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

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.