Stranger in a Strange Land is a 1961 science fiction novel by American author Robert A. Heinlein. It tells the story of Valentine Michael Smith, a human who comes to Earth in early adulthood after being born on the planet Mars and raised by Martians and explores his interaction with and eventual transformation of Terran culture.
I like having some pulp around for nighttime reading. The genre demands little of me and with good pulp, there’s plenty of action to be enjoyed in a handful of pages. I vaguely knew of this book and I knew of it as a Sixties book, which are okay, but I’ve read enough of them that I don’t need to read another guy being performatively goofy. I picked it up when I was reading Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon, a fun but typical conspiracy book devoid of citations. There was some commentary in that on how much the book had influenced the Laurel Canyon scene in the ’60s and Heinlein resenting it due to a distaste for hippies. I’m not sure how true that is, but I needed a new bedtime book.
The techniques employed for this story were fantastic. The pulp elements are laid like epoxy over a plausible Hard Sci-fi plot. The smuttiness, by today’s standards, is negligible. The characters are developed as much as they need to be and with little exposition. The social commentary was baked in well. While some of the author’s views are clearly demonstrated they aren’t awkwardly punched in. The world building carries a lot of this. The dialogue does the rest and the Social Commentary exchanges read like a cordial debate. And they’re funny, some of the characters are extremely funny. There’s no distinctively dastardly villain or out-group. Everyone in the utopia gets a swipe.
An unintentionally entertaining aspect of the book is the effects of time. The setting never has a specific year named, time is framed in terms of years since [event]. It’s in a post-era of a third world war. The tech seemed reasonable enough. There are self-flying cabs, and some people have their own, but there are still ground cars and both are used by law enforcement and reporters. Video calls are pretty default, but phones still exist and for both devices, the calls have to be routed by an operator. There are TVs, but no computers. One prominent character is a prolific pulp writer of a million pen names and his assistants record his stories on stenotypes. When a video camera is brought out it is a massive hulk of a thing that’s prone to malfunction. Guns are normal with normal bullets. Apparently, the guy that invented waterbeds had trouble patenting his monstrosity because of the waterbeds depicted in this book and another Heinlein novel, which were considered “prior art”.
Become strange. Buy a copy here.
The Normal Times 
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