I REALLY wanted to like this work…Heinlein is a great SciFi novelist having written at least one of my all time favorite sci-fi works in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress as well as Starship Troopers which is also great but just short of TMIAHM.
Unfortunately I have to agree with some of the quotes from the original NYT review which included a feeling that it is “a disastrous mishmash of science fiction, laborious humor, dreary social satire and cheap eroticism”. While “disastrous” is a bit of a stretch, this overly lengthy work is of Heinlein’s lesser ones despite the platitudes it has been given and that it is his best selling work.
Crafted over a decade SIASL feels like it….in fact it feels like at least two separate novels in one. The first is more traditional Heinlein with an individual caught up in strange circumstances beyond their control and having to deal with it as the sci-fi part is brought in with the central character being a human who was born on Mars and raised by Martians, arriving back on Earth as an adult with capabilities far beyond those of existing Earth residents.
The second novel and the part that is the most tedious develops as this “Man From Mars” attempts to reshape humanity into a new ideal. Inclusive in this new ideal are commune living, spouse sharing, psychic powers, teleportation, and more. Zzzzzzz….Now Heinlein himself has said that he wrote this as a challenge to existing social mores and could not have published it when he first thought of it in 1948 due to then cultural restrictions—to which I say “hogwash”. There is nothing here that Hemingway, Henry Miller, Shakespeare or a 100 other known writers hadn’t already published…nothing scandalous beyond its peers certainly. Instead I believe his delay in publishing was simply that the story wasn’t good enough and was just adding to it and adding to it and by a certain point, his initial structure went by the wayside and he got waylaid by his puerile focus on “free love”…Now this was prior to the big hippy movement, so of course this book sometimes got thrown in with the Beats and similar and called a great piece deconstructing our existing society but I think Heinlein ended up with this content as many sci-fi nerds do—curiosity due to repression and inexperience.
Regardless of how he came to it, the second half of the work’s focus on “free sex” being a key component to transcendental growth of humanity comes off grossly juvenile. As Heinlein drags on and on and on as more and more of the central characters get drawn into the “free love” circle of the “Man from Mars”, one, as a reader responds with “OK, I get it…move on…” but Heinlein never does.
Referring back to the prior statement that Heinlein wanted to “challenge current mores”, he doesn’t really have any mores he wants to challenge in detail other than monogamy….race isn’t really brought up, nor is capitalism in any meaningful way. Religion gets a bit of a critique but gets wrapped directly into the “free love” commentary as well so doesn’t stand on its own. Again I revert to Heinlein’s lack of focus, length of the novel’s creation and fixation on his personal values than any desire to critique others or drive meaningful discussion. This one will NOT be going on my shelf alongside his better works…