Maybe you had forgotten that July 7, 1907 was the birthday of SF great Robert Heinlein? I certainly had, but thanks to the InterWebs, now I know.<\/p>\n
The always-iconoclastic Steve Sailer gives snapshots of Heinlein’s novels<\/a>, including Stranger in a Strange Land<\/em>, which had such an effect on the American Pagan movement via the Church of All Worlds<\/a>:<\/p>\n – Heinlein’s 1961 Stranger in a Strange Land evolved much like Nabokov’s Lolita. Both writers began working on their respective scandalous magnum opuses about 1949, figuring that while they weren’t publishable at present, American norms were changing fast enough that they would be publishable eventually. Both ended up long and self-indulgent.<\/p>\n – After a fast-paced opening, Stranger in a Strange Land bogs down badly. It reads like a few cokeheads lecturing some credulous potheads on everything under the sun. Still, what a great title it has, maybe the best by any novel ever. The Prophet Abraham’s description of himself is borrowed to describe a new prophet, a human raised by Martians, who comes to a satirical America. And one plot detail — how the First Lady’s astrologer was influencing the President — turned out to exactly foreshadow the situation under Ron and Nancy Reagan!<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Maybe you had forgotten that July 7, 1907 was the birthday of SF great Robert Heinlein? I certainly had, but thanks to the InterWebs, now I know. The always-iconoclastic Steve Sailer gives snapshots of Heinlein’s novels, including Stranger in a Strange Land, which had such an effect on the American Pagan movement via the Church […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[5,12],"class_list":["post-901","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-paganism","tag-writing"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6xQTg-ex","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":13,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=13","url_meta":{"origin":901,"position":0},"title":"Paganism: A Reader","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"May 13, 2003","format":false,"excerpt":"What I hope was the last paper work for Graham Harvey's and my new anthology, Paganism: A Reader went into the campus mailbag today on its way to Routledge, the publisher. The book is a collection of mostly primary sources, so in that way it's somewhat different from Graham's earlier\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Paganism\"","block_context":{"text":"Paganism","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=paganism"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":89,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=89","url_meta":{"origin":901,"position":1},"title":"Nightmare Alley Last November, Jim\u2026","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"January 1, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"Nightmare Alley Last November, Jim Lewis, the editor of Syzygy, the journal of new religious movements, tipped me off about William Lindsay Gresham's 1946 crime novel Nightmare Alley. He suggested that this book about \"carny\" life--with its attitude that most people are marks, rubes, sheep and that all religions are\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":358,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=358","url_meta":{"origin":901,"position":2},"title":"Is polyamory required? The publication\u2026","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"January 24, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"Is polyamory required? The publication of this article in Sunday's Denver Post lit up the biggest Colorado Pagan e-mail list. Of course, we recognized a pentagram ring--and the reference to reading Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land rings a big Pagan-history bell, about the founding of the Church of\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5666,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=5666","url_meta":{"origin":901,"position":3},"title":"Vril: It’s the Secret","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"June 20, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"Before there was Robert Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land or The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, water-sharing, grokking, TANSTAAFL, and line marriage, there was Edward Bulwer-Lytton and The Coming Race, published in 1871. As Egil Asprem recently noted in a blog post titled \"The (all too) secret history of\u00a0Vril,\"\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"literature\"","block_context":{"text":"literature","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=literature"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":8238,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=8238","url_meta":{"origin":901,"position":4},"title":"Sex, Kids, and the Witch’s Bible","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"September 17, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"In mid-20th-century America, the public face of anthropology was Margaret Mead (1901\u20131978). As her Wikipedia biography states, \"Her reports detailing the attitudes towards sex in South Pacific and Southeast Asian traditional cultures influenced the 1960s sexual revolution.\" Her distinctive cape and long walking stick became part of her public persona,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Neoplatonism\"","block_context":{"text":"Neoplatonism","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=neoplatonism"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5269,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=5269","url_meta":{"origin":901,"position":5},"title":"It’s All Right. I Have a Book","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"February 26, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"Bridget on the necessity of reading materials: Nothing for me is worse than being in the back of an airplane or at a hotel with nothing to read. When in one mountainous far off place, I had to downsize a bag as the little airplane being piloted by what I\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"books\"","block_context":{"text":"books","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=books"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/901","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=901"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/901\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=901"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=901"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=901"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}