So, Your Humble Blogger remembered The Puppet Masters as Robert Heinlein at his Heinleiniest, in a good way. That is, lots of action, a quick read, a plausible enough premise, a likeable enough protagonist, enemies that I can enjoy squishing like bugs, and no sex. And all of that is true. On the other hand, I also remembered it more fondly because I remembered it as being not particularly political, that is, not having so much of the libertarian/warrior/anticlerical/pseudo-rationalist/eugenicist ravings that make a lot of his stuff just unreadable to me these days. Different when I was fourteen, of course.
Anyway, although the action in this book doesn’t stop so that somebody can give a lecture about the evils of socialism, egalitarianism, religion, pacifism and bad writing, or at least doesn’t stop for very long, my recollection of it as being less soaked in Heinleiny political madness was sadly incorrect. The book posits a good reason for the government, through a Dubble Sekrit agency, to completely lay waste to the civil rights of most of the populace. Search and seizure? Sure! Imprisonment without trial? Of course! Privacy? Forget about it! And, to the person I was when I was much younger, all of this is perfectly reasonable, under the circumstances he has invented to make them reasonable. Torture? Hey, for the good of mankind, not only is torture OK, but the protagonist is tortured by his own father while under the control of the aliens (who, if you aren’t familiar with the book, the movie, or the zillion other stories just like it but worse, attach to humans between the shoulder blades and then control their every move!)(Gosh, I’m hitting the italics pretty hard, eh? Mr. Heinlein will do that to a fellow).
Anyway, what got me this time through was how Mr. Heinlein does not set up a hijjus eschatological situation where we must, grudgingly, do things we would never do in better times in order to highlight difficulty choices, or to expose the protagonist to brutal pressures, or to explode the simplistic and complacent way we think about our liberties. No, Mr. Heinlein, as far as I can tell, is just doing it for the fun of it. He’s just itching to violate our deeply held principles of proper government behavior. He’s really digging the impunity with which his protagonist lays waste to the Bill of Rights. Oh, if only horrific aliens would invade, I imagine him saying to himself whilst typing, then we’d see some action.
This whiff of brimstone is way more disturbing, to YHB at any rate, than the wacky but tedious fascism of the later novels. And, of course, there’s the aspect that I happened to read the book first in the early eighties, when a senescent Soviet Union scarcely seemed a serious threat, when Morning in America meant a shift from malaise to complacency, neither national mood appearing vulnerable to the jingoistic ruthlessness Mr. Heinlein so lovingly depicts. I mean, for all President Reagan’s evils, and there were many, I recall them seeming (to my teenage perceptions) more indifferent to civil rights than hostile. I find it difficult, even now, to imagine as compelling satire a scene of President Reagan and his close cabinet gloating over pictures of sadistic torture by Americans. I find it easy to imagine such a satire of our current administration. Heck, I find it easy to imagine such a scene in reality.
Such a scene is missing from The Puppet Masters. But within the story, that’s one of the President’s weaknesses, I think. I suspect that Mr. Heinlein would not have supported the current man in office, but sometimes it’s hard to tell.
chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.