Modern Classics Summarized: Stranger In A Strange Land

I enjoyed this sarcastic summary of Stranger in a Strange Land.

I read and reviewed this book myself back in 2006.  Although I'm not proud of my review.  To put it mildly.  In fact, I really cringe whenever I go back and read my old review.

I think part of the problem is that back in 2006, I was philosophically sympathetic towards free love.  Or at least, I wanted to be philosophically sympathetic towards free love.  But something inside of me was telling me that even though the philosophy sounds very good on paper, this wasn't how the real world worked.  And that confusion resulted in a incoherent review.

If I had more of a critical spine, I perhaps could have written something with a bit more intelligent analysis.  Something like the above video did.

I only vaguely remember the book at this point, so I don't remember it well enough to critique the video on its faithfulness to the source material.  But I'm going to trust that it is.  The parts I do remember seem to be faithfully represented on the video.

Love it or hate it, Stranger in a Strange Land is a modern classic of sorts.  So it's probably something you should be familiar with if you want to sound intelligent at cocktail parties.  I recommend just watching the video instead of reading the book.

The other day I overheard a conversation in the staffroom in which a co-worker was telling several friends that a lot of people don't understand how Starship Troopers is really a satire.

Of course, I immediately thought of this cracked.com article.

You already knew that Starship Troopers was a satire, because any time somebody mentions this movie, they follow it up with an explanation of how nobody understands that it's a satire with a glint in their eye that, if you zoom in, is actually the concept of irony dying in a house fire. This is a movie in which the heroes dress in actual Nazi SS uniforms and high school teachers explain "the failure of democracy." The movie uses satire the way an eight-year-old uses curses when her mother is at the grocery store. Everybody gets that this movie is a satire. Everybody.

Although to be fair, although I can be smug and pretentious about it now, I do admit to being very confused about this movie when it first came out.
I think my confusion was mainly due to the disconnect between the actual themes of the movie and the way it was marketed.   It wasn't marketed as a satire, it was marketed as just another shoot-em-up science fiction exploitation film.
See also my review of the book Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein, and my thoughts on Paul Verhoeven's DVD commentary.

Podkayne of Mars by Robert A. Heinlein

(Book Review)

Why I Read This Book

          I have several friends who think it’s admirable to read informative books, or possibly the classics, but think it’s an absolute waste of time to read trashy fantasy novels.

            And on an intellectual level, I’m inclined to agree with this.  And in my more sober and serious moods, I do my best to steer myself towards serious history books or the classical canon.

 

           And yet, I must confess, the genre does hold some appeal to me, for reasons I can’t really rationally explain.  (I suppose the very definition of a “guilty pleasure” is something you can’t rationally explain.)  I have been, and always will be, a geek at heart, and every now and then I just get this urge to find some sort of trashy fantasy novel and lose myself in the world of imagination.

            After recently following some of the trashy fantasy/sci-fi links from Whisky Prajer’s blog [LINK HERE], I got the urge to set aside some of the history books I was reading, and go down to my local bookstore and just browse the fantasy/sci-fi sections until I found something that looked like it would be just ridiculously fantastic enough to be enjoyable.

            Fantasy books aren’t hard to find these days—even in Cambodia.  There are several used bookstores here in Phnom Penh for expatriates which keep on their shelves all the trashy fantasy books that backpackers bring with them from their home countries, and then leave behind here once they finish them. 

            The difficulty, though, is choosing the right book to get immersed in.  They all have pictures of fantastic beasts or magical things on their covers.  They all promise a world of fantasy and imagination.  But as fans of the genre know only too well, many of the stories between these fantastic book covers are disappointing, and some can end up being very boring.

           

            (In many ways, browsing through fantasy books is a lot more fun than actually reading them.  I can spend hours standing in the bookstore, looking at the covers, flipping through each book briefly, and imagining the world of each book.  But when it comes to actually reading the books cover to cover, I actually get through very few of them.)

