I look back at Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, about Valentine Michael Smith, a human raised on Mars who comes home as the owner and sovereign of the planet he grew up on. I get into Jubal Harshaw’s household, the word “grok” and the book’s thoughts on government, religion and humanity.
I first read it as a teenager for the sexuality and grew to love it on re-reads for all its layers. It’s hefty and difficult, but a really good read that I’d happily point anyone to.
Stranger in a Strange Land is definitely one of the classics of the SciFi genre, and it’s also quite a hefty and difficult book. Heinlein’s writing style is very evident all the way through it, and it’s probably one of his most famous works. The story is set in the future but it’s driven by the conditions of the time it was written, so the prevalent anti-government attitudes of the early 60s are all over it. And as a teenager my first impression, or remembrance, of this book had a lot more to do with the wanton sexuality that pervades it than with anything else.
Re-reading it in later years is what changed that. I grew to love it for a lot of other reasons, and I’ve been back to it more than once, finding something I’d missed in the read before almost every time. Valentine Michael Smith is someone I would very much have liked to meet. I hope I’ve “grokked” the book properly, but there are many layers to it, and I’m honestly not sure anyone gets all of them in one go.
It helps to remember when it was written, because so much of the setup comes straight out of that mood. The government in this book doesn’t know what to do with a man who’s both an orphan and a sovereign, so its first instinct is to lock him up and call it protection. Everybody in the hospital has an angle, and nobody is actually asking Mike what he wants, mostly because he doesn’t yet know how to say it. I think that distrust of the people running things is a big part of why the book felt so alive to me the first time, even before I understood half of what it was doing.
The man from Mars
Valentine Michael Smith is genetically a human, but he was born on Mars, and he’s the only survivor of the first manned mission there. When the second expedition recovers him and brings him back to Earth, by the laws of the land he’s not only the owner of Mars but its sovereign as well. On top of that, as the last survivor of the first mission he’s the sole inheritor of the wealth of the entire crew, which makes him enormously rich and a definite threat to the government of the USA. That’d be problem enough on its own.
But Mars is inhabited, by an extremely ancient and powerful race, and they’re the ones who raised Valentine after the first expedition died. They’re in no way accepting of the foibles of humanity, and they’re sitting in judgement on the worth of Humanity and its overall place in the universe, which I thought was a great way to hang a book that’s mostly about people. The Martians never need to turn up in force, because the idea of being watched and weighed is already doing its job. It also gives Valentine a strange kind of weight, since whatever he decides about us could matter far beyond one hospital room.
The money and the title are what make him dangerous, and the book is smart about why. A man who legally owns a planet, and who’s richer than most governments, can’t be ignored, and he can’t be bought either, because he doesn’t want what anyone else wants. He doesn’t understand property the way we do, or status, or why anyone would lie about something. Every one of those gaps is a problem for the people holding him, and I loved watching them find that out.
Valentine himself is 100% Martian in attitude and personality, and his first exposure to humanity is a significant shock to his system. With the training he’s had from the Martians he’s at the pinnacle of human development, in control of all his body functions and with a fair amount of psychic ability on top. That makes for a very odd lead, because he doesn’t know how to laugh or what’s polite and he takes everything completely literally. Watching him try to work out a world that everybody else takes for granted was a big part of why I kept coming back.
Jubal’s house
Back on Earth he’s taken into custody by the government for his “own protection”, and he’s only rescued by a nurse, Gillian Boardman, in the hospital where he’s being held. Gillian takes him to Jubal Harshaw for protection, and this is where the story really starts. Before that it’s a setup, and a good one, but once Mike lands in Jubal’s house the book finds its voice. It’s also where I started to realise I was reading a book about ideas that just happens to have a plot.
Jubal’s house is a character of its own. It’s full of people who work for him, write for him and argue with him at every meal, and it feels like a household that has been talking about everything for years. Jill, the nurse who rescued Mike, ends up as part of it, and so does a journalist friend of hers who got into trouble chasing the story of the man from Mars. The place is comfortable, noisy and a bit eccentric, which makes it the right place for someone who’s never seen a family before to start learning what one is like.
Jubal is someone else I’d wish to meet or know. He’s a lawyer and an author with an immense amount of influence that he isn’t afraid to use when he’s “fighting the good fight”. He’s also, in a way, Hugh Hefner, or perhaps what Heinlein thought Hefner could have been. Jubal helps Valentine (Mike) Smith in his fight against the government, and he helps him with his education in humanity and its culture too. A lot of the time that means Jubal talking and Mike listening, and I’ll admit I never minded one bit.
Gradually Mike branches out on his own, getting more and more familiar with the positives and the negatives of “his” people in the process. That’s the part I find most interesting, because you can see him taking in the good and the bad at the same rate and not flinching from either. He isn’t there to be shocked by us or to flatter us, he’s there to understand us. It reminds me a bit of how The Stars My Destination builds a whole world out of one big idea, though it’s a very different kind of book. And that’s exactly what makes the word the book gave to geek culture so useful.
What it means to grok
The word “grok” itself has passed down into geek lexicon, and it basically means to understand something COMPLETELY. You understand it so completely that it literally becomes part of you and you can see all parts of it, both the positive and the negative. If someone ever tells you they grok Hitler, I’d suggest you run away really, really fast! It’s a bigger idea than “get it” or “know it”, and I think that’s why it stuck when so many other words from the same era didn’t.
Coming back to it
The idea reaches well past vocabulary, because the Martians use it for everything. To them sharing water is more than hospitality, it’s the closest bond there is, and when Mike takes it up on Earth the people around him slowly start doing the same. Greeting someone as a fellow being instead of a stranger comes up again and again, and I like how much of the book is about that one shift. Once you’ve seen it you notice it everywhere in what Mike does, and the funny, frightening and moving scenes all lean on it.
I’ve lost count of the times I’ve re-read it, and each time something has jumped out that I missed before. Some of that is just me being older, and some of it is how much the book packs in around the story. There are some really interesting speculations and thoughts about government, religion and humanity in general, and you can take them or leave them, but you can’t ignore them.
Part of why I keep going back is that it never reads the same twice. As a teenager I was after one thing and got it, and the rest slid past. Later I was watching Jubal’s arguments and Mike’s slow education, and later again it was the bigger questions about how we run ourselves and what we believe that stood out. That’s what a book with this many layers does, and it’s why I’d call it a favourite I still haven’t finished with.
I’ll let you read the rest of it for yourself. It’s a really good read, and one that you won’t regret once you start.