By Michael A. Burstein

Last week, I suddenly found myself interested in re-reading one of the scenes in the classic award-winning novel Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein. The scene in question is the one where Jubal Harshaw, who has taken on the protection of Valentine Michael Smith, the Man from Mars, decides he needs to place a phone call to the planet's chief executive, Secretary General Joseph Douglas. The scene is a fascinating one, dealing as it does with the problem of how an ordinary citizen can get in touch with the political leader of the entire Earth.

I'm not entirely sure why I was moved to re-read the scene. Quite possibly it was because I had just finished reading Margaret Atwood's collection of essays about science fiction, In Other Worlds. In one of her essays, she discusses Gulliver's Travels, and she mentions the flappers of Laputa. The flappers control access to their masters, and they only open their masters' ears to listen to a visitor if in the opinion of the flappers the visitor warrants an audience with their master.

Heinlein goes into a whole discussion of the flappers at the start of chapter 14 of Stranger in a Strange Land, as Jubal has to get through a variety of levels of "flappers" to get through to the planetary leader. In the end, he has to go through back channels, and so the whole scene is rather instructive. (For those of you who haven't read the book or don't recall, Jubal ends up getting through to Douglas by way of Douglas's wife's astrologer.)

Anyway, I did want to re-read the scene, but even though my wife and I moved three years ago, we still haven't unpacked all our books and I wasn't sure where my Ace paperback copy of the novel was. Knowing that I would not be able to locate my copy of the book immediately, I picked up a copy of the original hardcover at the Public Library of Brookline.

The hardcover was rather different in look and feel from the Ace paperback. The dust jacket front cover is bluish-green and seems to bear an illustration of a piece of sculpture, probably a Rodin, whose sculpture means a lot to Jubal. (Given copyright issues, I'm guessing the sculpture is supposed to evoke Rodin's work but is not an actual Rodin itself.) The inside front cover flap shows a price of $10.95 (!) for the book, and the blurb includes the following passage, which would make many critics and writers (I won't name them; you'll figure it out) pleased:

Although certain of the techniques of science fiction are used, STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND might be classed as philosophical fantasy, or as an entertainment, or, perhaps, as Cabellesque satire. A completely freewheeling look at contemporary culture from the nonhuman viewpoint of someone from another culture, it is unlike anything that has ever been done before....

(An aside: I'm amused to see the blurb writer distinguish between science fiction and "entertainment." If science fiction wasn't so entertaining, why would it have become so popular? But I digress.)

I found myself (I do that a lot, don't I?) interested in re-reading the whole novel, not just the one scene I mentioned before, because I realized that I now had a chance to replicate the experience of a reader coming to the original publication of the book for the first time. Out of curiosity, I looked at the copyright date of the novel: 1961. And then it hit me. This year, 2011, was its fiftieth anniversary. I was getting my re-read of the book in just under the wire.

It occurred to me that I hadn't heard much about this being the fiftieth anniversary of the novel, but a quick search on the Internet showed me that the anniversary hadn't been missed. Indeed, one of my local conventions, Arisia, had done a panel on the anniversary back in January. I probably would have been on the panel had not Nomi and I been taking time away from conventions for a while. (Twin toddlers will do that to you.)

So, in two days last week, I re-read Stranger in a Strange Land, trying to imagine what it would have been like to come across the novel in 1961, well before I was born.

As it so happens, I recently had reason to look into the cultural climate of the country and the world in the year 1961. I mentioned getting the book out of my local library. I'm a Trustee of the library, and earlier this month we noted the fiftieth anniversary of the opening of the one of the branch library buildings. Because the library opened in December 1961, I went looking for headlines and other historical information about the year, so we could present a small selection to patrons. I thought it would be a kick for people to read about what else was going on in the country when that branch library opened.

A list of historical events cannot necessarily give us today the flavor of what it was like to live through a particular time, but it's a start. Technically, I should probably go back to 1959 or 1960 to see what the world was like when Heinlein was writing the novel, but I'm also interested in the events taking place during the time readers were first being exposed to the book.  Here are a few of the things I found by a simple Internet search that happened in 1961:

• The USA broke off relations with Cuba and the Bay of Pigs invasion failed.
• The Berlin Wall was built.
• The USSR denoted a 50-megaton hydrogen bomb, the largest explosion in history.
• Yuri Gagarin became the first human being in space; Alan Shepard became the first American in space.
• Adolf Eichmann went on trial (and was executed in 1962).
• IBM introduced the Selectric typewriter.
• And finally, the Hugo Award for Best Novel went to "A Canticle for Leibowitz" by Walter M. Miller, Jr. (Stranger in a Strange Land would win the Hugo a year later.)

What does that tell us? I'm really just skimming the surface here, but you can find a lot that would assume the general American populace felt both anxious and hopeful about the future, an antinomy if I ever I saw one. Some might say that the time was ripe for a novel that kicked the basic assumptions of what it meant to be human in the teeth. Heinlein's novel, with its acceptance of casual sexual mores and portrayal of offbeat religions and cults, seems from the perspective of 2011 to be a book that helped usher in what we think of as the 1960s, at least in the United States.

Much of Stranger in a Strange Land is grounded in the era in which it was written and published. For example, I was struck by the fact that one of the main characters was a newspaper columnist, and although newspapers are still delivered in print today, the scene where he hands his girlfriend a copy of that afternoon's paper so she can read his column no longer rings true. Today, the guy would just text her with a URL, or quite possibly email her a copy of his column.

There are other touches like that throughout the book, but for the most part they're irrelevant. Heinlein's novel is informed by his time, but as opposed to many other science-fiction novels, it doesn't feel trapped in its period. The plot, involving an awakening of the human race, could easily be re-written as taking place in our own future, this time informed by the hopes, fears, and trappings of our own time.

And that shows the genius of Heinlein. A novel he wrote 50 years ago still works today as science fiction. There are four days left to 2011; may I suggest you pick up the novel and see for yourself? If you've read it before, it's worth a re-read, and if you haven't, prepare for an expansion of your mind.

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Michael A. Burstein, winner of the 1997 Campbell Award for Best New Writer, has earned ten Hugo nominations and four Nebula nominations for his short fiction, collected in I Remember the Future. Burstein lives with his wife Nomi and their twin daughters in the town of Brookline, Massachusetts, where he is an elected Town Meeting Member and Library Trustee. When not writing, he edits middle and high school Science textbooks. He has two degrees in Physics and attended the Clarion Workshop. More information on Burstein and his work can be found on his webpage,http://www.mabfan.com.