Reading Stranger In A Strange Land: Part One

Poolside with my old paperback.

During my beach trip to St. George I reread the sci-fi classic Stranger In A Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein for the first time in probably 30 years. I read it at least twice before I went to India. Back then, I thought it was a terrific book, so profound. Today much of it seems antiquated though there are still plenty of great quotes and ideas. I saw a few dents in the armor of the “terrific book” with this reading. First of all, after all these years, the prose, while excellent in some places, is clunky and dated, as are many of the plot devices. Secondly, you drift back to it after decades, expecting the same profound experience, only to find it different because you're the one who's changed.

Stranger In A Strange Land occupies an underappreciated space in literary history. This was the first science fiction novel to make The New York Times bestseller list. This wasn't just a milestone for a genre novel; it was a seismic shift. The barrier between "serious literature" and "sci-fi pulp" collapsed, at least in this case. The novel has elements that appealed to both the mainstream sci-fi nerds and to the beatniks also. It connected seemingly disconnected people, bridging mindsets and worldviews that normally wouldn't share the same cultural space.

The timing matters. Published in 1961, it coincided with the early stirrings of the counterculture, so the novel resonated.  It wasn't just nerds reading it, college students, beats, proto-hippies, even some intellectuals got caught up in it. Heinlein tapped into something that was already emerging in the collective consciousness but hadn't yet found its full expression. The novel was both prophet and catalyst. It spoke to what was coming while simultaneously helping bring it into existence. You couldn't separate the book from its moment in history if you tried.

Which is the main reason the novel felt dated this time (as do many classics, for that matter). In this case, however, some of it is downright offensive by today's sensibilities. The novel has remained fixed on the page while the world around it has transformed completely. Particularly jarring is a quote where Jill states: “Nine times out of ten when a girl gets raped it is partly her fault.” That couldn't be written today. Then there's the dismissive claim that "What modern artists do is pseudo-intellectual masturbation." These are fossilized attitudes that many of us have evolved beyond in the 60-plus years since Heinlein produced this novel.

I want to stress I am capable of reading the novel for what was intended in its time. I personally don't find anything in it offensive. It is impossible to offend me.  But much of it has become out of tune with the times and not in a thought-provoking way. This is the necessary tension of engaging with many past works. In this case, a lot of what once felt provocative or mind-expanding now feels kind of self-consciously stiff and even silly. The novel's swagger has aged unevenly. What was once revolutionary now sometimes reads like a teenager trying too hard to shock the adults. On this reading, the novel felt more adolescent that marvelous.

Nevertheless, much if its original thought-provoking nature remains. One thing glaringly obvious to me this time is that, although Jill is obviously a sexual bombshell of a woman, neither she nor anyone else is described physically in much detail. She is a very strong, confident and robust woman but we don't know much about her physique. This creates an odd disconnect. Sexuality permeates the novel, yet remains curiously abstract.

This absence of physical description applies universally throughout the novel. The Martians, despite being literal aliens, receive no physical description. Mike himself, our protagonist, remains physically indistinct. Jubal, Dawn, Ben, all the characters of the narrative exist as personalities rather than as bodies.

The rare exception comes when Mike refers to Jill as a "little imp with lively legs and lovely lewd lascivious lecherous licentious libido...beautiful bumps and pert posterior...soft voice and gentle hands." This playful, even goofy litany of alliteration tells us almost nothing concrete beyond suggesting an attractive feminine form. It's like looking at a silhouette rather than a portrait. That's as descriptive as we get even for a character repeatedly framed as sexually desirable.

I think the lack of physical description, or rather the veneer of it, allows Heinlein to do all sorts of things sexually in the novel. You can make anything happen as long as you leave out the physicality of it. There's a clever sleight-of-hand happening here. By keeping everything in this suggestive haze, Heinlein slips radical ideas past moralists as well as the defense mechanisms of readers. The absence of detail becomes a presence of possibility.

This was both a deliberate artistic choice and a practical response to the publishing environment of the late 1950s. It's a masterclass in working within constraints, the very limitations become opportunities. Physical vagueness allowed Heinlein to explore radical ideas about sexuality while avoiding possible censorship or excessive controversy while simultaneously understanding at a level deeper than the merely physical, a reinforcement in the narrative referred to as “grokking” which I'll get to in a moment.

