The Puppet Masters

by Robert A. Heinlein
(New York: Signet, 1951)
Paperback, 175 Pages, Fiction
ISBN: N/A, US$1.25

ABCD Rating: BACKLIST

From the Cover: Attack from space! Lock your doors. Never enter a dark place. Be wary of crowds. A man wearing a coat is an enemy. Shoot! This is a state of emergency. Invaders from another planet have landed in a flying saucer at Des Moines. They are capable of controlling man’s every thought and action. No one is safe. The monsters must be stopped. There is no choice. It’s your life or theirs. You must kill.

My Review: For my Afrofuturism seminar, I wrote a paper on reproductive anxieties as evidenced in science fiction, using posthuman theory. I had originally planned to discuss Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Jack Finney’s The Body Snatchers, Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Octavia E. Butler’s Lilith’s Brood and Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters. It had been a number of years since I had last read the Finney, Dick and Heinlein and so I decided to pick them up again and read through them in preparation for my paper (they’re all fairly short).

As I read through Heinlein’s book, it was different than I had remembered, and I ended up not using it in my paper, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy the read. I think the last time I read this novel was in either middle school or high school, so well over 20 years ago. I don’t remember much from that particular reading, other than being freaked out by the whole idea (and titillated by the notion of having to walk around naked … so I must have been in middle school). This time around, as a much more mature reader (ha ha!) I was in love with Heinlein’s terse prose and his way with a yarn.

The whole idea behind Puppet Masters is brilliant, the passive (so to speak) alien invasion is one of the best plots out there and when done right (as here and, another good example, in Finney’s novel) it is a reading experience of utter and sheer paranoia. Reading Heinlein’s novel will cause you to peer over your shoulder every couple of minutes and make you look askance at anyone who appears to be “overdressed” for the location, season or weather.

Hand-in-hand with the paranoia goes the fact that The Puppet Masters, like any good piece of genre fiction, really relays a time’s fears and concerns and anxieties (that was part of my argument in my paper) and with Heinlein’s novel, it really has a Cold War, There’s a Commie Under Every Bed, Fifth Columnists, Better Dead Than Red mentality in its battle versus the invading space aliens. But that’s what makes a book like this “timeless.” The Puppet Masters is an anti-communist story. It is a Big Brother story. It is an anti-consumer culture story. It is a story of the “war on terrorism.”

Political overtones aside, though, the long and the short of it, though, is that I thoroughly enjoyed this story.