Hah! I just finished Stranger in a Strange Land this weekend :) It was my introduction to Heinlein. I'd avoided older scifi because I'd wondered whether I woul

Hah! I just finished Stranger in a Strange Land this weekend :) It was my introduction to Heinlein. I'd avoided older scifi because I'd wondered whether I would relate to it, and felt confirmed in that suspicion with Stranger. It's not that I'm not glad that I read it, and if I consider the context that it was written in circa the 1950s, then I can definitely appreciate how radical it must have been. But to my sensibilities, it feels tawdry and cheap, and thus insincere. It's in no way a fair criticism since it seems to have been part of the zeitgeist that led to the free love of the 60s and subsequent over-indulgence and exploitation of the 70s (and thus the dominance of the idea that sex sells and so on). And from what I gather it was rather sincere in so far as Heinlein was supremely interested in challenging prevailing mores of the time. But outside of that context, to me, it feels, again, cheap and tawdry, and just kind of stale.