINASL and Starship Troopers.
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