Stranger in a Strange Land

Heinlein is one of those giants of Sci-Fi. If you are familiar with the genre you will have heard his name mentioned, and Stranger in Strange Land is considered to be one of his best works. It is an intriguing concept - a man raised by aliens is returned to Earth without knowing anything of Earths culture. How would someone without any cultural basis in Earth react to how we live our lives?

The concept is a good one and some of the ideas presented are fascinating - how would you react to the opposite gender if you had never met someone from it before? How would you understand concepts of wealth and economy without any basis in them? Unfortunately, I do not think this has aged well - a frequent problem with classic sci-fi. When you are trying to predict the future, what sounds futuristic in the early 60s may not be so 60 years later. The main challenge I have is in some of the social ideas presented. Heinlein writes women incredibly poorly. It feels like from a different time. This really detracts from the story for me. Other things such as the quasi-religious concepts are drawn out into somewhat bizarre but ultimately dull places, with some strange fetishization which is distracting.

This is not a bad book, but it definitely reads poorly in the modern society. The basic concepts and ideas are intriguing, but the social mores are decidedly dated.