The Puppet Masters

How did I come to find myself reading Heinlein's The Puppet Masters (ISBN-13: 978-0451131461)? I was with the family for Thanksgiving, and at around noon on Thursday I found myself in need of some quiet time. I went in search of some reading material in my old room, and I stumbled across this book that I must have first read about twenty years ago.

One could argue that this book is a piece of trash. The premise is simple (think Invasion of the Body Snatchers meets, well, Robert Heinlein). It was published during the height of the cold war, and it shows. There are plot holes that trivially reflect the concepts and biases of the times (space stations, but no communications satellites?).

Despite this necessary criticism, this book has merit. I still remember (and still enjoyed) reading this passage (p. 126, near the end of Chapter 23):

... Most men were wearing straps as the cops had been, but I was not the only man naked to his shoes. One in particular I remember; he was leaning against a street-roof stanchion and searching every passer-by with cold eyes. He was wearing nothing but slippers and a brassard lettered "VIG"--and he was cradling an Owens mob gun. I saw three more like him; I was glad that I was carrying my shorts.

I still enjoy the short text capturing the breakdown of the social order, the desperation of the remaining survivors, and the brutal pragmatism to which people have turned rather than be defeated.

Elihu Nivens

Late in the book, it's revealed that the book's protagonist is named Elihu Nivens. The name "Elihu" held no meaning for me when I read this book so many years ago, but I immediately recognized it from the book of Job, which I finished only recently!

For what it's worth, the name Elihu means "My God is YHVH". I suppose the name may have been chosen due to similarities in the personalities of the two characters--young, impetuous, brash. I think these similarities are superficial, but I'd like to think Heinlein's name choice was not entirely arbitrary.

"hagridden"

In The Puppet Masters, those posessed by the parasites are often described as "hagridden", e.g. (p.106, near the end of Chapter 19):

So they brought in Satan, a coal-black chimp. He may have been aggressive elsewhere; he was not so here. They dumped him inside; he shrank back against the door and began to whine. ... At first the hagridden apes stared at him like a jury. This went on for a long while. ...

Here's a definition of the word from the Merriam-Webster online dictionary:

hagridden - tormented or harassed by nightmares or unreasonable fears; "hagridden...by visions of an imminent heaven or hell upon earth" - C.S.Lewis

Interestingly, a little research turns up this connection between this word and the name of the Harry Potter character Hagrid:

"Hagrid", according to Rowling in an interview with The Boston Globe, comes from an old English word "hagridden", meaning to have a nightmarish night, particularly when hung over; Hagrid is known to be a heavy drinker. In Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge, the word is represented as typical Wessex slang and appears in the same passage as "Dumbledore", a local term for "bumblebee".

Odd, the little connections that turn up.