Stranger in a Strange Land
Hugo Award winner 1962, Prometheus Award 1987: Hall of Fame Award for Best Classic Libertarian SF Novel.
Note! When Robert A. Heinlein first wrote Stranger in a Strange Land, his editors at Putnam required him to drastically cut its original length, and to remove some scenes that might have been considered too shocking at the time. The early editions contain only 160 000 words, but later editions contain 220 000 words.
Epic, ambitious and entertaining, STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND caused controversy and uproar when it was first published.
Still topical and challenging today, the story of Valentine Michael Smith, the first man from Mars to visit Earth, is in the great tradition of stories that endure through the power of the author's imagination that stretches from Gulliver's Travels to 1984.
Robert A. Heinlein
Robert Anson Heinlein (1907–1988) was an American science fiction writer. Often called the "dean of science fiction writers", he was one of the most influential and controversial authors of the genre in his time. He set a standard for scientific and engineering plausibility, and helped to raise the genre's standards of literary quality.
He was one of the first science fiction writers to break into mainstream magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post in the late 1940s. He was one of the best-selling science fiction novelists for many decades. He, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke are known as the "Big Three" of science fiction.