Grokking a Wrongness: Robert A. Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land

Grokking a Wrongness: Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Stranger Land.

"I was not giving answers. I was trying to shake the reader loose from some preconceptions and induce him to think for himself, along new and fresh lines. In consequence, each reader gets something different out of that book because he himself supplies the answers... It is an invitation to think, not to believe."

So wrote the author, Robert Heinlein, when put a question which might be fairly summarised as follows: Stranger in a Strange Land is a comment on society. But is it a fictional comment on a fictional society, or a comment on actual society made by the medium of fiction?

Heinlein’s response is disappointing. Given the opportunity to account for an exceptional novel (I do not say a good novel, for that is something else), Heinlein forgoes the certainty and the conviction that characterises his own creation, and opts instead for the stock response of a coward.

A shame. Whatever else may be said of it, Stranger in a Strange Land is not a cowardly book.

Published in 1961 (though the unexpurgated version was not printed for another thirty years), Stranger tells the story of one Valentine Michael Smith, a human born on Mars and raised for two decades by Martians. The book begins with Smith’s return to Earth, and follows him as he attempts to learn about and to fit in with the society of a people who, though genetically his own, are alien in every meaningful respect.

Numerous parallels have been drawn between Stranger and Rudyard Kipling’s Kim and The Jungle Book. These may or may not be deliberate on the part of the author. Though I have yet to find any first or even second hand testimony to the fact, one of the most frequently recounted tales of the origin ofStranger involves a discussion between Robert and his wife, Virginia Heinlein, in which it is suggested that a science fiction adaptation of Kipling’s classic (The Jungle Book) might be an interesting project.

(This kind of transliteration is more common than one might think. Isaac Asimov’s infinitely superior Foundation series was conceived as something like an adaptation of Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire whilst Asimov was working alongside Heinlein at the Philadelphia Navy Yard.)

The comparison only goes so far. Prone to fits of jingoism, Kipling would almost certainly have found more to like in Heinlein’s earlier novel, the hysterically militaristic, slightly racist and thoroughly anti-democratic Starship Troopers, published in 1959.

Starship Troopers made Heinlein a popular figure amongst the worst elements of the American Right, and it was eventually placed on the reading lists of three of the five branches of the United States military. But, only two years later, Stranger in a Strange Land was earning him plaudits from hippies, libertarians, and other factions in the early 60s counterculture movement. Guns in Stranger are 'grokked' by Mike to be a “great wrongness.” The drastically restricted franchise in Troopers, where only veterans and civil servants are classed as citizens, is replaced by a firm commitment to a universal, ostensibly fair society in Stranger. In his brief departure from a steady shift toward the Right, Heinlein leaves the nest of a hawk and takes flight as the most opulent of doves, preaching the desirability of free love (especially polyamory) and criticising the corruption in and of politics and organised religion. It forms a central part of his wider campaign to challenge, in his own words, the “public mores,” without going to the extremes found in later books, such as Farnham’s Freehold, which disturbed even some of Heinlein’s most devoted fans with arguments apparently favourable toward incest and ‘self-creation’. The latter art is explored in Heinlein’s 1970 book I Will Fear No Evil, in which a 94-year-old billionaire has his brain implanted in the body of a 28-year-old black woman, and then has that body impregnated with the frozen sperm of the previous body. (Not to overuse the comparison, but in The Light That Failed, Kipling has one character opine that “Four-fifths of everybody’s work must be bad.” This maxim certainly applies to Heinlein.)

Stranger in a Strange Land is a novel which reformed its genre, introducing – or at least emphasising – a split between “hard sci-fi” and other, more readable variants. But its problems – and there are many – mirror those of Heinlein's life and career.

There are few better openings in science fiction. Michael's return to earth sees him overawed; a child thrown through the wardrobe into Narnia. He is kidnapped by a government that would use him for its own purposes, and held prisoner as his would-be protectors wonder how they might go about rescuing him. He is oblivious as one of them, a journalist, is attacked and kidnapped himself, and withdraws into himself as he is hidden in a suitcase and dragged to safety; the home of the ageing doctor, writer and philosopher, Jubal Harshaw.

Their efforts to protect him and help him grow lead to numerous intriguing encounters, from a meeting with the Secretary General (head of the United Nations which, in this world, could easily be a precursor to one of the superstates in Orwell's 1984) in which they must defend Michael's claim to sovereignty over the planet Mars, to a visit to the Fosterite Church, via damaging and destructive encounters with the police.

