The Puppet Masters

What Hacker News says

1. aaronemFeb 2015
   Peter Watts's Blindsight - easily the best SF novel I've read in the last decade. I haven't got round to Echopraxia yet, but I doubt it'll fail to live up to its predecessor.

   Also, while I have no use whatsoever for Stross's "Singularity" stuff, his Laundry Files series excels, especially for an inveterate old Lovecraft fan such as myself. If you want a taste, there are some shorts available online -- "Overtime" and "Funny Farm" are good places to start; "Equoid" is the most recent, but it's not representative, and it's also the weakest entry in the series as a whole due to its poor characterization and reliance on shock and gruesomeness rather than the more insidious sort of horror in which the rest of the series specializes.

   I'm sort of surprised to see that no one has yet mentioned Heinlein; I know he's a politically divisive figure in the fandom, to say the least, but he's also the great granddaddy of the modern field, and such prominence deserves recognition. (Hell, he was pushing the Rapture of the Nerds before any of its modern adherents was even born!) Granted that his later works tend to bog down in self-referentiality and author tracts on the evils of Communism and the benefits of casual nudism; in his prime, though, he was an author and storyteller practically beyond compare.

   In particular, his The Moon is a Harsh Mistress remains a classic among classics; The Puppet Masters even more so, to the extent of spawning practically a whole subgenre of second-rate imitations; and, for a lighter entry, his oft-overlooked The Door into Summer is a sweet story in which all's well that ends well and the importance of feline companionship in a well-rounded life is not overlooked.

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2. mcguireApr 2020
   Hmm.

   There are some science fiction tropes that become really obvious when you start looking for them. For one, check out Invasion of the Body Snatchers or Heinlein's Puppet Masters: that's "the Commies are among us", and it's not surprising that it became a significant thing in the 1950s. Although the idea that there are a group of people out there who look and act completely normal but who are actually out to destroy everything that decent people hold dear is a pretty common fear; demonic possession and all.

   The Zombie 'Pocalypse is another. Charlie's right, it is the same fear as that of the owners of an antebellum Southern plantation at the mention of a slave uprising. The idea that all of the people you live with every day might suddenly turn into degenerate, savage monsters yearning to snack on your favorite nervous system is pretty scary, though. But it doesn't really have anything to do with infection or disease, and he is wrong to try to tie the two together. The infection isn't the important part.

   Oh, and let's wait until the next time something like the current pandemic happens before we pass too much judgement on how people react. Consider the difference between the Northeast blackout of 1965 and the New York City blackout of 1977.

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3. mcguireApr 2019
   And yet, when I point out that I find The Moon is a Harsh Mistress to be a story about a god-like entity that appears, saves the libertarians from their inability to play well with others, and then disappears before we get to ask any questions about its existence, or The Puppet Masters to be tedious (yeah, I get it, commies bad) and to demonstrate that Heinlein wasn't very good at seeing the consequences of his ideas,...I get a lot of crankiness from the same "humanities are about punishing disagreement" people.
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4. dalkeSep 2015
   Heinlein stated writing "Friday" in 1981. This is well after Vannevar Bush's highly influential "As We May Think" from 1945. It's hard to find someone in information retrieval in the 1950 and 1960s who wasn't directly influenced by Bush's Memex. One of those is Ted Nelson, who coined 'hypertext' and wrote "Computer Lib / Dream Machines" in 1974. This book in turn influenced the early microcomputer hackers, which is the era when Heinlein wrote Friday. (Eg, Jerry Pournelle started writing for BYTE in 1980; there isn't a huge gulf between SF and microcomputers.)

   You regard Heinlein's 'dead-on intuition that such systems will naturally lend themselves to browsing by associate leap' as being prescient. I can't say what you mean by prescience, but I can point to "As We May Think" to show the importance Bush placed in associative thinking some 35 years earlier:

   > The human mind does not work that way. It operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain. .... Yet the speed of action, the intricacy of trails, the detail of mental pictures, is awe-inspiring beyond all else in nature.

   > Man cannot hope fully to duplicate this mental process artificially, but he certainly ought to be able to learn from it. In minor ways he may even improve, for his records have relative permanency. The first idea, however, to be drawn from the analogy concerns selection. Selection by association, rather than indexing, may yet be mechanized. One cannot hope thus to equal the speed and flexibility with which the mind follows an associative trail, but it should be possible to beat the mind decisively in regard to the permanence and clarity of the items resurrected from storage. ...

   > Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified.

   I can also say that in 1951 Heinlein was well aware that research was much more than 'narrow document retrieval'. Consider "The Puppet Masters" from that year, chapter IV:

   > "At the library I went to the catalogue, put on blinkers and started scanning for references. "Flying Saucers" led to "Flying Disks," then to "Project Saucer," then "Lights in the Sky,", "Fireballs," "Cosmic Diffusion Theory of Life Origin," and two dozen blind alleys and screwball branches of literature. I needed a Geiger counter to tell me what was pay dirt, ... Nevertheless, in an hour I had a handful of selector cards. I handed them to the vestal virgin at the desk and waited while she fed them into the hopper."

   That's catalogue-assisted associative thinking, followed by document retrieval. I don't think requires prescience in the early 1980s to get a sense for how a Memex-like machine embodied in a modern computer might improve upon a paper catalogue for associative thinking.

   To be more concrete, remember too that France was rolling out Minitel across the country the same year Friday was published. While Minitel specifically did not likely influence Heinlein, I bring it up to show that the ideas of online research terminals was no longer pie-in-the-sky dreaming, but something that many people thought about and were implementing. (Another example from two years later is the 'the Bloomberg terminal', which is now a mainstay of business research.)

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