Introduction to The Puppet Masters
(Robert A. Heinlein, 1951)
By William H. Patterson, Jr.
The Puppet Masters was supremely timely, supremely in tune with the zeitgeist when it first appeared late in 1951. It was the first major fictional workup of the flying saucer craze, then in its fourth year (and the Air Force was still trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube, after its first official report explicitly would not rule out an extraterrestrial origin for the 1947 sightings). The sensational trials of Josef Stalin's atomic spies in the U.S., Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, that spring—and high State Department official Alger Hiss the previous autumn—convinced Mr. and Mrs. John Q. American Public that there were, indeed, aliens living undetected among us.
Heinlein was the first to work this vein of aliens-among-us cultural fear, but books and films followed like clockwork as the decade wore on and the Junior Senator from Wisconsin spun American fears of aliens-among-us into brief political capital. Jack Finney's The Body Snatchers went from a serial in Collier's to a book, to a shuddery film (Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 1956), following the cheesy Invaders from Mars (1953). Roger Corman's even more cheesy The Brain Eaters blatantly pirated The Puppet Masters in 1959 and derailed a prestige film production that was in negotiation. A quality production of The Puppet Masters would have capped the duck-and-cover decade's paranoia very appropriately.
When that prestige film production finally was made in 1994, Robert Heinlein's The Puppet Masters was back in tune with the zeitgeist. The complete version of the book, suppressed as too sexy and too shuddery when it was written in 1950, had been restored and published in 1990—when the aliens-among-us were no longer carriers of a deadly, insidious political meme: now they were carriers of a deadly, insidious virus.
But this coincidence of timeliness (Invasion of the Body Snatchers also got a remake in the 1990's) was just a cultural blip: The Puppet Masters had a lively publishing history between those blips, and The Puppet Masters continues into the Naughty-Oughties with fresh editions—two this year: the book you hold in your hands plus the publication in the Virginia Edition Collected Works of Robert A. Heinlein.
The Puppet Masters is not just a book for appropriate cultural blips, it is a perennial because it has something important to say to anyone who thinks about the self-responsible human being in relation his/her society—and how his/her society can shove him/her casually into the dirt. The Puppet Masters, at a level far more profound than pod people, is "about" the real aliens among us, the scattering of free men trying to live reasonably and responsibly among people who are cracked on the subject of the collective, of the mass man and what mass man can do politically to stamp out that disease of the human spirit, individualism. For Americans, that is a true perennial theme.
Heinlein almost never talked about his own work, but he made an exception in 1957 when he was asked to give a lecture at the University of Chicago, published as "Science Fiction: Its Nature, Faults, and Virtues." His thesis was that speculative fiction could potentially be broader, more meaningful, more relevant than so-called "mainstream" literature (which he saw at that moment as being stuck in a particularly unpleasant and tiresome rut of ironic novel conventions). In his drafts of the lecture, Heinlein selected The Puppet Masters as his example of that kind of broad and searching relevance, in a "discussion" section which was omitted from the published text:
What do I think is good, or bad, about The Puppet Masters? It has a tired plot and was hastily written; its literary merit is negligible. I strove hard to make characterization, scene, and incident have a feeling of reality and to entertain while doing so; the mail I have received seems to indicate that I succeeded.
These virtues and defects are those of the professional juggler and clown, the entertainer—which is what I think a fictioneer should be first of all. If the book has any permanent merit it must lie in its theme, which is a thinly-disguised allegory, a diatribe against totalitarianism in all its forms. Each writer has his personal philosophy; included in mine 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. The trick in sermonizing through fiction is not to let your sermon get in the way of the story, to cause the story to make your point for you. Apparently I succeeded well enough in The Puppet Masters not to annoy most readers, so, despite the novel's obvious literary faults, I am reasonably content with it.
So when the paperback editors suggested in 1949 to Heinlein's agent they'd like to see a workup of Donald Keyhoe's True Magazine notion that flying saucers were aliens from outer space, they probably expected to get something like Michael Rennie's stern-but-kindly Mr. Klaatu (The Day the Earth Stood Still—the original one—appeared in 1951, about the same time The Puppet Masters was running as a serial in Galaxy magazine). They probably didn't expect a rewrite of The War of the Worlds—or "Death and Destruction!" They certainly could never have anticipated an extended meditation on the dignity of the individual.
But The Puppet Masters is all of these things—as well as a genuine and deeply-felt statement of the moral crisis just starting to be visible in 1951 and still gathering strength fifty-plus years later in the Neocon hagridden early years of the twenty-first century (internationalism is no substitute for individualism).
The truth of the matter is that superficial timeliness is a distraction. It is the book's perennial and enduring ideas that make The Puppet Masters perennially timely. The Puppet Masters could be remade as a film again today, and no doubt the aliens-among-us would be sleeper cells of radical fundamentalists of one kind or another. That kind of superficial timeliness only lets us not to have to think about those enduring American issues of individualism, in an era when the values of the Enlightenment are being rolled back and cast off in the name of an illusory collective "security."
Heinlein spent his entire career telling us: "focus, people—pay attention to what is important." The Puppet Masters talks about the dignity of the individual—and that is a message for all seasons.