Vonnegut Reviews Heinlein's “Stranger in a Strange Land” | Hacker News Reader

Vonnegut Reviews Heinlein's “Stranger in a Strange Land”

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66 pointsmiles35 comments

I happen to have just finished reading “Stranger in a Strange Land” for the first time a few weeks ago. In addition to having a super thought provoking premise, it coined the term “grok” which is so prevalent in tech circles. I never really questioned its origin, and I guess I assumed it was a borrowed word from Yiddish or something.

It's a really great word. We don't really have an equivalent in English that doesn't require some long awkward phraseology. "Deeply understand something at a fundamental level."

"get" is pretty close imho

I can think of several words like that, "comprehend" is the first one that springs to mind.

Have you actually read the book to observe how it was used there, or are you just responding to the previous comment?

"Comprehend" is a weak, distant cousin of "grok":

grok: "understand (something) intuitively or by empathy; [no object] empathize or communicate sympathetically, establish a rapport"

comprehend: "grasp mentally; understand"

To be fair, in real life, I usually see it used as a straight synonym for "understand" or "comprehend", just with extra geekiness. Very rarely is its special meaning actually intended.

I’ve never seen it used in that way, almost always it means to completely know something on a very deep level. To know it inside and out, etc.

Much more common is “expert” or “mastery” for that level of understanding, when I hear “grok” it means they read the Wikipedia page or did the tutorial or something.

I don't think I ever knew there was an expanded edition; as I thought, I have the original. While a Heinlein fan in general, Stranger in a Stranger Land was never my favorite. Probably not all that tempted to re-read the updated version. But certainly one of my favorite SF authors in college and afterwards.

For an even more incisive take-down of the realist literary establishment and its sacred cows, see Ursula Le Guin’s masterful On Serious Literature:

http://ursulakleguinarchive.com/Note-ChabonAndGenre.html

As I recall, to 'grok' something 'in fullness' means something along these lines: if you really want to understand something well, you have to make it a part of yourself, 'unite with it', long enough to take it in fully. (At which point, like modern 'culture' say, you might reject it.)

> to those who get to say which novels are serious and which are not, professional critics and teachers of literature in the company of authors of novels about the rise or fall of ordinary people in provincial societies, [Valentine Michael Smith] is absolutely intolerable.

Which is a fine reason to grok this book fully. Smith's consternation is an amusing introduction to the topic of how aliens might react to human behavior (much of which is certainly alienating). It may explain why UFOs so seldom land (except to convey a warning message) ... and why today they are packed with shocked rich sightseers.

I wonder why the byline at the top attributes the article to Vonnegut, but the article ends with "-- RICHARD E. NICHOLLS"?

There are actually two reviews, the first by Vonnegut and the second (entitled "The Biggest, Fattest Sacred Cows") by Nicholls. The delineation is clearer in this thumbnail image: https://s1.nyt.com/timesmachine/pages/1/1990/12/09/526690_36... .

“ In consequence, each reader gets something different out of that book because he himself supplies the answers . . . . It is an invitation to think -- not to believe."

Wise words that I wish echoed today.

(From the Nicholls section)

> Heinlein saw the novel as an opportunity to launch frontal assaults on "the two biggest, fattest sacred cows" of Western society, "monotheism and monogamy."

I've loved Heinlein's books for decades, and I think his "Crazy Years" prediction is playing right now, not quite as he depicted it, but the gist is there.

But on this, I've come to think he was barking up the wrong tree.

I think his "Crazy Years" prediction is playing right now

Here's Heinlein's "Future History" timeline.[1]

He got the "False Dawn" of space travel half right. He predicted a religious dictatorship in the US in the mid to late 21st century.

[1] http://templetongate.net/graphics/literature/fhchartlarge.gi...

The polygamy stuff is his books has always been a turn off for me. I don't really have anything against it, but it's that he goes to such lengths to explain and defend it, so many times (and always as some sort of "perfect system"), that it gets tiresome.

