ight years after the first Terran colony is established on the Moon, humanity takes its next step into space with the Envoy, a slow, primitive manned vessel dispatched to explore Mars. The ship arrives at Mars intact, but then ceases transmission, and the beginning of World War III makes a follow-up mission impossible. By the time a ship can be constructed to look for the Envoy, a quarter-century has passed. The ship's lone survivor--an infant born during the Envoy mission--is a healthy young man who has never seen a human face. Raised by Martians, taught to speak and think and act in the deliberate, deep Martian way, Valentine Michael Smith has the body of a man but an utterly alien mind.
The Federation ship Champion returns Michael to Earth, where he instantly becomes the focus of a media frenzy in spite of the Federation's attempts to keep him under wraps. Michael is initially too weak to deal with Earth's gravity and its dense atmosphere, and he's quickly hospitalized and hidden from the public eye, supposedly for his own good. But when a curious nurse named Jill Boardman bugs Michael's room on behalf of enterprising reporter Ben Caxton, the two uncover evidence that their government is deliberately trying to use Michael for its own ends. The "Man from Mars" is sole heir to the vast financial legacy of the Envoy's crew, and thanks to a legal fluke, he has sole rights to the ownership of Mars itself. Alive, he's an awkward threat to the Federation.
When Caxton mysteriously disappears, Jill panics and helps Michael "escape" to the palatial estate of Jubal Harshaw, a free-thinking, curmudgeonly, semi-sybaritic writer with a quick mind, a stolid outlook and enough clout to at least briefly protect Michael. The Martian Man's naiveté, his simplistic yet difficult-to-follow worldview, and his inherent trust of anyone with whom he has "shared water" all impose a momentous moral duty on his hosts, who try to help him understand his species and his new world. But in some ways his capacity for comprehension exceeds their own; as an outsider, he has a unique perspective that eventually lets him become his teachers' teacher.
The '60s Bible or just a good read?
Stranger, one of Heinlein's most seminal works and possibly his best written and best developed, is widely considered a milestone in American science fiction--one of the key books that turned the genre into a forum for something more than light entertainment. Reviews at the time decried the book's frank social criticism, impious metaphorical religious deconstruction, and satirical analysis of sex, gender relationships, and the human condition as heretical, if not pornographic. Even the publishers mandated removal of about 70,000 words to make the book shorter and less socially dangerous. (An "uncut" edition was first published in 1990, two years after Heinlein's death.) Some histories credit Stranger with spawning the "free love" movements of the 1960s; others consider it the veritable bible of the counterculture.
Forty years later, modern readers are unlikely to find the book's mild descriptions of nudist enclaves and polygamous relationships too earth-shattering. These days the "heresy" is centered more on the characters' provincial attitudes towards gay men ("poor in-betweeners" whose "wrongness" denies them water-kinship) and all women ("Nine times out of ten, if a girl gets raped, it's at least partly her own fault," Jill says to Michael, when instructing him not to defend her too strenuously against such an assault). But apart from the minor irritations of Harshaw's friendly, paternal misogynism and his tendency to wax lengthy on topics ranging from sculpture appreciation to bedroom manners, Stranger remains a solid, ideologically challenging book with a brisk story and a clever, creative execution.
The novel's structure mirrors Heinlein's career development as a writer: the first half is an adventure story, the second half a thoughtful exploration of religion and human needs. Stranger follows the core science-fiction literary motif of inner exploration from an external source, of defining humanity by looking at it through inhuman eyes. By creating a protagonist who is biologically but not psychologically human, Heinlein gives himself a perfect opportunity to examine what exactly defines "humanity." Many writers before and since have attempted the same construction and asked the same question, but Stranger remains a unique effort--a funny, touching book whose pretentious touches can't quite kill its surprisingly gentle charm.
