Stranger in a Strange Land/Trivia

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Defictionalization:
    • The water-filled sleeping sac that Heinlein imagined preceded the waterbed by several years. In fact, one person who independently invented the waterbed was unable to obtain a patent for it because its appearance in this novel constituted "prior art".
    • There is a real-world religious group which is based upon the trappings of Mike's teachings. It's even rumored that Heinlein wrote the novel on a bet with L. Ron Hubbard (founder of Scientology), to see which one could start a bigger cult, but decided to call the whole thing off when it started getting a little too real. That story, however, has never been confirmed.
  • Science Marches On: Sadly, subsequent exploration of the Red Planet has shown it to be far less hospitable to life than Heinlein imagined/hoped. Also, most of today's astronomers reject the theory that the asteroid belt is the remnants of a former planet.
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