My theory is that every Sci Fi author has their own sort of pet belief they like to expose on their novels. So I get it, this is his. But every time it came up on his books I couldn't help and roll my eyes at what I knew would be a long, unnecessary, mostly off topic diatribe about the benefits of polygamy.

The gist of the Crazy Years has been with us for a long time. Remember, Heinlein grew up when cars, telephony, radio, electrification, and more were transforming culture round him. The phrase itself almost certainly refers to Années folles - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ann%C3%A9es_folles .

To phrase it a different way, when weren't the Crazy Years? I first heard the comment that we are living in Heinlein's Crazy Years back in the 1990s.

Or, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Didn't_Start_the_Fire#Histo... :

> Joel got the idea for the song when he had just turned 40. He was in a recording studio and met a 21-year-old friend of Sean Lennon who said "It's a terrible time to be 21!" Joel replied to him, "Yeah, I remember when I was 21 – I thought it was an awful time and we had Vietnam, and y'know, drug problems, and civil rights problems and everything seemed to be awful." The friend replied, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, but it's different for you. You were a kid in the fifties and everybody knows that nothing happened in the fifties". Joel retorted, "Wait a minute, didn't you hear of the Korean War or the Suez Canal Crisis?"

> Date: December 9, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final

Also see Stanislaw Lem's "Philip K. Dick: A Visionary Among the Charlatans"[1]

Compare Vonnegut:

"Yes, and now Putnam has published for the first time the full text of "Stranger in a Strange Land," by Robert A. Heinlein (1907-88), an abridged version of which has sold 100,000 copies in hard cover and nearly five million in paper since its debut in 1961. An enormous number of readers have found this book a brilliant mind-bender, and yet I doubt that Heinlein's name was ever uttered at a meeting of PEN or in the halls of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.... How could this have happened?"

to Lem:

"What the absence of such model works leads to is shown, more plainly than by any abstract discussions, by the change of heart which Damon Knight, both author and respected critic, expressed in SFS #3. Knight declared himself to have been mistaken earlier in attacking books by van Vogt for their incoherence and irrationalism, on the grounds that, if van Vogt enjoys an enormous readership, he must by that very fact be on the right track as an author, and that it is wrong for criticism to discredit such writing in the name of arbitrary values, if the reading public does not want to recognize such values. The job of criticism is, rather, to discover those traits to which the work owes its popularity. Such words, from a man who struggled for years to stamp out tawdriness in SF, are more than the admission of a personal defeat -- they are the diagnosis of a general condition. If even the perennial defender of artistic values has laid down his arms, what can lesser spirits hope to accomplish in this situation?

"Indeed, the possibility cannot be ruled out that Joseph Conrad's elevated description of literature as rendering "the highest kind of truth to the visible universe" may become an anachronism -- that the independence of literature from fashion and demand may vanish outside SF as well, and then whatever reaps immediate applause as a best-seller will be identified with what is most worthwhile. That would be a gloomy prospect. The culture of any period is a mixture of that which docilely caters to passing whims and fancies and that which transcends these things -- and may also pass judgment on them. Whatever defers to current tastes becomes an entertainment which achieves success immediately or not at all, for there is no such thing as a stage-magic exhibition or a football game which, unrecognized today, will become famous a hundred years from now. Literature is another matter: it is created by a process of natural selection of values, which takes place in society and which does not necessarily relegate works to obscurity if they are also entertainment, but which consigns them to oblivion if they are only entertainment. Why is this so? Much could be said about this. If the concept of the human being as an individual who desires of society and of the world something more than immediate satisfactions were abolished, then the difference between literature and entertainment would likewise disappear. But since we do not as yet identify the dexterity of a conjurer with the personal expression of a relationship to the world, we cannot measure literary values by numbers of books sold."

[1] - https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/5/lem5art.htm

Obligatory Dick on Lem:

https://culture.pl/en/article/philip-k-dick-stanislaw-lem-is...

Miss both of these authors

My goodness, the name of the leading character in "Stranger in a Strange Land" is as familiar to millions of literate persons as Oliver Twist or Holden Caulfield.