As for the Martians themselves, especially the mysterious Old Ones, they exist in a completely different relationship to time, space, and consciousness than we do. Heinlein gives us this remarkable passage that begins with their reaction to being visited by spaceships from Earth.

"Mars, geared unlike Earth, paid little attention to the Envoy and the Champion. The events were too recent to be significant - if Martians had newspapers, one edition a Terran century would have been ample. Contact with other races was nothing new to the Martians; it had happened before, would happen again. When a new other race was thoroughly grokked, then (in a Terran millennium of so) would be time for action, if needed."

"On Mars the currently important event was a different sort. The discorporate Old Ones had decided almost absent-mindedly to send the nestling human to grok what he could of the third planet, then turned attention back to serious matters." Heinlein invents the term “discorporation” to denote the way Martians look at death.

Mike, the central figure of the entire narrative, is merely an afterthought to the Old Ones, a probe sent "almost absent-mindedly" to gather information. They've already moved on to "serious matters." This passage occurs about 90 pages into the novel and reframes everything about it although I don't recall ever paying much attention to it in my distant previous readings. What we gradually come to perceive as Mike's messianic mission is, from the Martian perspective, barely worth noting.

Buried in this passage comes this revelation: "The question was of greater interest because it was religious art (in the Terran sense) and strongly emotional: it described contact between the Martian Race and the people of the fifth planet, an event that had happened long ago but which was alive and important to Martians in the sense that one death by crucifixion remained alive and important to humans after two Terran millennia. The Martian Race had encountered the people of the fifth planet, grokked them completely, and had taken action; asteroid ruins were all that remained, save that the Martians continued to cherish and praise the people they had destroyed."

What?! The Martians destroyed an entire civilization, presumably turning what was once the fifth planet from the Sun into what we now call the asteroid belt and yet "continued to cherish and praise the people they had destroyed." This is a rather significant detail that I either never connected with initially or had completely forgotten in the three decades since I last read the novel. 

This short, offhanded section seems like a throwaway passage, only a few paragraphs easy to ignore as they seem to have little to do with the actual story at this point. Yet, this fundamentally alters our understanding of the Martians, of Mike's importance and of the novel's philosophical underpinnings.  There is also the passing mention of Christ here, just one instance of many intentionally dotting the novel.

The Old Ones are basically deceased Martians of some sort, "discorporate" beings, entities that have shed their physical forms yet continue to exist as conscious intelligences. They aren't ghosts in the human sense; they're beings who have transcended the limitations of physical existence while maintaining their identity and agency. Even Mike, raised by Martians, doesn't fully grok the Old Ones. When he speaks of them, it's always with a mixture of reverence, awe, and incomprehension. They represent a level of existence beyond even his hybrid understanding.

The Old Ones function in the narrative as a kind of cosmic perspective. They observe, they occasionally intervene, but they operate according to priorities and timescales incomprehensible to humans. They're not gods in the traditional sense, but they embody a godlike detachment, perspective and magical power. Their existence suggests that human consciousness is merely one stage in a potentially infinite evolution of awareness, that what we consider the ultimate questions may be merely preliminary from a higher perspective.

The Old Ones “grok” things. The concept of grok is Heinlein's most enduring creation in all his many works. The concept of grokking caused a sensation in its day. It's a conceptual tool that filled a genuine linguistic need, a way to express a form of understanding that our existing vocabulary couldn't quite capture, like the less memorable idea of discorporation.

This is understanding as union rather than analysis. The barrier between subject and object dissolves, one becomes immersed in the other. You don't just know the thing; you are the thing, and it is you. The concept transcends the merely intellectual and encompasses the spiritual, emotional, and physical dimensions of comprehension.

Dr. Mahmoud, a minor but important character who speaks Martian and, for that reason, becomes the first human Mike trusts, explains it like this: "'Grok' is a Martian word that cannot be defined in Terran terms. It is a word for which we must develop an earthly definition by living with Martians. But I've found that certain Terran words can be used to get a feeling for it: 'identity,' 'empathy,' 'understanding,' 'communion' - but each alone is not enough."

The concept has a powerful integrative nature, understanding someone or some thing in a way that transforms the person who is understanding. When you truly grok something, you can't remain unchanged by the experience. The boundaries between self and other become permeable, even illusory.

