Re-reading this cult classic, 15 years or thereabouts after the first time.
A colony is founded on Mars, but dies out. Years later, a new group of astronauts visiting Mars find Valentine Michael Smith, the child of a couple of the colonists, raised by Martians. Michael is brought to Earth. He learns to be human, and then – when he discovers that humans don’t have his powers of telepathy, telekinesis etc – teaches humans how to be Martian.
This is limited to his closest friends at first, until a juridical disagreement between Michael and the government is resolved, making him free and filthy rich. Then he starts to travel and meet people, in order to understand more of human society, and when he “groks” it well enough, he founds a religious cult to help spread his views. In the meantime we also hear a lot about the views of Jubal Harshaw, old rich opinionated eccentric who happens to be in the midst of the group of people around Mike.
Named views (Mike’s and Jubal’s) mostly come down to free love. Human moral rules are arbitrary, hence hindrances to human development. Anything that leads to love and “growing closer” is good. They value other human rules and conventions equally lowly: minor episodes aim to illustrate the pointlessness of money, the acceptability of occasional murder etc. (However, drugs are no good, and homosexuality is pitiable. Free love is good only when done the traditional way.) Through descriptions of Mike’s new-founded cult we also get some criticism of organized religion.
This is a book that clearly wants to be important, and to provoke. It was written with the explicit intention of changing social mores. And (having not been there myself at the time) I have to fall back to Wikipedia’s judgement of its effects:
The late-1960s counterculture, popularized by the hippie movement, was influenced by its themes of individual liberty, self-responsibility, sexual freedom, and the influence of organized religion on human culture and government, and adopted the book as something of a manifesto.
One can wonder, of course, how much of this was down to the author “reading” the currents of social change, and how much he was actually directing them?
Because of this aim to change the world, it’s a very preachy book, sometimes tiresomely so. And as so often is the case for books that want to spread important ideas (Little Brother comes to mind), the plot, characters, language etc gets less attention, so the end result is far from great literature.
The characters are bland and stereotypical (except for the absurdly colourful one of Jubal Harshaw), more charicatures than humans. There isn’t much plot, and the book is long and rambling. And rather annoyingly, the women are always lovingly jokingly girlishly submitting to their men, and the men are always patting their bottoms.
There are moments of greatness, and the core idea of “Thou art God”, the oneness of all life, the conflation of life / love / understanding / god, is at times expressed very well. Parts of the book are also quite funny and uplifting.
I can imagine that the ideas were probably pretty wild for 1961, but both society and SF have grown a bit since 1961. The book now feels juvenile, not so far from the 1950s pulps after all, despite its ambitions.
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