Stranger in a Strange Land

Stranger in a Strange Land, classic science fiction novel by American writer Robert A. Heinlein, published in 1961. The work centres on a human raised on Mars who comes to Earth and challenges customs relating to sex, death, religion, and money. The book became an icon of the 1960s counterculture, and it won the prestigious Hugo Award for best novel in 1962.

Summary

Valentine Michael (“Mike”) Smith was born on Mars to two members of the first expedition from Earth. The only survivor of the expedition, he was raised by Martians. When he is about 25 years old, a second expedition arrives, and he returns with them to Earth, which has endured a third world war. The world is now ruled by the Federation High Council, and organized religions wield incredible power. Although Mike is technically an Earthling, Earth is an entirely alien culture to him, and it is often terrifying; he truly is a “stranger in a strange land.” He is taken to Bethesda Medical Center in the United States, where his body adjusts to life on Earth. Nurse Gillian (“Jill”) Boardman, the first woman Mike has ever seen, fears that the government might harm Mike, who has an ownership claim to Mars. She helps him escape, and they are pursued by two men whom Mike makes disappear. Jill and Mike take refuge at the home of Jubal Harshaw—who is described as a “bon vivant, gourmet, sybarite, popular author extraordinary, and neo-pessimist philosopher”—and he becomes a father figure to Mike.

After learning about human culture, and with the money inherited from funds tied to the first exploration to Mars, Mike decides to create a religion, the Church of All Worlds. It is based on his own brand of Martian philosophy, which involves nudity, communal living, copious free love, and a message of peace—tenets of the hippie movement of the late 1960s. In the end, Mike is attacked and killed by members of a rival church, but he lives on as an archangel in the afterlife.

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Publication and reception

Stranger in a Strange Land contains numerous critiques of politics and organized religion and freely discusses sexual behaviour. Some of those passages were considered shocking for the time, and a number were deleted when the publisher requested that the book be cut by about 60,000 words. The unexpurgated version was released by Heinlein’s widow in 1991, three years after the author’s death.

Although panned by some critics, the novel was almost an immediate success upon its initial publication in 1961, and it is considered Heinlein’s masterpiece. It was the first work of science fiction to make The New York Times Book Review’s best-seller list. Heinlein’s coining of the word grok—meaning literally “to drink” but more broadly “to understand profoundly and intuitively”—was later incorporated into English-language dictionaries.