Since my first reading, back in my 20's, I just thought the whole concept of grok was fascinating. It offers a way to talk about the kind of deep, transformative understanding that our increasingly fragmented, analytical culture often lacks. To grok is to understand as communion rather than dissection. It remains the most memorable part of the novel, after all these years.

Grokking is the total immersion, including physical, of essentially minds in a dance with one another. Even more, it's minds becoming one, at least temporarily. The physical dimension isn't supplementary, it's essential. The novel repeatedly connects deep understanding with physical intimacy, at least in its human sense.

A particularly telling moment comes during the first (long expected) intimate scene between Mike and Jill.  She suggestively tells Mike to “turn just a little, I'll help.” The act itself is described as you would expect, without much physicality – “they merged, grokking together..." and concludes with Mike saying, "We grok God." This connection between physical merging, mental union, and spiritual revelation captures the multidimensional nature of grokking. Physical intimacy becomes the vehicle for both interpersonal and divine understanding, very trendy and provocative for the early 60's.

Similarly revealing is a later comment by Jill about Jubal's connection with Dawn: "Dawn told us that you were as deep into her mind as you were into her body." This gem of a line suggests an intense multifaceted passion where physical and mental intimacy are inseparable, equally deep, equally transformative. The body doesn't just house the mind; it participates fully in the experience of melding.

Heinlein gives us a fascinating stylistic representation of grokking toward the novel's end. After their initial and likely repetitive intercourse, Jill and Mike begin having brief moments of dialog that appear in parentheses and italics - a visual cue that they're communicating telepathically, sharing thoughts directly. This is a concrete demonstration of grokking in practice. They've transcended the limitations of verbal communication and achieved a direct mind-to-mind connection, something commonplace among Martians.

Heinlein's concept becomes truly radical when Mike realizes (along with the reader) that true grokking in the human sense must include the body. Martians don't seem to need the physical dimension to grok but humans certainly do. This is an expansion of both Heinlein's idea and the difference between the two races. Without the physical dimension, it would be incomplete, abstract, detached. In Mike's worldview, this integration of the physical into spiritual is what makes the concept so threatening to conventional religious structures in the novel. It challenges the mind-body dualism that underlies much Western religious thought.

Another interesting detail that I noticed more this time is that, throughout most of the novel, Mike doesn't laugh. This is specifically noted for the reader by Jubal. This absence becomes increasingly notable as he adapts to other human behaviors and emotions. Then comes a scene at the zoo. Mike watches one monkey attack a smaller monkey over a tidbit of food, pummels it and takes its food away. All the other monkeys ignore the attack. For them, it is business as usual. Almost incomprehensibly, Mike makes this connection and explodes in laughter.

This is a pivotal moment in Mike's development. Throughout the course of the novel he is struggling to grok people and suddenly in this moment he does. (We don't know why, you have to just go with it.) In this moment, he tells Jill, he finally groks humanity and, in doing so, simultaneously groks human love. Shortly after this he assumes his role as a teacher and founder of his own religion. It all comes after his laughter and grokking of apes, people and love.

Presumably, Mike finally grasps something essential about human nature by witnessing cruelty, absurdity, suffering sand indifference. Not through philosophical discussions with Jubal (which happen but fail to bring any grokking on Mike's part at all) or through Jill's patient explanations, but through this primal scene of one sentient being tormenting another. He laughs. This reaction seems to unlock something in him - a recognition of humanity's contradictions that intellectual understanding alone couldn't provide.

There's something profound about Mike finally grokking humanity through witnessing suffering and absurdity rather than through all the rational explanations others had been offering him. It suggests that understanding our humanity requires comprehending our instincts, our contradictions and cruelties, not just our ideals.

This sequence completes a fascinating progression: Mike becomes attracted to Jill, then he comes to trust her without understanding why, later understands that sex is the human way of “growing-closer” and ultimately proclaims to her  her “Thou art God.” But not until he witnesses the monkey's mistreatment and laughs for the first time.  Thereby, he groks people, groks love, then shortly after begins his role as spiritual teacher, which ultimately leads to his artistic "performance" that serves as the climax of the novel. 

