and agreed with my verdict. So, after the notification to the publisher, she presented them with a copy of the new/old version.No one remembered the fact that such drastic cutting had been done on this book; over the course of years all the editors and senior officers at the publishing house had changed. So this version was a complete surprise to them.They decided to publish the original version, agreeing that it was better than the cut one.You now have in your hands the original version of Stranger in a Strange Land, as written by Robert Anson Heinlein.The given names of the chief characters have great importance to the plot. They were carefully selected: Jubal means "the father of all," Michael stands for "Who is like God?" I leave it for the reader to find out what the other names mean. – Virginia Heinlein Carmel, California

PART ONE : HIS MACULATE ORIGIN

I

ONCE UPON A TIME when the world was young there was a Martian named Smith.

Valentine Michael Smith was as real as taxes but he was a race of one.The first human expedition from Terra to Mars was selected on the theory that the greatest danger to man in space was man himself. At that time, only eight Terran years after the founding of the first human colony on Luna, any interplanetary trip made by humans necessarily had to be made in weary free-fall orbits, doubly tangent semi-ellipses – from Terra to Mars, two hundred fifty-eight days, the same for the return journey, plus four hundred fifty-five days waiting at Mars while the two planets crawled slowly back into relative positions which would permit shaping the doubly-tangent orbit – a total of almost three Earth years.Besides its wearing length, the trip was very chancy. Only by refueling at a space station, then tacking back almost into Earth's atmosphere, could this primitive flying coffin,