ONCE UPON A TIME when the world was young there was a Martian named Smith.
The opening line of the novel immediately suggests that this a fairy tale. Or, at the very least, the story shall contain elements related to fairy tales: innocent heroes, corrupt villains, a little magic and maybe a nice a little moral to tidy things up. And, indeed, the narrative proceeds to deliver. Of course, in this case, the magic is science which has been discovered, but there is a fairly large school of thought which believes that all magic is just science not yet discovered.
"You grok. I am explain. I did not have the word. You grok. Anne groks. I grok. The grass under my feet groks in happy beauty. But I needed the word. The word is God."
Grok. Funny word. Big back among the hippie set in the 60’s and—perhaps not coincidentally—resurrected by the computer programming set of the 80’s. In terms originated by author who coined it, grok in Stranger in a Strange Land is kind of like what "viddy" is to A Clockwork Orange. Not necessarily in terms of meaning (although there is a similarity), but in terms of usage. Get used to it. In one form or another, grok (grokking, grokked) appears nearly 500 times over the course of the novel. The definition advanced in the novel gets kind of complicated, but suffice for now to learn that “grok” is a key Martian philosophical and cultural concept about understanding something to the extreme. That is to say, to understand on a more deeply personal level philosophically, spiritually, as a component of identity. You grok the drift, right?
"If Mike is converted to Fosterism... and makes a will in favor of his church... and then 'goes to heaven' some sunrise, it will all be, to put it in the correct tautology, 'as legal as church on Sunday.'"
The storyline does not just pit humans against Martians in the earthlings’ attempt to define Mr. Smith (Mike) as either truly human or some culturally constituted hybrid phenomenon. The story also pits Church of the New Revelation (Fosterites) against Church of All Worlds. As things turn out, Jubal doesn’t have to worry about Mike being sucked into the dangers of Fosterism because he will go on the become the founder of the Church of All Words. This aspect of the novel is fairly substantial so the differences cannot really be explained here, but rest assured that Mike in no way succumbs to that religious sect which actually bears quite a strong resemblance to those super-churches with world famous pastors making pilgrimages in private jets today.
"The point about show business, Smitty, is that first you have to know what the marks want…if you were a real magician – I mean if your magic was real like you had made a pact with the Devil. That'd be one thing. But the marks know that it's clever sleight-of-hand. So you give 'em a light-hearted show to match.”
Ah, the twist ending! In fact, there is magic. Not just science magic, but like actual magic tricks with a magician and assistants and tricks and smoke and mirrors and stuff. There is also a half-man half-woman, a fire eater and even a tattooed woman named Patty. That last may not seem like much today, but back when the novel was written, tattooed ladies usually did share the stage with bearded ladies and snake charmers at the carnival or else in some of the darker versions of fairy tales. A carnival plays a fairly big part in the story, but in terms of fitting into the whole “once upon a time” deal, well, maybe it does. And as for the tidy moral at the end summing things up?
Mike pushed back his halo and got to work. He could see a lot of changes he wanted to make.
No context is presented here. (As in here, this entry on this quote, not here as in the novel which has just provided an entire book's worth of context by this point.) Just a tidy moral that occurs at the end. The interested reader will have to get from “Once upon a time” to the "halo" to figure out just what moral is being served up by the novel’s end.