            Anyway, it’s always a gamble to try to choose a book by its cover, but sometimes the gamble just has to be taken.  After browsing through several books in the fanstasy/sci-fi section, this book caught my eye as looking suitably promising.  The cheesy artwork and big bubble lettering seemed to promise good-old-fashioned pulpy fantasy fun.  The exotic location and the magical fairy were also good.  And the back cover sounded interesting enough: “this is Heinlein’s famous novel of an adventurous Marsgirl on her first space voyage, her kidnapping on Venus, and her discovery that fairies are neither imaginary…nor nice.”

            I had read Robert A. Heinlein before—two books which I read 8 years ago now on Bear’s recommendations: Stranger in a Strange Land, and Starship Troopers  If you follow the above links to read my reviews, you’ll note that I gave both books slightly mixed reviews.  I don’t remember them as being bad reads, although I do remember that Robert A. Heinlein tended to mix a lot of talk and preaching into his books—something I’m not always looking for in escapist entertainment.  But at the same time, I do remember both books as being competently written, so I decided I might as well give Robert A. Heinlein another go.

The Review

          This is a funny little book.  I’m not entirely sure what to make of it.

            The first thing to note is that the book cover (both the cover art and the blurb on the back) completely misrepresent this book.  (I know that’s just par for the course in this genre, so I’m not going to complain too loudly about it, but I do need to just state it for the record.)

            The bulk of the book is not about fairies or kidnappings or any of that stuff.  In fact, it takes this book a long time before anything remotely exciting starts to happen.  Most of the book is just descriptions of space travel in the future, or of life in the future space colonies.

           The book is about a teenage girl named Podkayne who lives on Mars.  (The book is set in the distant future, when humans have settled the solar system, and there are human colonies living on the moon, Venus, and Mars.)  She begins to keep a journal in which she writes all about her life and ambitions.

            (Sidenote: I’d be curious to know what a female reviewer would make of this book.  There were times when I thought Robert Heinlein did a very poor job of imagining the thoughts of a teenage girl, but I suppose on that subject I’m no more qualified to judge than he is.)

            Podkayne, her younger brother Clark, and her Uncle Tom embark on a journey to see Earth for the first time.  But first, before seeing Earth, the ship stops over at Venus.

            For most of the book, there’s not really a plot.  It’s just the narrator Podkayne describing what life is like for people on Mars, then describing what life is like on the space shuttle between Mars and Venus, then describing what life is like on Venus. 

            As with the previous Robert Heinlein books I’ve read, Heinlein is interested in politics and society as much as with science fiction, so we get a lot of discussion about how the different societies of Mars and Venus are arranged.

            If I’m making this sound boring, the good news is that Heinlein is a skilled enough writer that he can just about pull it off.  The plot will stall for long periods at a time, but the prose is quite readable and I found myself still turning the pages despite my frustration with how unexciting the plot was.

            And then, the last 30 pages out of 176, the book suddenly remembered it had a plot it needed to get around to, and finally things really began to happen.

****SPOILERS****

           

            So…I’m not at all sure about what to make about this book’s ending.  The prose style was the same as the rest of the novel, but the pacing and plot seemed like they had come in from a different book altogether.

            And then at the very end, the book all of a sudden seemed to forget who its protagonist was, and what the point was.  After the reader has spent so long getting to know the heroine, she’s just completely disregarded at the end of the book.  Her brother gives a quick summary of the dramatic events at the end, and she’s sidelined from the narrative completely.  And then the book ends with the reader unsure of whether she’ll even live or die. 

            While the heroine has been completely forgotten, the focus of the last couple pages is all on the brother, and how he has been ruined by the neglect of the parents.  This is something that had not been a major theme of the book before now, and seemed an odd note to end the book on.

            In conclusion, I’m not really sure what to make of the end of the book.  But the whole thing was a short and pleasant enough read.  I’m not sure I’d recommend it to anyone, but I wouldn’t not recommend it either.

Update

          The Wikipedia page on this book gives some interesting information (W).

            Apparently this book was at a stage in his career when Robert Heinlein was beginning to move away from pulpy science fiction, and when this story was originally serialized in an adventure magazine in the early 60s it caused some friction between Heinlein and his publisher.

            Apparently the ending Heinlein wanted to publish was with the heroine dying at the end, and was upset that his publisher made him re-write it because, he argued, in real life people die.

