Conceptual Fiction is a regular feature, contributed by Ted Gioia, focusing on major works of fantasy, science fiction, magical realism and alternate history. These books are celebrated in recognition that literary experimentation with ways of conceptualizing reality has been as important as experimentation with language in creating fiction of lasting value. Dismissing these books as genre or escapist works has created a blind-spot in literary studies that this feature aims, in some small part, to rectify.

Two years after his novel Starship Troopers, which incurred charges that he was a militarist, Heinlein offered up Stranger in a Strange Land, which would establish him as a free love guru of the hippie generation. That must be like attending West Point in the morning, and leading a protest at Berkeley in the afternoon. Certainly somebody must be confused here - either Heinlein or his critics?

But those who try to pin Heinlein into an ideological corner are missing half the fun. This is science fiction, after all, and it is supposed to be provocative. Does anyone really think Asimov wanted to live as a citizen on the Foundation planet of Trantor? Was Herbert advocating large sandworms as his preferred form of mass transit? Hardly! But Heinlein’s narrative voice is so powerful and insinuating, readers are tempted to read his fictions as manifestos for a better way of life.

Nowhere is this more evident than in Stranger in a Strange Land. The hero of the tale, Valentine Michael Smith, is a human who was abandoned as an infant on Mars and raised by Martians. He returns to Earth as a young man, where he is immediately institutionalized and isolated by a hostile government. According to a quirk in international and inter-galactic law, Smith controls the wealth left behind by the first expeditionary party that visited the Red Planet, of which he is sole survivor. This includes rights to a valuable patent, which may be worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

But Smith is as innocent as a babe in the Martian woods, and only the intervention of a group of new found friends prevents him from handing over these rights. With the help of journalist Ben Caxton, nurse Gillian Boardman and lawyer Jubal Harshaw, among others, Smith is sprung from his hospital prison cell internment and assisted in securing his fabulous wealth. We have seen this plot twist before - for example, in serious fiction such as Dostoevsky’s The Idiot or its popular film equivalent Forrest Gump: the naïve but good-hearted simpleton overcomes the scheming and obstacles of an indifferent or hostile society.

Article Author: Ted Gioia

Ted Gioia is a writer and musician. He is the author of Delta Blues, The History of Jazz and, most recently, The Birth (and Death) of the Cool.

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