Conceptual Fiction: Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein - Page 2

This part of the story might have made for a reasonably interesting novel in its own right. But Heinlein is merely warming up for his main act. Once Valentine Michael Smith is wealthy and free to reach for all the gusto he can, he sets up a free love cult - sort of a cross between an organized religion and a commune. I’m not sure what wavelengths Heinlein was tapping into when he wrote this novel in the 1950s and early 1960s - after all, Esalen would not be founded until the year after the novel was published, bra-burning wouldn’t kick in for another seven years, and the Summer of Love was not even the glimmer of a wisp of a dream. But our author was clearly wired into the impending social changes that would sweep the country in the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination.

To some degree, Heinlein helped pave the way. And he certainly contributed to the jargon and concepts of the time. He gave us the word “grok” (a Martian term meaning to understand in a deep and thorough way) - a veritable gift to Scrabble players and crossword puzzle constructors. He anticipated the water bed, an essential accoutrement for all those under the sway of flower power. He invented the water sharing ritual fifteen years before Perrier opened up its first US office. Yes, he may have been old enough to join AARP, but Heinlein knew more about the essence of the Sixties generation than any of their parents were able to grok.

But for all its anticipation of the future, Heinlein is not without his debt to the past. Stranger in a Strange Land often reads like a pulp fiction novel, especially whenever Jubal Harshaw is on the scene. Harshaw talks like he has just strolled into these pages after being evicted from a Mickey Spillane novel. He keeps spouting off comments such as “Kiss girls all you want to - it beats the hell out of card games.” In the parlance of creative writing classes, this is known as hard-boiled prose. Heinlein is a master of the style -- so one can understand his reluctance to experiment with other techniques — but it is a tremendous mis-match with the subject matter of Stranger in a Strange Land. At a time when other authors who were shaping the sixties — Ken Kesey, Tom Wolfe, Hunter Thompson — were also creating fresh new ways of expressing themselves in prose, Heinlein was still wedded to the writing conventions of the 1930s and 1940s.

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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