Grokking the fullness of grokking

Stranger in a Strange Land started out strong, and I was entranced from the beginning. Heinlein introduces some interesting concepts, and observing the growth of Valentine Michael Smith and seeing his martian abilities revealed was quite enjoyable. That being said, I was disappointed to watch it all culminate into the creation of what was ostensibly a sex cult. It was slightly more intimate and meaningful than just that, and perhaps it is simply that I don’t grok martian, but a homophobic sex-centered utopia was a rather anti-climatic way for the story to develop.

So why did it earn such a high rating from me? I absolutely love the concept of “grokking”. Without it, I probably would have rated the book a full point less. Grokking means a lot of things, and is explained a few different ways throughout the book, as best as can be done with a human language. Typically it is used to mean “to dwell-upon” or “understand” (among other things) but it goes much deeper than mere knowledge about something. It essentially means to understand something so well as to become one with it. With my protestant upbringing, the line “all that groks is God” sounds reminiscent of the christian theology that man is created in the image of God, and would I pose it as an accurate biblical interpretation. There is also a memorable line that equates scientists trying to understand the universe to someone examining grains of sand in order to understand the desert. I’m still trying to grok this. Perhaps in reality it says less about scientists than it does about the universe being far too vast to grok it in fullness.

Before I continue, I should note that it was written in the ’60s, and reflects many attitudes of the time. As much as I like grokking, the overarching theme was constantly undercut by casual sexism and homophobia, among other prejudices. It’s hard to develop a utopia built on deep mutual understanding, when that understanding is that women are merely emotional beings that love shopping. There is one line in particular (which I shan’t repeat), which in and of itself would make me hesitate to either recommend or reread this book.

There are also times when certain motifs and insights are just poorly constructed. At one point in the book, Valentine Michael Smith groks laughing - we laugh because things are horrible and wrong. He explains that there is always someone that is the butt of the joke, and essentially things that are funny are due to a wrongness. The character then cannot conceive of a single situation that is funny without also being in some way bad. While it is an interesting observation on humanity, I felt the lack of even a single counter-example to be rather lazy on the author’s part. There are numerous times when I have laughed uproarious at a round of consecutive puns, at ridiculous scenarios, and at cleverly constructed jokes, none of which have the slightest hint of wrongness. This is a major point in the story where it is assumed the reader agrees that Michael not only understands humanity, but groks it more fully than humans. I am less than convinced.

Overall, I would give the first half of the book a full 5 stars, and the second half a firm 3.