            The ending with the heroine dying at the end is slightly better than the ambiguous ending that now stands, because in the current ending it’s not even clear if she lives or dies, and at the very least, giving the reader some certainty would have been better than leaving them in ambiguity.

            That being said, although Heinlein’s original ending was marginally better than the re-written ending, in my mind all of the original problems still stand either way—it still jars with the rest of the book, and it still abruptly changes focus.

Link of the Day
Noam Chomsky "Thought Control In Democratic Societies"

Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein

 (Book Review)
So I was talking to the Bear, and I said, “Bear, remember that book you recommended to me 6 years ago? I finally got around to reading it.”

And the Bear said, “Well if you liked that book, then this one is even better.” And before I knew it, I left the Bear’s house with another reading assignment. (You’ve got to watch that Bear. He’ll try and take over your whole reading list if you let him.)

So, because of the Bear, I returned to the world of Robert Heinlein. As I mentioned in my previous review, Heinlein had some interesting and contradictory politics. “Stranger in a Strange Land” is a book that advocated free love and communal living. “Starship Troopers” is often accused of militarism and fascism. There are some tortured attempts on the internet to find a thread of consistency through his writings, or explain a political progression, but I find it easier just to take each book as its own.

Film critic Roger Ebert says when he was in grade school he read this book to the point of memorization. On the other hand Paul Verhoeven, who directed the movie version of “Starship Troopers” found the book so depressing he claims he never even finished it (which is why the film version of “Starship Troopers” was done as a satire on Heinlein’s views).

After reading the book, I find myself more on the side of Verhoeven. No doubt there are many elements of this book which would be extremely cool to an 11 year old boy, such as space commanders fighting giant spiders and what not. But like any Heinlein book, this one is really heavy on the preaching.

The book opens with a really great action sequence, but then flashes back to the decision to enlist and the first days of military training. There follows a lot of talk about the poverty of Marxist economics, the necessity of capital punishment, the importance of publicly flogging juveniles, and how social workers are destroying society.

Then graduation happens, the characters go off to fight for a brief interlude, and then go back to training to become officers. Which follows even more preaching on topics like why only veterans should be able to be citizens.

As Roger Ebert says, “Heinlein was of course a right-wing saber-rattler, but a charming and intelligent one who wrote some of the best science fiction ever.” Heinlein is a talented writer, and his action scenes can be really good when he finally gets around to them. I could have forgiven the right wing politics if they would have been a little bit more subtle or a bit more in the back ground. But aside from being book-ended by a couple action scenes this book is just talk, talk talk. And I didn’t particularly care for what it was saying.

Useless Wikipedia Fact
Part of the criticism the Chronicles of Narnia series have received over the years center on the description of Susan Pevensie in The Last Battle. In the novel, the last of the series, Susan does not go to Narnia; other characters describe Susan as being "no longer a friend of Narnia" and as being interested "in nothing now-a-days except nylons and lipstick and invitations". J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series, while commenting Lewis' sentimentality about children, has said:
"There comes a point where Susan, who was the older girl, is lost to Narnia because she becomes interested in lipstick. She's become irreligious basically because she found sex, I have a big problem with that."
Others read the passage more critically, including allegations of sexism. Philip Pullman, author of the His Dark Materials trilogy, who has been quoted as saying "I hate the Narnia books...with a passion...", interprets it this way:
"Susan, like Cinderella, is undergoing a transition from one phase of her life to another. Lewis didn't approve of that. He didn't like women in general, or sexuality at all, at least at the stage in his life when he wrote the Narnia books. He was frightened and appalled at the notion of wanting to grow up."

Link of the Day
Another one for the history buffs: this is a clip from a new Japanese documentary about the Far East Military Tribunals. I watched this documentary with Shoko while in Japan, and it was fascinating from a number of perspectives. It was amazing how much Tojo and company resembled George Bush and his crew. They kept talking about how they were going into China in order to liberate it, and everything they had done was for the good of the Chinese people. And they defended Pearl Harbor as a pre-emptive strike.

But more relevant to this particular clip, another interesting thing was the Japanese were unfamiliar with the Anglo-American justice system, and didn't think the Americans appointed to defend them would give them an adequate defense. They were very much surprised when their American defenders actually gave them a good defense. They still lost of course, but it was a good argument. Watch the clip and see for yourselves.

