I take in a lot more horror and fantasy than I do science fiction, but I've read a few of the classics: 1984, Farenheit 451, Foundation, Brave New World. I picked up Stranger In a Strange Land as part of my attempt to read to completion all the books I started back in elementary school or junior high and never finished. I loved reading as a kid, but didn't always have the attention span for some of these books, and as a result would read a hundred, two hundred, or in the case of this one, three hundred pages, of a novel before discarding it for something else.
I've mostly gotten around to reading all the stuff I only half-completed years ago, and was happy to give Stranger In a Strange Land another shot (these days I only quit a book partway through only if it's absolutely un-readable, and most of the stuff I passed on when I was a kid certainly didn't fall into that category).
The only other Heinlein familiar to me is a collection of short stories called Menace From Earth. Stranger In a Strange Land, by its reputation, compared to his other books and stories, is his more "serious" work. Personally, I find the adventurous stories in Menace From Earth considerably more entertaining, but Stranger is certainly a good one, and I'm sure I got more from it than when I'd first picked it up as a thirteen-year-old.
Valentine Michael Smith, the Man From Mars, is born to human parents, scientists from Earth sent on a mission to Mars. He's subsequently raised by Martians and took on their ways. He's taken back to earth a couple decades after his birth, and his ideas inevitably clash with those of the humans with whom he attempts to acclimate himself.
Smith is capable of extraordinary acts of teleportation, levitation, and a disturbing ability to make objects and people disappear. He's a peaceful guy, and only wants to love his friends, impart his wisdom to the humans, but where he's from, dying, or "discorporating," isn't that big a deal, and when you discorporate, you simply move on to the next level of existence, becoming what the Martians refer to as an "Old One." And so, though he means no harm by it, it's no big deal to him to kill people who pose a threat to him. He learns, kind of like the Terminator,
why he can't do this, why it's different than on Mars--but unlike the Terminator, he never really seems to get it.
Smith, with help from Dr. Jubal, a sort of father figure, an
d Jill, his nurse and friend, comes to prominence living among the humans, with the President of the U.S. as his personal accountant. He eventually finds his way to a bizarre church that professes a sort of Christianity tinged with New Age craziness. Their prophet, Digby, dies early in the story, and is said to join their previous, and head, prophet, Foster, in the sky. Smith takes what he's learned from the Fosterites, decides it matches in part his Martian religious views, and develops his own church, with himself as high priest.
Here's the major part of the book I can't get into. All this talk
of Old Ones, scorned by Jubal, and believed wholly by Jill and other followers of Smith's, and Foster and Digby, is quite fasincating, and good for some multiple-page theological debates between the main characters, but midway into the book, appears the first of a series of brief sections in which Foster and Digby, up in heaven, adorned with halos, discuss, in a somewhat humorous manner, the goings on below, and the facts of the Man From Mars and the Old Ones.
For my money, it'd be better to leave the Old Ones and the two god-prophets to the area of speculation. I might've bought what Michael was saying anyway, and believed the Old Ones really had sent him to Earth on a fact-finding mission, that they were indeed real, without needing it so bluntly stated in a series of three short sections that clash with the rest of the narrative.
The novel loses some of its steam after that, and it's never quite as good as its first hundred-fifty, two hundred pages, but there are some interesting debates towards the end, with the skeptical Dr. Jubal finding it harder to make excuses for the bizarre supernatural occurrences surrounding himself and the Man From Mars.
I have a feeling I'd prefer some of Heinlein's more pulpy novels, though there's a lot to like about Stranger In a Strange Land, and it offers, perhaps, more for the reader to think about and consider.
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