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Il Terrore Della Sesta Luna (1952)

by Robert A. Heinlein(Favorite Author)

3.84 of 5 Votes: 4

languge

English

genre

Horror

publisher

Mondadori

review 1: I have this weird relationship with the works of Robert A. Heinlein. As I've stated here in the past, I never read much, if any, Heinlein in my formative sf years. I don't remember if that's because my mother didn't have any Heinlein on the shelves - and she's the one that got me started on all this stuff - or whether I just ignored him completely.As you know, I've started to dip my toe in the Heinleinian waters via audiobooks. I *could* read print copies, as my wife brought a lot of Heinlein into the marriage, but my own to-read list is daunting enough without actually reaching on to the shelves to add books to it. So when it came time to pick the next audiobook to listen to, Heinlein's THE PUPPET MASTERS caught my eye. The novel was originally published in 1951, and... more while it is reflective of the times with regard to its themes of paranoia and UFO sightings, among other things, the novel holds up surprisingly well.The novel takes place in the early 21st century, several years before our current present day. Sam is an agent in The Section, a clandestine and officially non-existent security organization within the U.S. government. The Section is headed up by the Old Man, a gruff authority figure whose word is not to be questioned and will to succeed appears to be unparalled. Sam and the Old Man, along with Mary, another field agent within the section, head to Des Moines, Iowa to investigate the disappearance of several agents who had been sent to investigate a flying saucer that had landed near Grinnell. Side note - I've been to Grinnell. There's a terrific steakhouse just off the I-80 exit where you get to pick out and grill your own steak. I did not notice, however, the things that that the Old Man, Sam, and Mary discovered, which were the gray slugs that were taking over the local population. These gray slugs attach themselves to the backs of their victims, taking over their bodies.This was, of course, the beginning of an invasion of earth by the slugs. The slugs spread by a couple of different means, one being a manner of recruitmentwhere unsuspecting individuals are lured to a place where slugs are placed upon them by already "recruited" humans. The other way, the way which is more insidious and frightening, is that the slugs multiply by fissioning, crawling off and latching on to unrecruited humans. Sam was taken over the by the first method, and was able to survive his ordeal when his slug was removed after being interrogated by the Old Man through Sam. Other folks weren't so lucky. Of course the government was at first reluctant to take any action, but events finally convinced the President of the U.S. to take action in the form of making everyone walk around almost completely naked so it could be seen whether a person was wearing a slug or not.The novel is something different from what Heinlein typically wrote, and yet the reader can see the makings of what was to come much later in his career. The novel was somewhat scandalous at the time, given its attitudes toward sex and the fact that people accepted walking around naked all the time. It also foreshadowed more of what was to come with regard to later novels' attitudes toward and about women - in particular, being tough and yet the fairer sex, resorting to feminine charms and acting in, oh, a stereotypical weak fashion. Mary, for example, is a tough field agent, someone not to be messed with. Her advantage was that she could tell if a man was under the influence of a slug if he didn't react to her feminine charms. In fact, Mary went from being a strong female character who could take care of herself to someone who seemed weak and needed help and advice from Sam, whom she married partway through the book. As an aside, she was also a redhead, which if memory serves is a physical characteristic shared by many of the prominent women in Heinlein's novels.In the end, we sort of beat the slugs, and sort of don't. Heinlein tells us we can never be completely certain that the slugs have been eliminated, so we must always be vigilant, keeping an eye out for the invaders. A ship is sent to Titan, a moon of Saturn, where the slugs are from, to try to eradicatethem at the source. Until then, we must keep constant watch. Paranoia indeed, whether it be UFOs, communists within our government, or slugs. There's always something out to get us.Tom Weiner does a decent enough job of narrating the story. I don't know that his voicing of female characters is any better or worse than any other narrator I've heard. I do know that he didn't intrude upon the story or annoy me in any way, so that's a good thing.With the constant threat of privacy invasion going on even today, some of the lessons of THE PUPPET MASTERS are still relevant. We still need to be vigilant, now more than ever, and that's one of the main reasons this book holds up as well as it does for me. Hopefully it will do the same for you.
review 2: This book has a great premise and interesting setting, in the then distant future 2007, but the characters and some of the dwelling on the details bogged down this sci-fi, alien invasion novel (maybe I would have liked the originally published, shorter version better). Alien parasites invade the Earth and immediately cover up their own invasion, a secret spy organization uncovers the plot, struggles to convince the powers that be in the government that it is real, fight the invaders, face a setback, and then discover the secret to victory, this basic structure had the potential for action and adventure. The authors commentary on the Soviet system and technology are interesting and some of the viewpoints can be seen as a product of the time the novel was written, but the inconsistency of the characters, and the author's preoccupation with nudism really drug the story down for me. less

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