Whitmanite

SPOKEN BY

Whitmanite is spoken by the Whitmanites, a sect that was evicted from Canada and emigrated to the planet Venus.

DOCUMENTED BY

Robert A. Heinlein (1907–1988) explored the idea of an alien invasion in The Puppet Masters (1951).

BEHIND THE WORDS

Alien slugs (the puppet masters) are invading the Earth, attaching themselves to humans high on their upper backs and controlling their minds. Sam, a member of a secret U.S. government agency, is assigned to save the president and the planet. Meanwhile, back on Venus, an invasion of the slugs is defeated by a plague of the Venusian Nine-Day Fever.

DERIVATION OF THE LANGUAGE

The Whitmanites, an anarchist-pacifist-religious sect, construct their own language.

PHILOLOGICAL FACTS

The lone human survivor of the Nine-Day Fever on Venus was agent Allucquere, who had taken the alias “Mary” while on a mission, before marrying Sam. More than ten years after The Puppet Masters was published, a woman who lived near the Heinleins changed her name to “Allucquere.”

The original version of the novel was approximately 90,000 words; this was cut to 60,000 words at the request of the publisher. After Heinlein’s death, an expanded edition of the book was published at around the same time that the publisher also released an expanded version of the Heinlein classic Stranger in a Strange Land.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Review the works listed above, the resources listed in the bibliography, and the web page: “A Heinlein Concordance” (www.heinleinsociety.org/concordance/index.htm).