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frasersimons 's review for:
Stranger in a Strange Land
by Robert A. Heinlein
There’s a few reasons this doesn’t hold up well for me. One is how antiquated it is now; even as the author tries to straddle back and forth in the Mars man’s interactions with ideologues, even when the pendulum hits the seemingly progressive views, they are woefully, often laughably inadequate. Particularly around queer culture and the overt homophobia there, but also how misogynistic the expression of feminism is and, probably most damning, how monocultural it is.
The foreign man only exists as axiomatic strategy to interrogate western culture. The things the author isn’t interested in simply do not exist, despite the conceit and the progression of plot all but begging some self reflection at shoe-horning all of earth culture as, pretty much just America. It’s also baffling that language isn’t interrogated more, but why should English be, when the author is most interested in a masturbatory trolling of social constructs. He no doubt thought himself really smart at doing so too, since basically the entirety of it could be described as mansplaining every concept being (I very magnanimously label) interrogated”.
There’s a tweet I think about something that went something like, “If your entire personality is giving other people a hard time, know that you are exhausting.” That is how this book reads. It’s almost embarrassing to read, even when it’s good. Like watching a very antiquated dance being performed, even when it’s good it calls attention to itself.
It does have better prose work and dialogue than other master scifi books I’ve read lately, which forged what the genre is good at without paying attention to staples of the craft like character work, prose, and dialogue. So there is that. But, at best, it feels like these exist to venerate and remember notions we have long since internalized in younger generations. Asking people to imagine a time when this slight step forward in a culture so toxic and disgusting is a futile exercise imo.
I can’t understand what it was like before it was born anymore than I can attempt to understand the future. So if the only thing a book has the communication of those antiquated notions, then what good is it? It doesn’t have an interesting plot, most of it is a circle jerk of characters digressing in their dialogue. It’s not fun or funny. There are much better books doing what it does. So, really, it’s for the people who read it when they were young and it moved them and made them thought about things differently. When they’re gone, they should be too.
The foreign man only exists as axiomatic strategy to interrogate western culture. The things the author isn’t interested in simply do not exist, despite the conceit and the progression of plot all but begging some self reflection at shoe-horning all of earth culture as, pretty much just America. It’s also baffling that language isn’t interrogated more, but why should English be, when the author is most interested in a masturbatory trolling of social constructs. He no doubt thought himself really smart at doing so too, since basically the entirety of it could be described as mansplaining every concept being (I very magnanimously label) interrogated”.
There’s a tweet I think about something that went something like, “If your entire personality is giving other people a hard time, know that you are exhausting.” That is how this book reads. It’s almost embarrassing to read, even when it’s good. Like watching a very antiquated dance being performed, even when it’s good it calls attention to itself.
It does have better prose work and dialogue than other master scifi books I’ve read lately, which forged what the genre is good at without paying attention to staples of the craft like character work, prose, and dialogue. So there is that. But, at best, it feels like these exist to venerate and remember notions we have long since internalized in younger generations. Asking people to imagine a time when this slight step forward in a culture so toxic and disgusting is a futile exercise imo.
I can’t understand what it was like before it was born anymore than I can attempt to understand the future. So if the only thing a book has the communication of those antiquated notions, then what good is it? It doesn’t have an interesting plot, most of it is a circle jerk of characters digressing in their dialogue. It’s not fun or funny. There are much better books doing what it does. So, really, it’s for the people who read it when they were young and it moved them and made them thought about things differently. When they’re gone, they should be too.