On a related note

[james_davis_nicoll]

What should go on a Top Ten "In retrospect, what the hell were we thinking" list of once-popular SF?

Comments

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

I read it when it was pretty new, probably in the mid 60s (I think it was the SFBC edition I first read). I'm certainly an "it's white on this side" person, but I've always associated that with Doc Smith's concept of a person being a "precisionist", which is the way I was raised (I certainly recognized that piece of the Fair Witness concept as matching something in me).

For me, it's "what were they thinking?", for a "they" apparently including you (sorry!). As I said, I never got the iconic importance it had for many people. Can you go into more detail? I'm wondering if it's things I don't think the book has, or things I got elsewhere, or things I didn't want, or what. Clearly lots and lots of people did find it an important book.

[morgan-dhu.livejournal.com]

I think it may be crucial for me that I read it just around the same time that I was starting to be heavily involved in the countercultural movement, the alternative spirituality movement ("New Age" philosophy) and also getting into political activism. I suspect that if I hadn't been the kind of person who was headed in that direction, it wouldn't have meant as much to me.

I'd certainly read a lot of science fiction prior to that, and have been a fan all my life, so I wasn't exactly a stranger to sfnal critiques of various elements of society (I was also reading the Kornbluth/Pohl collaborations and Delaney and what nascent feminist SF there was (Suzette Haden Elgin, for one) all the dystopian classics of the time and so on and so on).

I think some of the attraction had a lot to do with the combination of looking at everything from a fresh eye - as Mike does in the novel - and really thinking about how it functioned and whether it was actually necessary for it to function that way or could it be done completely differently, and the cynicism of Jubal who knows every con game in the book and tells us how it operates. This was very meaningful to the budding radical socialist that I was - showcasing two very different kinds of social criticism.

At the same time, Mike's "new religion" took me toward a serious study of non-monotheistic religion, which also influenced who I've become today. And although Heinlein's examination of alternative sexual expression in Stranger totally failed at re-examining homosexuality, still the questions made it easier to figure out my own non-heterosexuality when I came face to face with it.

There were certainly a lot of people at the time who didn't want any of that, and still don't, and lots of other people who had read or experienced something else that had already gotten them to similar places, but... for me, Stranger was one of the (many) books that were part of my learning to question what I saw around me.