Stranger in a Strange Land

This is a book I used to know well in its somewhat-abbreviated original version, but I haven't been reading Heinlein much in the 21st century.

Reading it again, I find that it's better than I remembered. It has defects, but it still makes a good story and does some things well.

The remarkable thing about it is that it was written gradually during the 1950s and completed by 1960. Had it been written in the late 1960s, one could say that it was of its time.

The first 25 chapters (63% of the book) are gripping stuff, with plenty of action and things to think about. The rest of the book wanders off into an unrealistic wish-fulfillment hippie daydream; it remains readable, but it's hard to see the point of it.

Heinlein apparently said that he wasn't preaching a way of life (though he seems to be doing so), just challenging conventional thinking. Well, yes, but if you challenge conventional thinking, shouldn't you propose something to put in its place? The lifestyle described towards the end of the book isn't a serious proposal, because it wouldn't work without the mind-enhancing qualities of the fictional Martian language; and indeed the characters in the book recognize that the language is essential.

The book portrays a human brought up by Martians, and does it well. The fictional religion of the Fosterites is also well imagined.

Demerits include the treatment of women, which is a bit jarring by modern standards, and Heinlein's tendency to lecture and instruct the reader about life (which continues in his later books).

The book contains plenty of able women with good qualities, but there's a vague sense that they remain subsidiary to men. Perhaps this is just the way people still thought in the 1950s, and not to be blamed on Heinlein specifically. I'm 47 years younger than Heinlein and not well acquainted with the mentality of his generation.

The book is set in the future, we don't know when, but probably in the first half of the 21st century (around now!). There has been a Third World War, which seems to have caused no lasting damage. There's an advanced space drive that enables a trip to Mars in 19 days; there are flying taxis that drive themselves. But there are no mobile phones, computers are barely mentioned, and people still use typewriters. Such are the limitations of foresight.

This uncut version of the book, published for the first time in 1991, is 37% longer than the original cut version from 1961, but to be honest I don't notice much difference. It's the same story, stretched out a bit. When I first read the uncut version in 1992, I thought it was a slight improvement. Now I think that the best policy could have been to take the best of both versions; I think that in some places the cut text is snappier. But I haven't bothered to go through comparing the two page-by-page. Really, you can read either version and get much the same experience, although Heinlein himself preferred the uncut version and cut it only reluctantly at the insistence of his publishers.

In modern terms, you could think of the 1961 edition as the cinema version and the 1991 edition as the extended DVD.