But one can detect the first hints of nonsense very early on. When his friends are accosted by the police, Michael makes them 'disappear', an ability he will reuse several times throughout the novel. Guns are a “great wrongness,” but making your enemies disappear is not a problem. Disappearing a policeman is, I would argue, not worthy of much praise. Disappearing a priest for his evangelism gives one a certain guilty satisfaction, but is a morally suspect act. Heinlein almost succeeds in circumventing this moral quandary by explaining that death, which Martians call discorporation, has a very different meaning for Mike. (Martians are known to voluntarily discorporate at moments of intense emotional suffering, or by committing minor offenses against society.) But the fact that Mike soon 'groks' the difference does not stop him condemning enemies and inconvenient people to summary disappearance.

The character of Harshaw, who is one of the most likeable characters throughout the novel, quickly reveals another problem: Heinlein is fond of speeches, and often treats his characters as puppets in order to put his own views across. This is tempered by the knowledge, or rather the hope, that his characters cannot always be presenting his own views as the overarching morals of Stranger are very different to those in his other books. Nevertheless, it is often the case that his characters have no characteristics or personalities of their own; rather, they are extensions of a single narrator. (The closest modern equivalent is Aaron Sorkin, creator of The West Wing and the deservedly maligned The Newsroom.) Harshaw, for all one might find him agreeable, is seldom anything but a vehicle.

His lifestyle, too, cannot be relativized out of trouble, especially as Heinlein's fans will often claim that he is a remarkably progressive writer. They are right, to an extent. Heinlein made a point of including protagonists and key characters who are black, and some of his strongest characters are women. (Though it should be remembered that Farnham's Freehold has a premise that is not all that dissimilar from Michel Houellebeqc's new novel, Soumission, which is garnering a good deal of deserved criticism for its treatment of Muslims.)

Nevertheless, Harshaw lives with a concubine, or a sexless harem, of four female secretaries. Though Heinlein gives them a veneer of independence, their sole purpose in the novel is, first, to wait upon Harshaw (albeit with no small amount of back-chat and good natured joshing) and then, later on, to fall pregnant, and then, later still, to serve as members of Mike's new church.

Lines like “Nine out of ten times if a girl gets raped it's partly her fault” are not made any more acceptable because they are spoken by a woman, even one as ostensibly powerful and independent and important to the story as Jill, Mike's first protector, teacher, and the first of his many lovers. Jill is also implicitly homophobic, which is a subject on which the book otherwise makes no mention.

(Again, Heinlein's position cannot always be derived from the character's opinion. One can see from his letters that he was not strictly straight, and his comments on homosexuality are almost uniformly accepting of it. His criticisms of the gay rights movement mirror those of Mary Renault, whose novels The Charioteer and The Alexander Trilogy are amongst the most beautiful portrayals of homosexual love and relationships one can find.)

The creation of Mike's church, which is formed toward the end of the novel, represents the departure from good writing and the advent of the novel's ridiculous final section.

The Church of All Worlds still exists today as a neopagan religion which regards Heinlein as something of a prophet. Though the story of a bet between himself and L. Ron Hubbard over who would be the first to found a religion appears to be apocryphal, it is nevertheless true that Heinlein convinced his first wife to accept the creator of the Church of Scientology into an open relationship; a decision which is thought to have contributed to her later battle with alcoholism. (To this day she is the subject of no small amount of vitriol and unjust criticism from members of the Heinlein Society and the devotees of the Church.)

Like the fictional church from which it is derived, the Church of All Worlds involves its members in water rituals (water being of particular significance to the Martians) and polyamory. And, like its fictional counterpart, its theology does not and cannot address the bizarre 'realisation' - made by Mike in one of the book's most egregiously pseudo-prophetic passages - that all religions are wrong and all faiths are right. Their vague devotion to the 'Old Ones', who can be made to exist in the book (in another of its more childish scenes) but not in reality, shows us little except what we already know: that New Age spirituality is not particularly new or revolutionary. Mike's apparent sacrifice, which is an allusion to Jesus that Heinlein does not bother to hide or to make subtle, also serves as testimony to this fact.

The book has much to recommend it, and not only to those who are familiar with science fiction. (It suffers as a genre because, for every Foundation or The Forever War there are ten books as bad as Hyperion.) There is just as much for which is worthy of condemnation, and I cannot deny that I stuck with it primarily because I enjoyed criticising it. Nevertheless, it is reasonably well-written, and it offers an insight into what we might vaguely term 'the spirit of the '60s', and it occasionally serves to make one think. With that in mind, I encourage the reader to pick up a copy. It can be found for as little as £2, and it is worth that much, at least.