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Sometime in the not too distant future, when the United States had become only one of many humble members of the World Federation of Free States and the moon had been profitably and thoroughly exploited, a human baby was born on Mars. His parents and the others on board the rocket ship died, but the child was raised by Martians. Some twenty-one years later a second rocket reached Mars and brought Valentine Michael Smith back to earth. In appearance he was human. In thought, habits, instincts and mysterious powers he was a Martian. His life on earth and how it affected the lives of numerous others is the story told in Stranger in a Strange Land. |
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So, just as eighteenth-century authors wrote the impressions of Europe drawn by imaginary Persians and Chinese, Mr. Heinlein writes of earthly and American matters from the supremely "unworldly" point of view of a Martian. But his satire of international politics, religion, various kinds of corruption and many ordinary customs is singularly ineffective, crude and tedious. Mr. Heinlein has little gift for characterization, a flippant and heavy-breathing style, a ponderous sense of humor and a sophomoric (high school, not college) enthusiasm for sex. ( . .) |
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Strewn through Stranger in a Strange Land are numerous harangues by the doctor expressing an agnostic and skeptical philosophy about everything. They are very dull. But they are not so dull as the Martian's innumerable miraculous sleight-of-hand tricks or as the intricate ramifications of his Martian sex cult. |
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It is difficult to tell whether Mr. Heinlein thinks that his monotonous variations upon an erotic theme are funny, or whether beneath all the verbiage and leering lubricity there is supposed to be some serious plea for the "innocent" promiscuity of Smith's cult. In either case, much of Stranger in a Strange Land is puerile and ludicrous. |
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Orville Prescott, "Books of The Times," New York Times, 4 August 1961, p. 19 |
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The truly "classic" Heinlein is the allegorical writer who emerges from the numerous stories and novels I have examined. There is a basic pattern, shaped in the earliest tales, and carefully elaborated in his subsequent work. But there is also a distinct development of allegorical forms on a diachronic axis as well. The early stories and novellas are more obviously parables, and whatever action and adventure |
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