Melissa Modolo "Stranger in a Strange Land"

I read a book this fall called "Stranger in a Strange Land" that was very... well... strange. It was an old book I had to search the shelves for and when I finally found it, it was a copy printed sometime in the fifties I think it said. The pages were yellow and the binding was taped together. Needless to say, the book was very old and well used. The book was about a mission to Mars that took a nasty turn and all passengers were thought to be lost. Many years later another mission was made to Mars and a human was found living among the Martians and was brought back to Earth. This human was apparently the descendant of some humans who had survived the crash and had assimilated into Martian culture. He was kept top secret in a hospital but a girl who was working there found him, and kidnapped him to save his life. A group of conspirators formed to try to keep the man safe from the government and as they all lived together, they began to learn a lot from the Martian man. Apparently these Martians he had been living with had formed a culture that was completely unfazed by death. To him, death was not the end but was rather a transformation. It was interesting to think about how people today spend so much time fearing death that they forget to enjoy life. In this fictional Martian culture, the members of the society were happy to sacrifice themselves for the others and because of this and some other social reasons, they had no boundaries or classes separating them. It made me consider the fact that on earth, we are still governed by the laws of survival of the fittest. Life has become all about survival and about gaining as much as possible during that life. Perhaps in another environment where we were not so instinctually driven to survival, we would spend more time caring for our spiritual selves and one another's spiritual selves than only being fixed on what is physical. Anyhow it was just a thought I had when thinking about the book and how it could relate to this class.