Book Review-Stranger in a strange land

Review: Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein

As someone working in computers the slang term grok is pretty synonymous with understanding. It turns out that it originates here in Heinlein’s Martian language, with similar meaning but a lot more nuance.

Which is perhaps out of order in this review, but seems like a decent place to start.

Stranger in a strange land is a sci-fi classic. It was the first sci-fi book to be a New York Times Book Review best seller. It won the Hugo in 1962. But how does it hold up?

It feels like a book I should like, but to be honest it felt pretty preachy and filled with exposition, through the voices of some of its characters. Some of their motivations were unclear, but they wouldn’t stop talking long enough to show us why they were doing things.

I suspect that there was some inspiration from it that went into Arrival, which is a movie I love, but the level of exposition takes some really interesting ideas, about language, and how we observe the world, what it means to be human, and the legal conflict of the future, and waters them down with characters who tell and don’t show.

It wasn’t my favorite of the sci-fi classics.

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