Also this trailer for a Chinese movie based on the same events looks interesting. I wonder when it will be available in the U.S.

Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein: Book Review (Scripted)

Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein

 (Book Review)
The Bear once recommended this book to me way back when we were still Calvin students. We were having a late night political/philosophical discussion, and he said to me, “Chewie, I think you would really enjoy this book. It was the hippy bible.”

The book stayed untouched on my bookshelf for a couple months before I finally gave it back to the Bear. Taking the time to read a book, at least for me, is enough of a commitment that I can never seem to do it for other people’s reasons.

But recently I’ve been trying to return to the idea of reading for fun, and thought I might take the Bear up on some of his science fiction recommendations.

This book is a cult classic, which means, according to the definition of cult classic, it is very well known inside of some circles, and then almost completely unknown once you get outside of those circles. It was published in 1961 and, as the Bear mentions, became very popular with the flower children. This is also the book responsible for introducing the word “grok” into the language, or at least into hippy or science fiction circles.

The plot of the book is about the first Martian visitor to the US. Only it turns out the first Martian is actually a human.

The first human expedition to Mars resulted in the death of all aboard except the infant Valentine Michael Smith. Years later, the Martian named Smith, now an adult, is sent back to earth to rejoin his race.

So this is a typical “Man from Mars” outside observer type story line, except this time its literal. Smith doesn’t understand anything about human culture, and has to learn about the human race and all its idiosyncracies.

Between the observations of the man from Mars, and the long diatribes by philosopher Jubal Harshaw (who acts as Heinlein’s mouth piece) there’s a lot to chew on in this book. In fact arguably too much. If Heinlein isn’t outright violating one of the cardinal rules of writing, “Don’t cram too many themes into one book”, then at least he’s pretty damn close.

But near the end of the book especially a few main themes do start to emerge: critiques of organized religion, advocating free love, and a communal view of property. (Did I mention this book was popular with hippies?)

The politics of Heinlein are rather interesting and not always consistent. (This wikipedia entry does a good job of trying to sort it out). Some of Heinlein’s more militaristic views in other books, such as the idea in “Starship Troopers” that citizenship should be based on military service, would not have been popular with the 68 generation. But all of that is absent from “Stranger in a Strange Land” which, if taken alone, would easily lead one to believe that Heinlein was an anarchist socialist.

Still, its difficult to know how seriously to take this book as manifesto. The idyllic free love commune that is created near the end of the book is predicated on Martian telepathy and special abilities. If Science Fiction is about the “What ifs” instead of the “what is” than this makes interesting reading, but is Heinlein advocating this kind of lifestyle for us ordinary humans?

After growing up in an environment where sex was demonized, in my young days at Calvin I was very attracted to the philosophies of Karl Marx, Mikhail Bakunin, Emma Goldman, Rosa Luxembourg, and other thinkers who advocated abolition of the traditional family in favor of free love associations. (In fact I think it might have been during a discussion on this topic that the Bear recommend this book.) But my actual experience at the time was limited.

In the years since I’ve been out in the world, my experience is that people do really get hurt by casual sex relations. But whether this is because of societal conditioning or raw human nature is beyond me. In my experience, it seems like it is the woman who ends up hurt, thus leading me at times to wonder if free love might be a male fantasy more than a well thought out philosophy. But when I tried to make up this point once, my sister violently disagreed and said that girls were more than capable of taking care of themselves, and that I was being a misogynist. And now that I think about, both Emma Goldman and Rosa Luxembourg were women.

...Well, obviously I’m still sorting through some of these issues. To sum up: “Stranger in a Strange Land” is a pretty good book, that will give you some interesting things to think about, although you do have to be patient with the various philosophical digressions the story takes.

Useless Wikipedia Fact
In one anonymous letter sent to King just before he received the Nobel Peace Prize, the FBI threatened King with releasing information about his affairs unless he committed suicide

Link of the Day
Conservative pundits made wildly wrong claims about how Iraq would turn out -- what are they saying now about the Middle East?

Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein: Book Review (Scripted)