The novel's approach to sexuality is simultaneously radical and problematic. There is the age gap moment when Jubal has sex with Dawn who is apparently 50 years younger than he. This age gap would be controversial even by today's standards and was downright scandalous in 1961. What makes it work in the narrative is that Dawn (who groks Jubal) had to push through several refusals by Jubal to make it happen - the reversal of traditional power dynamics mitigates some of the potential exploitation. Still, it remains one of the most provocative elements of a novel filled with taboo-breaking ideas.

As you might expect by now, Heinlein handles this potentially controversial dynamic casually, with minimal physical detail - just the suggestion of these sexual connections without elaborate description. The absence of physical detail creates a kind of acceptable vagueness that was almost universal in 19^th century literature while still exploring radical relationship structures that were racy for their time.

This age-gap intercourse is embedded within the broader Martian concept of "water brotherhood” (water being scarce on Mars makes it rather holy to them). There's a powerful moment where Jill doesn't actually witness Jubal and Dawn's intimacy, but rather groks it, understands it with that deep, transformative comprehension that transcends mere observation. In grokking their connection and she welcomes Jubal the next day without jealousy or judgment.

Jealousy is viewed negatively by those who grok. First of all, it doesn't exist on Mars. Secondly, as Mike groks it in others, he thinks it is a form of insanity. It leads to fear and guilt and bitterness. He sees nothing of benefit in it. To Mike, the Biblical commandment to not covet another man's wife is primitive. Everyone should love one another, including physically, without jealousy. The hippies went crazy for that idea, of course.

This is a perfect example of Martian “nesting” translated into the human world. Gender does not really exist for Martians. There are only levels of maturity. Children, known as “nymphs” on Mars, are predominantly feminine by nature. When they grow to adulthood they become masculine. The Martian perspective on relationships as non-possessive, non-exclusive, transcending conventional boundaries of age or other social categories becomes accessible to humans who grok.

The sexual relationships in the later part of the book veer into territory that now reads as proto-gender-fluid or even pansexual in spirit despite the stiff and somewhat antiquated prose. Mike considers women as "brothers" because adult Martians are masculine, children are feminine.  The grokking among “water brothers” collapses identity boundaries—gender, age, sometimes even species—in this idealized, quasi-telepathic communion. This dimension of the novel creates a fascinating tension for contemporary readers. It feels strikingly modern in its fluidity and rejection of traditional boundaries, yet the execution often remains trapped in the male-centric perspective of the era.

Even though Heinlein's characterizations feel dated, many of his ideas don't. The mechanics are old-school, but the architecture of his sexual worldview is weirdly resonant now, nonmonogamous, body-positive, anti-shame, fluid, communal. You can see elements of fluidity, relationship anarchy, and queer theory in Heinlein's vision, filtered through the limitations of his time and perspective. I am sure Heinlein never intended this sort of interpretation but, as I have said before, the artist loses control of their art once it becomes public. As a cultural artifact, Stranger In A Strange Land is both ahead of its time and very much of its time, containing both the seeds of future liberation and the constraints of past prejudice.

“Thou art God” is a phrase that appears with increasing frequency as you read the novel. Mike says this the Jill as they first consummate their grokking in its “fullness.” At first, it seems blasphemous, especially to characters with traditional religious backgrounds. But its meaning gradually unfolds as the narrative progresses. Mike explains it this way: "Thou art God and I am God and all that groks is God, and I am all that I have ever been or seen or felt or experienced. I am all that I grok."

The phrase essentially suggests that divinity (or at least sacredness) exists within each person, that each individual is part of the divine and contains divinity. When Mike says "Thou art God," he's grokking the divine nature in whoever he's addressing. When applied to people and divinity, it suggests that once you fully grok another person, you recognize their ineffable nature.

This concept becomes revolutionary and threatening to established religions in the novel because it removes the separation between humans and the divine. It challenges the hierarchical structure of traditional religions by suggesting that divinity isn't something external to be worshipped but an internal quality to be recognized.

It's a radically democratic spirituality. There's no priesthood, no mediator between you and the divine, because you are the divine. There's no salvation to be earned, because you're already saved. There's no transcendence to achieve, because you're already transcendent, you just haven't grokked it yet.

This philosophy underlies everything in the novel, from the water ceremonies that recognize the divine in others to Mike's final artistic act.  Beyond religious philosophy it is a complete reconception of human identity and relationship. And it all stems from this simple, radical phrase: "Thou art God." Ultimately, it brings about Mike's preeminent act of grokking – his voluntary discorporation.

(to be continued)