Stranger in a Strange Land

Stranger in a Strange Land is a science fiction novel by the American writer Robert A. Heinlein, published in 1961. It won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1962 and became the first science fiction novel to reach the best-seller list of The New York Times Book Review.

Before the war that shapes the book's world, a crewed spacecraft is sent towards Mars and all contact with it is lost shortly before it lands. Twenty-five years later a second ship reaches the planet and finds a single survivor: a man born there, raised by Martians, who returns to Earth as the inheritor of a considerable fortune and of a complicated legal position.

The novel follows what happens when somebody with no share in human assumptions is introduced into them. Smith's education is Martian, and the arrangements that make sense to the people who take charge of him, from property and law to religion and sex, do not make sense to him, while the abilities he brings with him are not something the authorities know how to handle. Heinlein's unedited manuscript was published in full in 1991, three years after his death.