Strange

When I was a teen I read sci-fi and little else.  I don't read it much any more, but it sure meant a lot to me back then.  So when I saw Jo Walton's An Informal History Of The Hugos in my library I decided to check it out. Turns out Walton and friends had been discussing the Hugos year by year on the internet and now she's turned it into a book.

A bit of explanation, just in case: the Hugos are prestigious sf awards voted on by fans and handed out every year.  The book only covers the beginning in 1953 up to 2000--that was the year Walton had her first novel published, so she figured she'd stop.  Apparently Walton has won her own Hugo, though I haven't read any of her fiction.

Anyway, while it's fun going over a lot of old titles I read so many years ago, and quite a few more I didn't, I want to concentrate on the winning novel for 1962, Stranger In A Strange Land by Robert Heinlein.  It's one of the best known and best selling sf novels of all.  And Walton doesn't like it.

Heinlein is my favorite writer of science fiction.  I'm hardly alone.  I would guess he'd win in a poll.  I've read Stranger, of course--in fact, I've read it more than once.  On the other hand, I don't think I've read it in 20 years, so it's interesting to hear what Walton has to say, and what memories it brings back.

Heinlein's novel is about the only survivor of an expedition to Mars--he was raised almost from birth by Martians, who are far more advanced than humans, and 25 years later he's been sent home.  He's confined in a hospital and a nurse helps him break out.  He has plenty of adventures after that which make up most of the book.

Walton is a big fan of Heinlein, but Stranger, which was a departure for him, doesn't do it for her.  She likes the story up till the man from Mars breaks out, and then thinks it turns into a bunch of lectures from smug people with very little happening until an ending that comes out of nowhere.

She also doesn't like the attitudes in the book.  For instance, there's a problem with how the females are portrayed.  The man from Mars founds a religion and has a lot of sex with willing, beautiful young women; they're willing in two ways--with the power he teaches them, they can will themselves to be young and beautiful, which they do, even though the older men in the book don't feel the need to.  There's also the suggestion homosexuals have got something wrong with them.  The book in general preaches do your own thing, but this cult practices cannibalism, which is a bridge too far for Walton.

I have to admit I don't remember much more than a vague outline of the story.  In one sense, I agree with Walton.  Heinlein was a master of plotting--he was a master in general--but this book is a bit more discursive than most (a flaw that would grow in his later work).  I remember thinking the first half, filled with intrigue, was the best part, and at a certain point it lost its urgency.  Also quite entertaining is how the naive man from Mars learns the ways of Earthlings, but that innocence eventually disappears.  I held on longer than Walton, though--it's only after we cut ahead and the man from Mars starts his own religion that I felt the book got weaker (though still pretty good).

It's funny what you remember when you think back on something you read so long ago.  Here are a some of the particulars that stuck with me: "grok" and "water brother"; Jubal Harshaw, the "father figure" who makes money writing short stories which he dictates to his beautiful secretaries who are always on call; Jubal discussing the pain that caryatids look like they carry; a woman displaying herself and liking how men enjoy her body; "Fair Witnesses"--people who observe things objectively and can be used to give testimony in court; people with telekinetic powers having their cigarette packs following after them; the Martians taking their time to decide what to do; the realization that humor arises out of pain; and, yes, the argument for cannibalism.

Stranger In A Stranger Land, published in 1961, became a central text for the 60s counterculture, and you can see why--communal living, mystical rituals, free love and so on.  Heinlein himself, not a young man at the time, laughed at how so many young readers saw him as a guru, though he felt they'd missed the discipline required to be in this particular cult.

I don't know if the reputation of the book is what it once was, but it's still in print and continues to sell.  Walton complains that so many who don't know Heinlein see Stranger as representative of his work, which it definitely is not.  But I still like it, or remember liking it.  If nothing else, Walton should be happy it provided Heinlein with a fair amount of royalties in his later years.