"I'll give you an exact definition. When the happiness of another person becomes as essential to yourself as your own, then the state of love exists."
-- Jubal Harshaw to Ben Caxton, Stranger in a Strange Land

Name the hundred best novels of the century -- it's the fad of the year. We celebrate high comedy, high drama, even children's books that strike a profound chord in our history. But where's the dirty genre? Where's all the science fiction?

Sure, you'll hear occasional praise for an Isaac Asimov, and certainly political SF like Brave New World and 1984 have been given its due. But it's grudging praise, often accompanied by the disclaimer, "of course, this is more than just science fiction."

Breaking the mold
In 1961 a book came along which radically altered the mass audience's perception of SF. I speak of course of Robert Heinlein's masterpiece, Stranger In a Strange Land.

Previously, Heinlein had contributed to the standard plot conventions of SF -- rocket ships, robots, scary aliens, square-chinned commanders and pliable women serving up coffee -- with his fun early works like The Puppet Masters and Starship Troopers. Then, in a fitting tribute to the genre he was poised to transfigure, Heinlein started Stranger off much the same way.

The first paragraphs of Stranger lay out the setting for a standard 1950s SF adventure. Six stalwart commanders and their sexy scientist wives head for Mars. All are brilliant, young and beautiful. All are ready for adventure. Then, when they get to the Red Planet, something happens and by page three, they're all dead.

We pick up the story 25 years later with a second expedition returning to Earth from Mars. Breaking from the space opera tradition, not one page of Stranger actually takes place on Mars itself, and very little of it in space. Instead, Heinlein had set his sights on a new story: the story of a Stranger born on Mars, raised by Martians, and brought to Earth in adulthood.

The stranger's name was Valentine Michael Smith, the only survivor of the doomed expedition. Smith's alien culture and philosophy -- grounded in a simple doctrine of love -- form the core of the book. Devoid of ego, Smith seeks only to "grok" -- Heinlein's coined verb for achieving deep conceptual understanding -- the complexities of genuine interaction, to share and bond through the Water Ritual, and to Nest with others in an intimate form of shared understanding. Even death holds no real value nor fear for Smith, and can occur simply if one is cast out from the Nest. The only true values are communal connection and love.

Unfettered by greed, sexuality, or competitive nature, Smith's entire essence works only to connect intimately with other people. He can't imagine it being any other way.

But it is. To Smith's nominally fellow Americans, this way of life is so truly alien that it sets off a chain reaction in society. Cast as a modern messiah, Valentine Michael Smith finds himself assaulted on all sides by the need to exploit for profit and the desperation for a spiritual leader. Despite his inability to comprehend all the entirely human motivations thrust upon him, he is literally consumed by those around him.

Smith doesn't want to spread any message. But those around him crave what he offers. Even at the cost of destroying him.

The vision and the voice
At its core, Heinlein's masterpiece is based on the simple idea that it takes an innocent, a man raised on Mars, to bring the human race closer to their own humanity. Although Smith's very existence preaches a utopian vision, Heinlein cautioned his readers that this sort of idealism is always at the mercy of baser impulses. Even though Smith is who he is, the rest of us greedy savages can think of little better to do with him than latch on and take what we can from him.

Coming out of the repressive climate of the 1950s, Stranger arrived with a shocking new voice in literature - science fiction looking inward at the human soul and serving as veiled social critique.

At a time when every American family had (or wanted) 2.5 kids and a two-car garage, the example of Valentine Michael Smith asked them to commune with their souls, to not just think or understand, but to "grok."

Released with little fanfare, it took the book five years to catch on with readers outside the closed circles of science fiction fandom. One by one, Americans disillusioned by the collapse of the Great Society latched on to the Stranger's philosophies as a new way of life. Eventually, there were millions of fans desperate to grok the world as Smith did.

Heinlein himself doesn't appear to have taken the book terribly seriously, but his concepts radically shaped and influenced the new thought processes emerging in the 1960s. The novel entered mass consciousness like a firecracker, predicting and describing so much of the upheaval that was to come. The flower children dug it so much that they founded many small communities with names like "The Church of All Worlds" and "The Mithril Star" around Smith's water-sharing culture of free love. "Grok" even made it into most dictionaries.

Even now, in the post-hippie landscape, there is no doubt of the emotional and psychological weight the book carries. Stranger remains a landmark in science fiction because it operates on so many disparate levels -- political, religious, emotional, spiritual -- all layered around a good old-fashioned suspense story, offering up bold insights about what it means to be human.

With these intensely relevant metaphors, Stranger helped lay the groundwork for much of the innovative SF to follow. Some of the greatest speculative works of the last 40 years, from Philip K. Dick's probing search for truth to Greg Bear's metaphorical evolutionary theories, owe a debt to Heinlein for preparing the minds of readers and publishers alike.

Stranger In a Strange Land most certainly makes my top 100 list of important books of the century. Maybe my top 10. While its free-love slant may seem dated, its powerful message of spiritual quest and discovery remains potent to this day, you grok me?