The first expedition to Mars is lost, and when a second reaches the planet twenty-five years later it finds a single survivor: Valentine Michael Smith, born in the wreck and raised entirely by Martians. Brought back to an Earth he has never seen, Smith is legally the heir to two fortunes and, under an awkward reading of precedent, the owner of a planet, which makes him an immediate problem for a world government that would prefer him quiet. Spirited out of protective custody by the nurse Gillian Boardman, he is taken to the household of Jubal Harshaw, lawyer, doctor and popular author, who defends him from the state while Smith slowly learns to be human. What he brings with him is not merely a naivety about clothes and money but a Martian grasp of reality itself: telekinesis, the discorporation of enemies, and the untranslatable act of grokking. In time he founds a church. Heinlein's novel is discursive, provocative and frequently exasperating, using Smith's innocence as a scalpel on monogamy, organised religion, property and death, and it became a countercultural touchstone in the decade after publication in a way its author never quite anticipated.
