Arctangential

I finished The Puppet Masters yesterday. What a great book.

This book comes really from the pinnacle of Heinlein’s career — it was after he’d stopped writing the juveniles, but before he’d gone entirely off the deep end, so it’s an intelligent, logical adventure story that’s told simply and without gratuitous sex-with-clones and other such silliness.

The basic idea here is that there are these slug-like aliens which can “ride” a human and completely control their body, with no possibility of resistance. These aliens come to Earth en masse and start covertly taking people over, starting with a saucer crash near Des Moines. (Iowa). The story centers around a man who works as a kind of super secret agent working for a shadow agency known only as The Section, he is among the team who firsts discovers the invasion and ends up being integral to the efforts which finally (mostly) save the Earth from in the invaders. He’s the archetypal Heinlein hero — quick to action, quick-thinking, strong, wise, brave, I’m sure he could compose a sonnet or set a bone, too.

What’s so good about this book is that even though the main character is so smart and generally apt, he isn’t perfect. He is captured once (and almost a second time) by the invading aliens, he allows his wife (and fellow agent) to be captured and almost kills her in rescuing her. He generally does the best he can with what he knows at a given time, but he’s not omniscient or all-powerful, and he does make mistakes. Heinlein also doesn’t pave the way for the heroes — no solution is easy, and they have to think through all the implications of a plan of action. For example, when they find a method for killing the aliens, the next chapter isn’t all of them sitting around toasting to their victory — instead they have to figure out a vector for delivering the poison to the aliens, how to get it to them all before they get suspicious, and how to care for the humans after the aliens have all died. Heinlein just sets up the situation and lets it play itself out, not taking shortcuts or changing things to make life simpler for his heroes.

Anyways, it’s a great read. The movie version isn’t terrible either.

Now I’m reading the 4th dinosaur book, Stephen Leigh’s Dinosaur Warriors.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 15th, 2006 at 12:29 am and is filed under Books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.