Even better is Andy Serkis as David Robey, a wealthy and psychopathic millionaire turned high body count serial killer, who uses surveillance technology to manipulate and kill civilians.
Valentine Michael Smith, a human who comes to Earth in early adulthood after being born on the planet Mars and raised by Martians, brings light to all the silly, stupid conventions of Earth.
Heinlein named his main character “Smith” because he was disappointed in the unpronounceable names assigned to extraterrestrials in most science fiction.
The given names of the chief characters have great importance to the plot. They were carefully selected: Jubal means ‘the father of all, ‘ Michael stands for ‘Who is like God?’
It’s a philosophical and thought providing read.
Plenty of sex to keep the teenage male audience absorbed.
Stranger is one of many books which pose provocative situations, challenging conventional social mores.
The importance of individual liberty and self-reliance, the nature of sexual relationships, the obligation individuals owe to their societies, the influence of organized religion on culture and government.
The free love and commune living aspects led to the book’s exclusion from school reading lists in the USA.
I still like the book — though this review is not wrong:
The New York Times, Orville Prescott received the novel caustically, describing it as a “disastrous mishmash of science fiction, laborious humor, dreary social satire, and cheap eroticism”; he characterized Stranger in a Strange Land as “puerile and ludicrous”, saying “when a non-stop orgy is combined with a lot of preposterous chatter, it becomes unendurable, an affront to the patience and intelligence of readers”.
It’s the eve of 1953, and Aloysius Archer is in Los Angeles to ring in the New Year with an old friend, aspiring actress Liberty Callahan, when their evening is interrupted by an acquaintance of Callahan’s: Eleanor Lamb, a screenwriter in dire straits.
After a series of increasingly chilling events—mysterious phone calls, the same blue car loitering outside her house, and a bloody knife left in her sink—Eleanor fears that her life is in danger, and she wants to hire Archer to look into the matter. …
The Husband (2006) by Dean Koontz is one intense book.
Mitch Rafferty, owner of a small landscaping business, receives a phone call from someone claiming to have kidnapped his wife Holly. The caller demands that Mitch pay two million dollars or Holly will be killed, and if he informs the police, Holly will be tortured and left to die. …
On arriving home, Mitch finds his house staged to look like he had killed his wife. He finds blood smeared over his clothes in the closet and splattered on the kitchen walls. …
As instructed, Mitch visits his brother Anson …. During this time, Anson receives a call from the kidnappers …. Anson, who had helped his siblings throughout their childhood cope with their parents, offers to give Mitch the two million dollar ransom amount. …
Like most teen boys my age, I read every Heinlein book I could get my hands on.
Tunnel in the Sky (1955) … a group of students sent on a survival test to an uninhabited planet, who soon realise they are stranded there. The themes of the work include the difficulties of growing up and the nature of man as a social animal.
His juvenile books are rollicking adventures. No profanity.
But on another level, Heinlein was a provocative philosopher on matters of personal freedom, particularly sexual freedom, libertarianism, religion, politics, and government.
Heinlein wrote strong female characters decades before it was cool. 😀
My main takeaway from Tunnel is the truism that rule of law must come first.
Everything else, later.
If you don’t have enforceable laws, wannabe dictators will insist criminals are tourists.
Here’s Georgia GOP Andrew Clyde barricading the doors of the Senate. He later called those attacking him tourists.
Any objective person would want those breaking into their home or business arrested. To deny this fact is to deny rule of law.
As in Lord of the Flies, which had been published a year earlier, isolation reveals the true natures of the students as individuals. The Heinlein book is more optimistic, however.
The colony of young people in Tunnel do establish rule of law. Democracy.
In any case, it’s still worth reading Heinlein books today. They are thought provoking.
Rick McCharles 