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★★★★★ 4
A strange book I don’t grok
I have started to read this book directly after I had read “The Moon is a harsh Mistress” and after the first chapter, I almost stopped reading again. The first chapter starts promisingly enough, after a Mars expedition with only four couples, finding the fitting couples that contained all the required capabilities in themselves had been difficult enough, had failed, years later, another expedition is started, and this time, the flight takes much shorter. They find a young man there and bring him back, but how they treat him here, locked and no women allowed, for the first time really showed me how old Robert Heinlein’s books really are and here, for the first time, it was an annoyance. What would happen if a woman would visit him? We find out in the second chapter, and the answer is, basically, nothing.
Then, for about 10% of the book, we get Jill, working in the hospital where the Man from Mars is kept, discussing with Ben, a journalist, about the implication of the Man from Mars. Once he owns the whole Mars, once he owns a majority of Lunar Enterprises. In any case, the government under the Secretary General cannot keep him alive. Then, finally, some action occurs: Ben tries to get the Man released, but fails miserably; Jill subsequently tries to prisonbreak with the Man. They escape to Ben’s place but the henchmen are not far away. They ring at the door, there is a confrontation and... it’s over. They go to another benefactor, Jubal, who keeps Jill and the Man hidden for rest of almost half of the book.
There, Jubal thinks about how to help the Man, together with getting Ben back, while he tries to learn as much as possible about the Martian and Mars. Then, the henchmen appear again, ready to arrest everybody, and after the Martian makes the policemen disappear once more, Jubal eventually manages to bluff the Secretary General into calling back the second arresting team and agreeing to meet with the Man from Mars with him, Jubal, as the official delegate for the Martian. At the meeting, Jubal does what he can to make the Man’s live safe: He gives the Secretary General the mandate the manage the money of the Martian with the payment as much money as he sees fit.
Having thus secured the Martian’s safety, the Martians keeps living at Jubal’s place and learning. They visit a service of the Fosterite church, where people gamble, visit the bar and have stories with women but when the archbishop wants to have one-to-one talk with the Martian, latter recognizes former’s evilness and discorporates him. Eventually, the Man from Mars has learned all he can at Jubal’s and he and Jill set out for the world. They join a circus troupe where the Martian performs a levitating trick with Jill, only it is not a trick, he really does so. But they are unsuccessful, the marks see right through it. They leave again, but not before they have listened to a snake charmer sermon about the Fosterites and before they make her a water brother. They next move to Las Vegas where Jill works in a show and the Martian as croupier and they elucidate naughty pictures. Thereafter, they go to San Francisco, where the Martian reads all the books about the various religions without grokking anything. They then visit a zoo where the Martian breaks out laughing as he, observing monkeys, finally groks people.
They founded their own church, but it’s not a religion. The Martian had hereto shown some extraordinary capabilities, such as being able to enter a trance state where he could stay under water for hours, telekinesis and the ability to discorporate things or beings at will. Had the reader so far been wondering how he could do that, if the Old Ones on Mars has changed him somehow on Mars, now it become clear that this was not the case. Everybody can do it but, in order to facilitate such deeds, which were connected to Martian creed, one had to understand the Martian concepts, which one could only by firstly learning the Martian language. The Martian church was thus foremost a Martian language school. That was however not all it was. The Martian idea was that there was no God than God in everyone of us. All other religions were considered as truths, only that they were kind of hiding that God was each of us, and thus the creed was “Thou are God.” In the Martian church, also free love was practiced. We get hence a chapter where Ben was shocked by this and fled the church most hurriedly to report to Jubal, only to join it again the next chapter. And of course, we get Fosterites who try to start a persecution against their competitors.
The end then also makes sense, but I don’t understand why. It was on one hand logical but on the other hand why was it necessary? This is thus not really a work of science fiction and but rather a theological treatise. I think it could have shortened somehow, then realized, that what the original editors thought as well. It was my third book I read from Robert Heinlein, Starship Troopers was a good concept which Joe Haldeman made into a good book, the Moon is a harsh Mistress was a quick read that kept me hooked, but considering, it is basically a story of the American struggle for independence, just on the Moon, and it will also be my last. There are other science fictions authors out there.
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Reviewed in the United States on November 15, 2022
