June 1, 1961: "Stranger In a Strange Land" Is Published

June 1, 1961: Stranger In a Strange Land is published. The author is Robert A. Heinlein, who took the title from Moses' declaration in the Bible's Book of Exodus, Chapter 2, Verse 22.

Robert Anson Heinlein was born on July 7, 1907 outside Kansas City in Butler, Missouri. He graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy, but ill health led to a medical discharge from the Navy. During World War II, by which point he was already a published science fiction writer, he was an aeronautical engineer for the Navy.

Stranger In a Strange Land is set in an indeterminate future. An American spacecraft, the Envoy, is launched toward the planet Mars, but all contact is soon lost. Following a nuclear World War III, Earth is ruled by the World Federation of Free Nations, which, 25 years after the Envoy was lost, sends another craft to Mars. They find the earlier craft, and a single survivor, a 20-year-old man born on the ship, named Valentine Michael Smith. He has been raised by the Martians, who order him to go back with the Earth crew.

On Earth, Smith demonstrates psychic abilities and superhuman intelligence, coupled with a childlike naïveté. The World Federation is dominated by an organized religion, and Smith understands the concept of God only as "one who groks," meaning understands and empathizes with others. He says this includes every extant organism. That leads him to express the Martian concept of life as the phrase "Thou art God," although he knows that to be a bad translation.

Many other human concepts such as war, clothing, and jealousy are strange to him, and the idea of an afterlife is a fact that he takes for granted, because Martian society is directed by "Old Ones", the spirits of Martians who have "discorporated." (Heinlein may have, ahem, borrowed the concept of "the Old Ones" from another sci-fi writer, H.P. Lovecraft.)

Smith becomes a celebrity, and is feted by the Earth's elite. He investigates many religions, including the Fosterite Church of the New Revelation, a populist megachurch in which freedom of sexuality, gambling, alcohol consumption, and similar activities are allowed and even encouraged, and considered "sinning" only when they are not under church auspices. The church owns many politicians, and uses violence against those who oppose it.

Smith starts a Martian-influenced "Church of All Worlds," whose members learn the Martian language, and thus acquire the ability to truly "grok" the nature of reality, granting them psychokinesis. The established Fosterite Church can't handle this, and raises a mob that assassinates Smith. This does not stop him, as, like Jesus over 2,000 years earlier, he appears to his followers, and to his opponents, converting them.

The novel has never been filmed. Billy Joel mentioned it in his 1989 song "We Didn't Start the Fire." Songs with the title "Stranger in a Strange Land" have been released by The Byrds in 1965, Leon Russell in 1971, U2 in 1981, Eddie Money and Iron Maiden in 1986, Ace Frehley of Kiss in 1987, Barbra Streisand in 2005, and, perhaps appropriately, 30 Seconds to Mars in 2009.

Heinlein wrote extensively about space travel and time travel, including the novels Starship Troopers, Time Enough for Love, and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. The first of these has been criticized as a hard right-wing screed, and he was, indeed, an ardent anti-Communist, who volunteered for the 1964 Presidential campaign of Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, who was nominated by the Republican Party as the beginning of what became known as the conservative movement.

However, he was equally ardent in anti-racism: Even as the "space marines" in Starship Troopers are bigoted toward the invading "bugs," their units are racially and ethnically diverse, and are even gender-integrated (resulting in the controversial shower scene, with Dina Meyer among the male actors, in the 1997 film version).

And many of his books have a heavy libertarian bent, resulting in, shall we say, some unusual sex practices. He was quoted as coming up with the pun, "It is better to copulate than never." His views on Communism made him popular with the Right in the 1960s, but his views on sex, race and religion made him even more popular with the Left, which may have left each side puzzled.

Literary critic William Patterson, said that the best way to gain an understanding of Heinlein is as a "full-service iconoclast, the unique individual who decides that things do not have to be, and won't continue, as they are." Or, as libertarian journalist Bran Doherty put it in a 2007 article on the Centennial of Heinlein's birth:

Heinlein's novels and short stories reflected the rough-hewn anti-government but pro-defense message associated with Goldwater and the conservative movement he sparked. At the same time, his writings exuded the communal desire to live in blissful togetherness, ignoring the repressive sexual and religious mores of bourgeois America. With a libertarian vision that appealed to individualists of both the left and the right, Heinlein not only set the template for the American 1960s but helped create the looser, hipper, more pluralist world of the decades since.

Heinlein himself said, in a 1952 interview with CBS journalist Edward R. Murrow, "I believe in my fellow citizens. Our headlines are splashed with crime. Yet for every criminal, there are ten thousand honest, decent, kindly men. If it were not so, no child would live to grow up. Business could not go on from day to day. Decency is not news. It is buried in the obituaries, but it is a force stronger than crime."

Although he wrote books about the aptly-named immortal character Lazarus Long, and also about cryogenics to keep people alive long after they would have died, Heinlein died of emphysema at his home in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, on May 8, 1988. He was 81.

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June 1, 1961 was a Thursday. Hockey Hall-of-Famer Paul Coffey was born. And these baseball games were played:

* The New York Yankees lost to the Boston Red Sox, 7-5 at Fenway Park in Boston. Rookie Carl Yastrzemski hit his 4th career home run. There would be 448 more. Bill "Moose" Skowron hit 2 homers for the Yankees. Mickey Mantle and Yogi Berra each went 2-for-5, and Roger Maris went 0-for-4 with a walk.

* The Chicago Cubs beat the Philadelphia Phillies, 10-3 at Connie Mack Stadium in Philadelphia. Ernie Banks went 1-for-4 with a walk and an RBI.

* In a battle of expansion teams, the "new" Washington Senators beat the Los Angeles Angels, 3-2 at Griffith Stadium in Washington.

* The Pittsburgh Pirates led the Milwaukee Braves, 8-2 at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh, when the game was called due to rain after 7 innings, giving the Pirates the win. The Pirates got 2 home runs from Smoky Burgess and 1 from Dick Groat, while Roberto Clemente went 1-for-4. Hank Aaron went 1-for-3.

* The Kansas City Athletics and the Detroit Tigers were tied 4-4 after 8 innings at Tiger Stadium in Detroit, when the game was called due to rain. Al Kaline went 2-for-4. The game was replayed as part of a doubleheader on July 16. The Tigers swept, 11-1 and 8-3.

* The St. Louis Cardinals beat the San Francisco Giants, 7-6 at Candlestick Park in San Francisco. Stan Musial went 1-for-3 with a walk and an RBI. Willie Mays went 1-for-4 with a walk and an RBI.

* And the Baltimore Orioles, the Chicago White Sox, the Cleveland Indians, the Minnesota Twins, the Cincinnati Reds and the Los Angeles Dodgers were not scheduled.