Stranger in a Strange Land
Valentine Michael Smith, raised by Martians, arrives on Earth and becomes a messiah. Heinlein's 1961 counterculture novel gave the language "grok" and gave SF free love, communal living, water-sharing. For all its problems, it rewired how a generation thought about religion and society.
The treatment of women is the dominant complaint, “appallingly sexist and frequently offensive” across the whole book rather than one bad line. The women are interchangeable, defined by attraction to Smith or by domestic skill. The back half stalls as Harshaw becomes “simply Heinlein’s mouthpiece standing on a soapbox loudly spouting” instead of a character. The free-love material reads as coercive once you look at the authority Smith holds. And readers warn newcomers off the 1990 uncut edition, one noting “‘Unabridged’ does not mean ‘cooler.’ It means ‘longer.’”
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
