Robert Anson Heinlein was a hard-headed Libertarian, and knew much about how society and government worked in his time and held very controversial opinions about it all. For the most part, he felt people could govern themselves just fine, necessitating certain liberties, and that love, freedom and science flourish in a society in which people are given the opportunity to make informed decisions on their own and don’t have too many personal liberties infringed upon. He was always within reason though, clearly laying down the need for a stable government and why a system such as ours is a successful one, and why authoritarian dictatorships and communist regimes don’t have the strength to rule successfully for very long.
Puppet Masters is an interesting book that highlights many of these views and others, and from what I’ve read thus far of the man, probably his best effort at conveying his ideals whilst still being a very enjoyable sci-fi thriller. It has the furious pace and light-reading-style similar to a Crichton novel, but don’t forget this was written in 1951 and relates to the fear tactics of our Cold War counterparts.
A UFO crash lands in Iowa, and a special branch of the government similar to what many kids from our generation might compare to the Men in Black are dispatched to check it out. Their findings: Nothing. There was no crash and everything is a hoax, “thanks for coming though and check out this tourist trap of a man-made saucer,” the strange Iowans all say.
Only problem is that it really couldn’t have been a hoax, not with what this group knows. Also, a member of the unit is a super attractive and stacked brunette (in typical Heinlein fashion) who can tell when men “aren’t right” because they don’t treat her as men normally would. So she surmises they may be possessed.
Turns out, she’s right. The alien creatures attach themselves to your spine and use you, still knowing what you know and speaking as you speak, the use your manpower and human nature to gather up a fierce fighting force.
Only the agency knows the truth, which is so out there that the President has trouble buying into it. But when he does, declaring a state of emergency takes, as you may be able to guess, an Act of Congress. This leads to Heinlein wonderfully relaying the problems with bureaucracy, lobbyists and special needs groups with strict (in this case conservative) agendas. It takes brute force to use common sense but once everyone’s on board with beating the aliens, they run into another problem.
So many aliens are in control of such large areas, breaking through how they run the media is next to impossible. Small tricks with the camera and what gets displayed on TV in these regions is easy to control, and difficult to overthrow and reach the public from the outside. Not at all unlike our own media’s love affair with Barack Obama, their absolute refusal to acknowledge Ron Paul and even more scarily similar to the near-brain-washing that went on in communist Soviet Union.
The resolution is met through downright unique science fiction, involving mobile infantry, shooting possessed charing zoo animals, alien abductions, colonists on other planets, hypnosis and controlled alien experiments.
Things to love about this novel include Heinlein’s use of sexy females and the powers of their charm, his rant of how government and media works, the frustrations of improper military action, far out but accurate comparisons to Soviet society, and the great closer in which the narrator says “Death and destruction!” to put an exclamation on the hunt to eradicate an enemy so humanity (specifically Americans) can live peacefully.
And in case you had any other questions on how much I love Robert Heinlein, the name of the blog is taken from the first thought in the first intermission of Time Enough for Love.
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