Just found this on the web...this isn't where I read it originally (reading this I bet it was Grumbles) but it repeats pretty much the same information...
The Puppet Masters
The next novel, one I believe was a potential early bestseller, The Puppet Masters (1951), was broken and crippled as a published book. Heinlein's manuscript is 100,000 words. Doubleday's edition as published, stripped down by Heinlein to editorial demand, is 75,000 words. Although I always liked The Puppet Masters, it was not one of my top favorites because it read jerkily. Even repeated re-readings into my adulthood teased with aspects I did not understand, yet I couldn't see just what was wrong with the story. It wasn't until I read the much longer version that it all came together. Heinlein's complete version is far more coherent as well as having more vivid and realistic details, and overall is a vastly better novel.
I take the word counts here and below from
James Gifford's "The New Heinlein Opus List", which is an appendix to his book
Robert A. Heinlein: A Reader's Companion, and also available online. Heinlein discusses editorial changes via colorful letters to his agent Lurton Blasingame, collected in his posthumous Grumbles from the Grave.
In a related misfortune, The Puppet Masters first was serialized in Galaxy magazine, promoted as complete and book-length though abridged even further down to 60,000 words, and additionally subjected to H.L. Gold's typically heavy-handed editing.
The Puppet Masters a potential bestseller? Here's how it might have happened. Around 1950 was the height of the flying-saucer craze in America. Amazing Stories and some other magazines and newspapers were pushing flying saucers for all the market would bear. Most science-fiction fans and writers were dubious at best about saucer claims.
But if you wanted to read a novel about flying saucers done right, could it be done? Who would you turn to? What writer of stature and capability would dare to try?
Already in mid-1941, Heinlein was generally acclaimed the top science-fiction writer by the time of his Guest of Honor appearance at the World Science Fiction Convention in Denver (the Denvention). By 1950, after breaking into both the slick magazines and the juvenile-novel markets, Heinlein was ready and able for another major challenge. He wanted to write a solid and fully adult science fiction novel, and for theme he tackled the flying-saucer scare head on. The result is The Puppet Masters. Even abridged and watered-down, it's a powerful novel of alien invasion and mental control, full of naturalistic detail.
But major publishers were only cautiously dipping their toes into the uncertain space of science fiction. Doubleday's abridged version was published and promoted as part of their new science-fiction line, a standard science-fiction novel without fanfare. No big deal. Since it was by Heinlein after all, reprintings followed, but all labelled and confined within the safe and narrow science-fiction box as it was then perceived.
In some alternate timeline, I envision The Puppet Masters becoming a major bestseller in 1951, greatly boosting science fiction's awareness and acceptance by the general public. This is fifteen years before Stranger in a Strange Land boosted that process in the mid-1960s, and well before the first Star Wars film in 1977 began a major science-fiction boom. But that didn't happen here, not in our timeline. — By the way, I mention an even earlier missed chance for Skylark and Lensman author Edward E. Smith in my review of David Kyle's
The Illustrated Book of Science Fiction Ideas & Dreams.
The abridged Doubleday edition of The Puppet Masters appeared in 1951 with a sad book-jacket cover that could not entice anyone who didn't know Heinlein's name already. Galaxy ran a much nicer cover painting, but textually missed the boat by an even wider margin. There's a stolen concept here, the editors valuing the Heinlein byline to appeal to their readers, but contemptuously slighting the Heinlein story itself.
The unabridged novel appeared in 1990 as a Del Rey paperback: look on the cover for a mention that it's the uncut novel, or check the copyright page for the revised printing count beginning in 1990. Read Heinlein's complete version.
