Just Finished Reading Robert Heinlein's The Puppet Masters

Robert Heinlein, one of the most renown science fiction writers of the twentieth century, in 1951 published his novel The Puppet Masters.  It examines how an alien invasion of Earth might take place with the parasitic conquerors surreptitiously taking over the minds and bodies of unsuspecting humans.  If this sounds a bit like The Invasion of the Body Snatchers or that Conspiracy episode from Star Trek: The Next Generation, then it's because this novel forms the original basis for those types of "conquer from within" stories.  Heinlein, himself a staunch anti-communist who saw a "fifth column" threat from the Soviet Union and China within the United States through traitors and spies in our government, schools, and media, may have used The Puppet Masters as an analogous way to express his angst of the times.  This is definitely a "period piece", and it is set hard in the context of the politics of its time...in that part of the Cold War when China and the USSR were allies and the latter had just attained the ability to detonate the hydrogen bomb.  And America, along with the nominal United Nations forces, was embroiled in a "hot" war in Korea against the communists.  Heinlein seems to have taken the tension of his time and projected it ahead onto our early twenty-first century...

That having all been said, Heinlein spins an interesting, suspenseful story with sympathetic characters (the secret agents Sam, Mary, and the "Old Man"), along with their own personal tales.  How they combat the "slugs" who take over people by attaching themselves to their shoulders (and then hiding their presence under clothing), and how successful they ultimately are, pose questions that led me to keep plugging away at the book to its finish.  I felt that the ending works, as Heinlein seems to have put a lot of thought into the ramifications of such an alien invasion...

One other observation about The Puppet Masters: it exhibits a couple of commonly held assumptions by mid-twentieth century sci-fi writers about the "near future" as it pertained to themselves (which corresponds to our "present" and "near past").  First, in their "prophetic" narratives there usually is a World War III that occurred toward the end of the twentieth century and which involves nuclear attacks and bombed out cities (in The Puppet Masters, Manhattan is a "crater").  Second, space travel is on a much more advanced level than we have yet attained...Mars and Venus have already been explored in Heinlein's novel (of course, he didn't know then about Venus's ultra-hot, acid-saturated atmosphere).  Although I'm disappointed about our relative lack of progress with manned space efforts during the last few decades, I'll accept the lack, as of yet, of a devastating Third World War as a reasonable trade-off for this deficiency...

Let's see...so far I've read four novels of Robert Heinlein: Starship Troopers, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Stranger in a Strange Land, and, now, The Puppet Masters...not to mention a few of his earlier short stories.  He is one of my favorite writers, so I'm going to have to seek out some of his other books...