Stranger in a Strange Land - I'm disappointed...

[Itisnotlogical]

Really, this book was awesome for about the first half, maybe three quarters if you really want to push it. Throwing sex all over the place pretty much ruined the experience for me. I'd just got done with Heretics of Dune and Chapterhouse: Dune, and was already quite fed up with sci-fi plots being so ridiculously full of sex that I felt like the book might as well have been shipped in a brown paper bag from an anonymous PO box. I know a lot of all you classic sci-fi fans are going to tell me that Heinlein was trying to make some big, galaxy-spanning point, but I didn't catch it. Was anybody else disappointed with Stranger in a Strange Land?

 

[wildstar]

I agree. That book has a weird vibe because of all the sex in it. Heinlein did some great work, but being such an extreme conservative I always found it strange that he had so much of that in his writings. I tried reading his Lazarus Long books too and got the same feeling about it.

 

[Allyn Gibson]

I've sometimes thought that Heinlein missed his calling as a a porn writer.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

Nah, but I was disappointed by I Will Fear No Evil.

They're both very much books of their time.

 

[RoJoHen]

I actually read about 3/4 of this book and then stopped because I got annoyed. It seemed to turn into a totally different novel.

 

[Mistral]

The idea was intellectual freedom. I think Heinlein felt that once you freed your mind your ass(and other parts) would follow.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

Like much that was popular in the 1960s it has managed to remain somewhat intriguing while becoming quickly dated.

 

[Jan]

Yeah, maybe it's better to keep in mind the time when it was written. People complain about Heinlein being sexist but the fact that he wrote female characters that were smart, professional and sexual was quite a new thing. Maybe he went overboard but it was quite an influential book back then.

Jan

 

[Itisnotlogical]

Like much that was popular in the 1960s it has managed to remain somewhat intriguing while becoming quickly dated.

Actually, I thought morals were a lot more punishing on sexually-oriented books 50 years ago.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

Like much that was popular in the 1960s it has managed to remain somewhat intriguing while becoming quickly dated.

Actually, I thought morals were a lot more punishing on sexually-oriented books 50 years ago.

Prose fiction of this sort? Not at all. Bestsellers in the U.S. had featured far more explicit sexual material for quite a while by the early 1960s - Never Love A Stranger was a bestseller in 1948. Stranger In A Strange Land was pretty tame by comparison with most of that stuff; it's not at all explicit.

Hell, when I was about nine years old I bought the paperback of From Russia With Love off the rack at Drug Fair - my mom was fairly alarmed when she leafed through it.

 

[Itisnotlogical]

Shows how much I know about the times 30 years before I was born. I feel so young and vibrant

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

Treatment of sexual topics in the mass media - TV and movies - in the U.S. were oblique at most until the mid-to-late 1960s; if you've watched the original Star Trek you've got the general idea. Books and magazines, however, were another matter.

 

[Jan]

Shows how much I know about the times 30 years before I was born. I feel so young and vibrant

Enjoy that. Those of us less limber these days might be lucky enough to remember the height of the sexual revolution when the advent of The Pill allowed unprecedented sexual freedom and the risk of disease was negligible and never a death sentence.

Like I said, you need to keep in mind when it was written.

Jan