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only to an author who takes it for granted that he can create the real and unreal alike, and make his audience sit still for it. Like Jubal, he may be "fooling around," but for serious purposes. (. . .) |
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The book's confusion, then, stems in part from the contradiction between an exemplary tale of men like gods and a solipsistic sense that it's all make-believe. The sophisticated reader may see this as confusion, rejecting both fantasies as adolescent wish-fulfillment. But the more naive audience might more easily accept what it wants to, from the satirical denigration of common knowledge and established tradition to the assumption of godlike powers. The audience in the Sixties, I suspect, has the latter reaction. Aside from the traditional science fiction subculture, Heinlein's readers were young, relatively untutored in literary analysis, certainly not schooled in literary readings of science fiction. College students, and other members of the "counterculture" that grew in the wake of the loss of John Kennedy's dream of Camelot, and in shared opposition to a technocratic society that had no use for them except as cannon fodder, devoured Stranger in a Strange Land and handed it on. Its reputation grew by word of mouth, as a "book of wisdom" for our time, an "underground classic." ( . .) |
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Criticism of the book for bad taste in style or contents would hardly have been welcome, except as evidence of the critic's defense of the Establishment. Besides, old-fashioned ideas of taste were part of what the book attacked. In addition, it offered, with impenetrably confusing irony, a new program to establish utopia on Earth in which everyone who believed would love and share. It even seemed to be preaching revolution, at the cost of martyrdom if necessary. And the decade bore these supposed teachings out, in abortive form, from the Flower Children to the Weathermen. Even the most "shocking" aspects of Stranger seem pale against the background of the last seventeen years, and its solipsism fits right in to today's "laid-back" hedonism, in which everyone is trying to findor createthe "real me." |
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David N. Samuelson, "Stranger in the Sixties: Model or Mirror?," Critical Encounters: Writers and Themes in Science Fiction, ed. Dick Riley (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1978), pp. 17174 |
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The underlying fantasy-wish of Beyond This Horizon involves a justification of life and politics based on libertarian and competitive principles which are derived from a social Darwinistic |
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