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nihilisk 's review for:
Stranger in a Strange Land
by Robert A. Heinlein
I'm pretty gob-smacked that this is still considered a canonical work of sf. It doesn't remotely hold up in any way. The writing itself is rudimentary, as barebones as prose can get. A significant portion of the book is banal conversation. Even for its time, the ideas here were not progressive or particularly groundbreaking, and read now as distractingly anachronistic. All in all, I only finished this book out of courtesy to the person who gifted it to me. Otherwise, I would have abandoned it around a quarter of the way through.
If this was the first sf someone ever read, it could conceivably set them on a path towards better sf, but that's the most charitable take I have on this book. The characters and dialogue are unbelievably outdated and corny--and no, the same is not true for all sf written in the 60s (even plenty of works from the 50s hold up better than this). To be honest, this reads in 2021 like fanfic. Avoid at all costs. There are hundreds if not thousands of better sf works to read.
If this was the first sf someone ever read, it could conceivably set them on a path towards better sf, but that's the most charitable take I have on this book. The characters and dialogue are unbelievably outdated and corny--and no, the same is not true for all sf written in the 60s (even plenty of works from the 50s hold up better than this). To be honest, this reads in 2021 like fanfic. Avoid at all costs. There are hundreds if not thousands of better sf works to read.