The Internet Book Database of Fiction

<img src="http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0441790348.01.LZZZZZZZ.jpg" align="left">Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein is the story of a human, Valentine Michale smith, who was born and on raised on mars, and now on earth must come to understand the human race.

This is a wonderful classic that I cannot say enough good things about. It is captivating and quite exceptional. Full of philosophical, spiritual, social and religious ideas that are not only mind boggling but eye opening in many ways. This wonderful piece of literature delves deep into why humans act the way they do, and how society as a whole sees the world it has created.

I have very little complaints about this novel. I found some exceptionally sexist views in this book which were unsettling to me but not surprising for a book written in 1962. That is actually my only major complaint, and the passages in which this viewpoint seeps through are so short and so sparse that it did not detour me from reading the book. Oddly enough Heinlein seems to contradict himself in these viewpoints, he writes female characters that are Strong and would make any feminist proud, and then turns around and has them say something that contradicts that very character.

So overall this book was truly wonderful. Something I would suggest anyone and everyone read, simply because of the ideas expressed within it alone, if not for the wonderful writing and compelling story. (By the end of this book you will find need to incorporate the word "grok" into your daily vocabulary.)

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Review also posted at the IBLIST

It gets a 10 from me.

As for the 'sexist' remarks you refer to, that's really a reference to the character Jubal Harshaw - a brash, pompous, blustry, wealthy, high-powered, bull-in-a-china-shop, cigar-chomping, philanthropic primadona of an attorney, with a nascent hugh hefner streak, a knack for public relations & politics, and a soft spot in his heart for hard-luck cases needing pro bono protection and lovely & uber-intelligent amazonian women.

Yes, he acts like a male chauvanist pig with his secretarial assistants, but if you read those scenes more closely, there's a great deal more subtlety present than is apparent on one's first reading. Jubal, and the assistants he appears to be verbally mistreating, are actually just PLAY ACTING with each other ... it's a tongue-in-cheek back & forth verbal dance of role playing, where Jubal goes through the motions of acting like a sexist pig, and the assistants smirk and quip and razz him back - while also doing as he asks, while maintaining a sort of queenly feline swagger & sense of bemused tolerance. Heinlein does everything but have them pat jubal on the head in motherly fashion whenever he has one of his pretend-chauvanistic outbursts. Jubal's a loudmouth, yes, and he's the general in charge of the plot - but it's the amazon women who actually rule the roost in his office ... and all of then know it.

It's all in good fun, and it's the author's (and Jubal's) way of poking pun tired 1950's sexist stereotypes. It's the presence of that sexist play-acting by jubal that allows Smith's idealistic 1960's free-love liberalism to springboard out at the reader. So, in a way, despite being the loudest and most obnoxious character in the book, Jubal is actually the 'straight man' that Heinlein plays Smith off of.

IMNSHO, it's a brilliant and subtle feat of writing to accomplish something like that ... and to do it so well.

actually Jubal was not the character that bothered me as far as sexist remarks go. Although he was how brad describes, the author does in fact remind the readers that this character is incorrect in his views. The line that bothered me came from Jill. She said (and I am paraphrasing here) "90 percent of the time when a woman gets raped it is partly her fault". This is a very sexist remark in my opinion and the author says it as though it is simply a fact that everyone knows.

author does in fact remind the readers that [Jubal] is incorrect in his views

That's really just an extra layer of redundancy to help make the self-deprecating humor paying off of 1950's stereotypes (i.e., biting social commentary) of sexist rapartee more obvious to the casual reader who might otherwise be offended by assuming the characters (and the author by association) were being serious about it.

In any given audience there is a wide range of intellects an author has to deal with ... ranging from geniuses who are smarter & more saavy than the author himself, to naieve simpletons who believe the characters they see on TV and read in books are real and exist somewhere ... and there's a whole range of people spread out between those two extremes. Authors have to walk a line while writing for ALL of them.

As for Jill ... I agree that the line you mention is wholly sexist and wholly misguided. No argument. However, it is very often a mistake to assume that authors share the same flaws as the flawed characters they create for us.

I'm not saying authors dont have specific beliefs or agendas of their own - only that there is rarely a 1:1 correspondence between theirs, and their fictional characters. The same is true for characters created by musicians, sculptors, painters and other artists.

Brad wrote: I agree that the line by Jill is wholly sexist and misguided. However, it is very often a mistake to assume that authors share the same flaws of the flawed characters they create for us.

Yes I often run into this dilemma. An author states a viewpoint through one of their characters and often times I can never figure out if they are simply building this character or if they are actually sharing a viewpoint of their own. Sometimes I figure out which it is by the context of it, or by which character is conveying this viewpoint. Still many times I am stumped, and somewhat frustrated. Is the author trying to tell me this is how he/she thinks things should be or not? With this book, after thinking over it a bit, I would have to agree with you that it is not something I can really draw a conclusion from. It stuck out with me only because that is nearly the only sexist remark that character says, and furthermore that character made many other remarks that were quite the opposite.

Well said, and I encounter the same dilemmas too. I'm sure many of us do.

Deciding what's what is a complex effort that eventually gets easier as you read more and more of a given author's books, interviews, letters, and critiques of said books by others.

I've read enough RAH such that I'm comfortable giving him a fairly generous amount of slack in telling his tales without leaping to conclusions about him.

Brad wrote: I've read enough RAH such that I'm comfortable giving him a fairly generous amount of slack in telling his tales without leaping to conclusions about him.

Ahh and this is the first I have read by him myself.

I recommend "Number of the Beast" next - it's a straight forward light hearted (yet still hard scifi) enjoyable romp of a tale.