For whatever reason, two weeks ago I got the urge to reread Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land with an eye toward his motivations for writing it. I thought that perhaps I had reached a point in my own writing where I could relate to Heinlein as he was embarking on what, to me, has always been his most confusing novel. I was almost right.
I first read Heinlein when I was fourteen, in 1993. My high school had a testing period every day, and as one of the faster students at test-taking, I always had a book with me for when the test was over. Michael Crichton was a big deal that year, with the Jurassic Park movie coming out that summer. I was reading his novel The Terminal Man in testing, and Carl Maneval, who was sitting across the table from me, slid me a note. It said "The Terminal Man sucks. Read Heinlein." By then I was far enough into the book to know that he was at least half-right.
My mom was a science fiction fan, and she had three Heinlein books in her library: Tunnel in the Sky, The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, and Stranger in a Strange Land. I read the first, and enjoyed it quite a bit. I read the second, and found it a fun read but baffling. Then I read Stranger, and found it just baffling. But memorable. I remember being fascinated by the concept of Fair Witnesses, and confused at why he spent so much of the second half of the book arguing for philosophical concepts that were essentially self-evident.
I hadn't looked at it again in twenty-five years. In that time I've read most of the rest of Heinlein's work, much of it more than once. And while Stranger is perhaps the most notable of Heinlein's works - Billy Joel put it in "We Didn't Start the Fire" for reasons I still don't understand - I remained convinced it wasn't one of the best. (Spoiler: that opinion has not changed with the reread.)
So I set out with the idea that I would read it looking specifically for what Heinlein's motivation for writing it was, what kept him plowing through pages for 238,000 words. In most of Heinlein's work, this isn't especially difficult. His later novels, especially, have very straightforward motivations which are sometimes eccentric but rarely obfuscated. Stranger is not at all the same. The first half of the book is very slow, and its purpose only becomes evident once you're well into the second half. An author who's usually very direct is quite slow to the point in this book.
The pacing picks up when the character of Patricia Paiwonski appears, and Mike the Man from Mars begins to form his thoughts about religion, and eventually his church. This is also where Heinlein breaks into the didacticism he's well-known for, and the book becomes most fully-formed. But why the first half? Why is this the one work where Heinlein, usually not an author who will use a hundred thousand words to say what seventy thousand will do quite well, allowed his work to expand beyond control?
The answer comes in the point of view. He needs a sufficiently sophisticated, sympathetic point of view character to play devil's advocate for the religious and philosophical concepts he's exploring. In fact, he needs two of them. And suddenly the first half of the novel comes into focus: Heinlein has written a full novel's worth of words purely to set up the characters of Ben Caxton and Jubal Harshaw so that they can, after some resistance, eventually be convinced by Mike's religious theories and serve as proxies for the reader to consume his arguments.
In the end it works better as didacticism than it does as a novel. All that setup is more about putting the reader into the proper receptiveness for argument than it is about entertaining them. Late in the book Heinlein uses much of the language of setting up carnival marks to describe the characters' actions, while also describing what he's been doing all along. But he seems to think at this point that being a carnival mark is a satisfactory experience. Fortunately he later learned that a novel might have more than just that purpose.
As to his motivation, it's clear that his religious argument is the primary factor here, but I still don't understand why that was an argument he particularly wanted to make, or why he chose to do so in this rather-roundabout fashion. Perhaps I should revisit the question in 2043. But Heinlein's 1958 perspectives on just about everything had already faded quite far from the reality I was experiencing in 1993, and are even farther today. By 2043 I wouldn't be surprised if the novel might as well be written in Martian.