Reviews
If any work of fiction will earn Robert Heinlein a permanent place on the collective bookshelf, it is going to be , for the impact it has made on American society. If a person has not managed to read by now, then he has at least absorbed a bit of it osmotically, for it flows throughout our cultural consciousness. Perhaps least of all, it anticipated Nancy Reagan's reliance on astrology and spawned the water bed and the neologism "grok," (Heinlein's Martian verb for a thorough understanding), though "grok" would never have taken hold, had the young rebels of the 1960s not discovered as their counterculture bible. Some went even further and formed "nests" and churches based on what they found in ; perhaps the most famous instance of that is the Church of All Worlds, a pagan group who lifted its name and logo intact from the book. has also begun to be included in many canonical college reading lists, and Billy Joel saw fit to mention the title in his 1989 Top-40 hit about history, "We Didn't Start the Fire."
Enter Caxton's friend, Jubal Harshaw, attorney, physician, hack writer, bon vivant, curmudgeon, anarchist. He caches Smith in Freedom Hall, his Poconos enclave, and takes on the dual chore of fighting the world federation for Smith's liberty and of educating Smith in the ways of his biological race. The youth is an apt student, a strange admixture of human infant and Martian superman, and as time goes on, he manages to win more and more people over to his own alien viewpoint. He becomes a kind of messiah–with explosive results.
Given that, I leave it to the reader to pick up and revel in it. In spite of the movements and religions it has birthed, is no bible; it is a sprawling satire of human conceits, including marriage, love, sex and–most importantly–religion. Satire usually aims to inform, so if one is looking for any message in , then one take a good, long look at Heinlein's targets and think. As Heinlein himself said in a to an avid fan, ". . .I would never undertake to be a `Prophet,' handing out neatly packaged answers to lazy minds. [. . .] anyone who takes that book as is cheating himself. It is an invitation to think–not to believe."
What an invitation. ~~Beth Ager
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