Just Finished Reading Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land

Robert Heinlein is one of the most renown science fiction writers of the twentieth century. Perhaps his most famous work is his 1961 novel Stranger in a Strange Land, which I just finished reading and which (according to Wikipedia) his wife said was inspired by Kipling's The Jungle Book story of how a boy brought up by animals adjusted to life among humans...only with Heinlein's story, the boy is brought up from birth by Martians and returned to Earth as a young man.  This character, going by the name Valentine Michael Smith, or simply "Michael", has a completely different take on life, death, sex, and society based on his upbringing.  The novel follows his "education" at what it means to be human through his small circle of human friends, who owe their fellowship with him to a ritual called the "sharing of water".  Michael is constantly seeking the deeper meaning of what he perceives around him through a process he calls "grokking".  Sometimes he puts himself into a deathlike trance while he tries to "grok" something.  And speaking of death, Michael sees it (he calls death "discorporation") as something not to be feared but rather a possible cause for elevation into a higher spiritual plane of existence.  Eventually, Michael's exploration into humanity leads him on a collision course with religion and sexuality, combining the two into a cultlike free-love religion that causes the established religions to oppose him, one of them, the Fosterites, with extreme violence.  It was this open expression of sexuality and dropping out of the dominant culture that caused Stranger in a Strange Land to eventually be embraced by many in the late 1960s counterculture "hippie" movement, although Heinlein himself has expressed that he wasn't advocating anything more in his story than for people to try to take a broader perspective on their beliefs and customs.

The supporting characters for Michael included Gillian Boardman, a nurse, Ben Caxton, a muckraking journalist, and Jubal Harshaw, an elderly doctor/lawyer/writer who serves in the story as the framer for the many and often intense philosophical discussions contained within.  For me, it is Jubal who makes Stranger in a Strange Land work as a story: I can't imagine it without him.

When Heinlein first had Stranger in a Strange Land published in 1961, it was a shortened version of his original work, which had undergone extensive editing, largely to omit some of the more sexually suggestive material.  A year or so after Heinlein's death in 1988, though, his wife stopped the publication of this truncated version and authorized the complete original, which is the version now available to us...