The Puppet Masters by Robert A. Heinlein
Baen, $14.00, 320pp, tp, 9781439132838. Science fiction.
Robert Heinlein is one of my favorite authors, and even though I’ve read everything he’s written, there are times when I’ll pick up one of his books just to wander again through a scene or a chapter, and wind up rereading the whole book again. The Puppet Masters is not one of those books.
Don’t get me wrong, even the worst Heinlein is better than a lot of what’s out there, and The Puppet Masters is not remotely that bad. But it’s one of his darkest books. A sense of impending doom and hopelessness permeates the entire novel, from the first discovery of the secretive alien invasion, through the various false hopes that humanity might be winning. Even the final affirmation that humanity will survive, and ultimately triumph, is tinged with a sense that this isn’t really a world we want to live in.
The book was first published in 1951, at the height of the UFO scare, the threat of the red menace, and the black terror that was a future with an atomic bomb in it. And even as our heroes continue to affirm their belief that humanity can survive through little more than the use of our brains, Heinlein reminds us again and again of the stupidity of the masses and the blindness of the bureaucracies. The invasion is secretive, so of course the people can’t see it. And rather than damage their positions of leadership, the government is unwilling to admit there even is an invasion.
The star of the book, the variously named Sam, is one of Heinlein’s classic protagonist-heroes. He’s a superman (in his chosen field, which is intelligence and intuition), but doesn’t even realize it. And the reader, therefore, assumes Sam is just an average fellow, until he (and we) has his nose rubbed in the fact that the reason he has a leadership position is that he really is better. Indeed, as Sam’s Boss reminds us late in the book, “Luck is a tag given by the mediocre to account for the accomplishments of genius.” And there’s no doubt that the characters talking are geniuses. Sam’s paramour, too, is a typical Heinlein female character: stronger than, smarter than, and subservient to, her man. The only thing that really feels forced in this book is the solution to the problem: Heinlein did such a good job of setting up a relentless, seemingly unbeatable enemy, that when he got to the point where he needed humanity to beat the enemy, he was backed into an authorial corner. He was also working on a deadline and a word limit, so the solution is much weaker than the path that brings us to it.
Heinlein himself thought it was one of his lesser works, as William H. Patterson, Jr., tells us in his introduction. He quotes a draft of a lecture Heinlein gave in 1957, a part of which didn’t make it into the final speech. Nevertheless, even then, more than 50 years ago, and less than a decade after he’d written the book, Heinlein said “it has a tired plot and was hastily written; its literary merit is negligible.” But he goes on to say exactly what the book is: “a thinly disguised allegory, a diatribe against totalitarianism in all its forms. [My philosophy] is an intense love of personal freedom and an almost religious respect for the dignity of the individual—I despise anything which reduces these two and have, in many stories, explored the attendant problems.” And that is the book’s saving grace: like all his novels, this one extols not only the virtues of individuality and self-reliance, but idolizes them, making them not only goals, but the means of salvation.
I’m very happy that Baen is republishing the Heinlein novels, enabling us to find clean, gorgeous copies of these books (thus far, I think they all have brand new, stunning Bob Eggleton covers). And though each one has an added introduction and afterword (in this case, by Patterson and Sarah A. Hoyt, respectively) those notes aren’t really necessary. All that’s needed to avoid the anachronisms you’ll inevitably stumble across is to note the copyright date before you start reading the books. If you haven’t read all of Heinlein, why not? And if you have, well, it’s time to clean up your collection (unless that dog-eared, fading copy has special meaning for you).