Not reading the next sentence, I thought it was Jubal Hershaw, the author-avatar character but it was Michael Smith and damned if I could remember that. Vonnegut is simply wrong about that. No one remembers Michael Smith by name.

It wasn't a good book at all. If it were a first book by an unknown author, it would never have been published. It was just Heinlein trying to do what he thought was a book for adults rather than his usual young adult sci-fi. Aside from grok, there's nothing memorable. The sex cult stuff is just weird. Indeed if you use grok in a sentence today it marks you as a boomer or maybe a techie. I rarely see this book mentioned at all and never by the kidz.

Speaking of the kidz, Overly Sarcastic Productions does a good piece on it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jAkplrZci0

As many Heinlein fans may recall, one working title for the book was "A Martian Named Smith".

Your comment echoes that of Orville Prescott ("disastrous mishmash of science fiction, laborious humor, dreary social satire and cheap eroticism.") , mentioned both in Vonnegut's review and at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stranger_in_a_Strange_Land#Rec... .

"Memorable" to you now is certainly different than 1990, when Vonnegut wrote, or 1961 when it was first released.

It was released at the start of the sexual revolution. American views on sex were already in flux - look at the reaction to the Kinsey Reports around 1950. Moreover, Heinlein timed the publication because "I had been in no hurry to finish it, as that story could not be published commercially until the public mores changed. I could see them changing and it turned out that I had timed it right." (Quote from that Wikipedia page.)

"The kidz" turning 20 now were born 40 years after the book came out, over a decade after the AIDS crisis, in a world where discussions about sex are much more common. Heinlein wrote Stranger "to shake the reader loose from some preconceptions and induce him to think for himself, along new and fresh lines" (Quote from that Wikipedia page.)

I think few kidz now consider mid-20th century ideas to be new and fresh. For that matter, how many young Asimov fans are there these days?

I don't much like Dune. However, I recognize the impact it had for its era, like its treatment of planetary ecology, written in the new Silent Spring era.

I think the same applies to Stranger. And I totally get not wanting to try to understand that era in order grok its context. ("Sure, you don't get it now, but after you watch the next five seasons it will totally make sense!")

I’ll take your point about era. A friend said the same about On The Road, that it belonged to a generation. I don’t think Stranger holds up, probably for the same reason.

I’m not much of a science fiction fan but I remember Dune and Bradbury’s Illustrated Man fondly. I can’t say that about Asimov or Heinlein or Fahrenheit 451. (Well the first chapter is pretty good.)

But Rachel Carson was great writer; she should be studied and remembered for her craft as a writer and for her ideas.

I have always thought of Heinlein as having written two original books. The first part of _Stranger in a Strange Land_ was one of them, then pick the second part or any of his other books for the other. I really tried to look for originality in his others that I read, but aside from names and settings, I just didn’t find any. I wish he had written more books with the freshness of SiaSL.

I think RAH went over the cliff into self-indulgence with SIASL, as many authors do later in their career.

James Michener as an example in general fiction.

It's hard to call SIASL late-career unless you basically consider anything post YA as late career. Heinlein would basically be hardly remembered today had he stopped writing before Starship Troopers.

Agreed, I would place the onset of 'late career' Heinlein at Number of the Beast.

Which it turns out Wikipedia agrees with, when I went to check the bibliography, so there's that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_A._Heinlein_bibliograph...

That would have been my intuitive guess--although, looking at that list, there are IMO some real stinkers in mid-Heinlein and a couple of decent books in late Heinlein. I suppose I'd be a bit hard-pressed to really draw a clear distinction between the two periods.

His later books had the self-indulgent feel that I was referring too. Self-referential, wordy, very strange approach to life.

It's obviously totally fine not to like post-juvenile Heinlein but my point is that pretty much no one would remember Heinlein for pre-late 50s YA fiction alone.

You may be right. Though not all his pre-1960 work was YA.

One more thought, even if we don't consider Stranger and afterward as "late career" it does feel like a break with prior work, YA or adult.

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