I revisited Robert Heinlein’s novel, Stranger in a Strange Land after half a century by listening to the audiobook, which, mercifully, is based on the shorter version first published in 1962, rather than the “uncut” version published in the 1990s by Heinlein’s widow.
At its worst, the novel is a hodgepodge of nonsense interspersed with offensive and mildly offensive artifacts of the time when it was written and the gender of its author. At its best it does indeed (as Heinlein claimed) raise fundamental questions worth considering about who we are as a species, and how we ought to live. It’s something like the People Magazine version of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
Are the questions worth the nonsense? No. But the nonsense is just treacly enough to keep the book in print and selling for another fifty years, I fear.