STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND By Robert A. Heinlein. 525 pp. New York: Ace/G.P. Putnam's Sons. $24.95.

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IN London in October, at a dinner party in the home of the publisher Tom Maschler, head of Jonathan Cape, our host asked a question that was primitive but deep. "What is the best novel ever written?" I nominated "Madame Bovary." A majority went for "Anna Karenina." Anna had glamour, Emma didn't. That was that. We hastened on to gossip about Salman Rushdie and so forth.

Afterward, though, as I sat alone in my room at Brown's Hotel, I marveled that none of us had celebrated a story that took place in the world at large rather than in a stratified and codified little society. And Tom Wolfe a few months earlier had told the rest of us in the fiction trade to either do deep-dish reportage on members of little groups, right down to the name of the manufacturers of the shoes they wore, or take up macrame.

Yes, and now Putnam has published for the first time the full text of "Stranger in a Strange Land," by Robert A. Heinlein (1907-88), an abridged version of which has sold 100,000 copies in hard cover and nearly five million in paper since its debut in 1961. An enormous number of readers have found this book a brilliant mind-bender, and yet I doubt that Heinlein's name was ever uttered at a meeting of PEN or in the halls of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Despite his having written this book and about 40 others ("The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress," "I Will Fear No Evil," "Methuselah's Children," "The Puppet Masters" and on and on), this remarkable man, whom I never met, was included only in "Who's Who in Science Fiction," and died without having been considered worthy of an entry in the more inclusive annual "Who's Who." The president of the American Poultry Association is sure as heck in the big 'Who's Who" somewhere.

How could this have happened? My goodness, the name of the leading character in "Stranger in a Strange Land" is as familiar to millions of literate persons as Oliver Twist or Holden Caulfield. He is Valentine Michael Smith. But he was raised by Martians on Mars, without ever having seen another human being. And to those who get to say which novels are serious and which are not, professional critics and teachers of literature in the company of authors of novels about the rise or fall of ordinary people in provincial societies, he is absolutely intolerable. He is far more dismaying to them, say, than a character found when an infant in an overnight bag in Victoria Station. And I say that their rejection of not only Valentine Michael Smith, but his creator, too, is an act based on social prejudices, and that intellectual and esthetic standards have nothing to do with it.

The great critic H. L. Mencken confessed as much without shame, saying that he could not appreciate the works of Willa Cather since he simply wasn't interested in people from Nebraska. That isn't criticism. That is snobbery. In the Soviet Union before glasnost the Writers' Union regularly said that some writers weren't really writers, no matter how much and how well they had written, since they were politically incorrect. In this country the same thing is done to writers like Robert A. Heinlein because they are socially incorrect, because their stories are about places members of the literary establishment do not care to visit and about characters, many of them not even human or humanoid, they simply do not care to befriend.

Truth be told, the establishment, on the same grounds, isn't all that fond of "Candide" or "Gulliver's Travels," either, both of which I should have championed at Tom Maschler's house. I should have at least mentioned "Stranger in a Strange Land" as well, a wonderfully humanizing artifact for those who can enjoy thinking about the place of human beings not at a dinner table but in the universe.

We are approaching the 30th birthday of "Stranger in a Strange Land." Valentine Michael Smith is the stranger. Raised by Martians on Mars, he is brought to Earth where he must adapt not only to our social prejudices, but to our strong gravitational field and rich atmosphere. Some 60,000 words that were cut from Heinlein's manuscript for reasons of economy back in 1961 are at last taking their rightful place in the body of world literature. There is a preface by the author's widow, Virginia Heinlein, which speaks not at all of the neglect of her husband's work by the establishment. It tells the history of the uncut manuscript, which, if it weren't for her, might have remained in total darkness forever in a vault in the library of the University of California at Santa Cruz.

Is the story much improved by the restored passages? I leave it to someone else to compare the two versions line by line. The thought-provoking premise is unchanged and could scarcely be enriched. Nor did the consequences of that premise as extrapolated by Heinlein seem to me garbled or anemic or whatever in the abridged edition I read years ago. So I say of the restorations, "Icing on a cake which for people who like that kind of cake was already quite satisfactory."

Am I arguing that "Stranger in a Strange Land" is anywhere near as good as "Madame Bovary"? Good heavens no! No novel has come within a kilometer of the greatness of Flaubert's masterpiece. Not even "Anna Karenina." Not even "The Bonfire of the Vanities."

THE BIGGEST, FATTEST SACRED COWS

"I believe that I have dreamed up a really new S-F idea, a hard thing to do these days," Robert Heinlein confided to his agent, Lurton Blassingame, in 1952. His idea (which had emerged in a discussion with his wife, Virginia) used the picaresque adventures of a young human, brought to Earth after having been raised from infancy by Martians, to probe human prejudices and foibles. "Absolutely everything about Earth is strange to him . . . its orientations, motives, pleasures, evaluations. On the other hand, he himself has received the education of a wise and subtle and very advanced -- but completely nonhuman -- race." No stranger to controversy, Heinlein saw the novel as an opportunity to launch frontal assaults on "the two biggest, fattest sacred cows" of Western society, "monotheism and monogamy."

The book had a long, uncertain evolution. There were many drafts. The final version, 220,000 words long (down from the 600,000 he had once envisioned), was finished in two feverish months and submitted in 1960 to G. P. Putnam's Sons. Putnam accepted the book but requested that it be trimmed. Heinlein reluctantly complied, deleting 60,000 words and, in the process, some of the more provocative passages lampooning American attitudes toward sex and religion.

Even in its pared-down form, the book was intensely controversial. Some reviews were descriptive rather than judgmental. Others shared the ire expressed by Orville Prescott in the pages of The New York Times. The reviewer described the novel as a "disastrous mishmash of science fiction, laborious humor, dreary social satire and cheap eroticism."

Despite such responses the book sold well. It quickly went into a book club edition, appeared in paperback, and eventually became the first science-fiction title to appear on The New York Times Book Review's best-seller list. In 1989 Virginia Heinlein approached Putnam with the suggestion that the complete work, based on Heinlein's working manuscript, should be published. While the restored version does not present a radically new work, it does offer readers a chance to watch Heinlein working out his ideas at greater length, and challenging society's "sacred cows" with unexpurgated zest.

Heinlein was bemused by those who claimed that the work provided a blueprint for a new society. The novel was not written, he explained to one fan, to promulgate any set of beliefs. "I was not giving answers. I was trying to shake the reader loose from some preconceptions and induce him to think for himself, along new and fresh lines. In consequence, each reader gets something different out of that book because he himself supplies the answers . . . . It is an invitation to think -- not to believe." -- RICHARD E. NICHOLLS