Friday

Friday

by Robert A. Heinlein

Friday, a secret courier, is thrown into an assignment under the command of her employer, a man she knows only as "Boss". She operates from and over a near-future Earth in North America, a vulgar and chaotic land comprised of dozens of independent states. In America's disunion, Friday keeps her balance nimbly with quick, expeditious solutions as she conquers one calamity and scrape after another.

Please This audiobook includes adult content and themes.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Science Fiction Fantasy, Speculative Fiction, Audiobook, Adventure, Fantasy

Audible Audio

First published June 1, 1982

About the author

Robert Anson Heinlein was an American science fiction author, aeronautical engineer, and naval officer. Sometimes called the "dean of science fiction writers", he was among the first to emphasize scientific accuracy in his fiction, and was thus a pioneer of the subgenre of hard science fiction. His published works, both fiction and non-fiction, express admiration for competence and emphasize the value of critical thinking. His plots often posed provocative situations which challenged conventional social mores. His work continues to have an influence on the science-fiction genre, and on modern culture more generally.
Heinlein became one of the first American science-fiction writers to break into mainstream magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post in the late 1940s. He was one of the best-selling science-fiction novelists for many decades, and he, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke are often considered the "Big Three" of English-language science fiction authors. Notable Heinlein works include Stranger in a Strange Land, Starship Troopers (which helped mold the space marine and mecha archetypes) and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. His work sometimes had controversial aspects, such as plural marriage in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, militarism in Starship Troopers and technologically competent women characters who were formidable, yet often stereotypically feminine—such as Friday.
Heinlein used his science fiction as a way to explore provocative social and political ideas and to speculate how progress in science and engineering might shape the future of politics, race, religion, and sex. Within the framework of his science-fiction stories, Heinlein repeatedly addressed certain social themes: the importance of individual liberty and self-reliance, the nature of sexual relationships, the obligation individuals owe to their societies, the influence of organized religion on culture and government, and the tendency of society to repress nonconformist thought. He also speculated on the influence of space travel on human cultural practices.
Heinlein was named the first Science Fiction Writers Grand Master in 1974. Four of his novels won Hugo Awards. In addition, fifty years after publication, seven of his works were awarded "Retro Hugos"—awards given retrospectively for works that were published before the Hugo Awards came into existence. In his fiction, Heinlein coined terms that have become part of the English language, including grok, waldo and speculative fiction, as well as popularizing existing terms like "TANSTAAFL", "pay it forward", and "space marine". He also anticipated mechanical computer-aided design with "Drafting Dan" and described a modern version of a waterbed in his novel Beyond This Horizon.
Also wrote under Pen names: Anson McDonald, Lyle Monroe, Caleb Saunders, John Riverside and Simon York.

Reviews

[Stephen · Rating 1 out of 5]

Robert Anson Heinlein…shame on you, sir. W…T…everwomanhating…F were you thinking when you wrote this drivel?

Friday is, in my irritated opinion, the most offensive and childishly ridiculous female protagonist since Russ Meyer and Roger Corman teamed up to co-direct Planet of the Nympho Bimbos Part II: Attack of the Soapy Breast Monsters.**

** Not a real film, so don’t bother searching Amazon for it.

Pardon my soap boxing, but this is a despicable pile of misogynistic shit that should have been dropped, wiped away and flushed from the literary world before it ever plopped on the printing press. Sorry for the dysphemism, but “I really didn’t like it” just doesn’t adequately express my loathe-on for this book.

Previously, I’d read and enjoyed a handful of Robert Heinlein’s novels and many of his short stories and considered myself a fan of his work. I have also read some reviews where people took issue with his attitudes on sex and women, but hadn’t personally come across anything I found excessively off-putting…UNTIL NOW. This noxious crap pissed me off the roof of the RAH Fan club and had me losing respect for the man all the way down.

Before I get to my major problems with the book, let me pause, slow my heart rate and give you a quick run down of the plot:

PLOT SUMMARY

Set in the future on a balkanized Earth that has splintered into a collection of rival city-states, corporate fiefdoms and criminal enclaves, Friday Baldwin is an artificial person (AP) who works as a combat courier for a mysterious employer. Her job is making deliveries and pick ups to sensitive to be entrusted to normal channels. As an AP, she is stronger, faster and supposedly more intelligent than normal humans though she hides her true nature because APs are held in contempt by society (similar to Robots in Asimov’s much better Robot novels).

Early on in the book Friday finds herself out of a job and then travels from situation to situation acting as the reader’s eyes and ears for Heinlein to share with us his vision of a dystopic future and expound on his political views.

Of the almost 400 pages in the book, there’s about 100 or so that are decent, Heinlein world building.

MY PROBLEMS WITH THIS BOOK

For all of her strength, speed and deadly fighting ability, Friday is nothing more than an insecure, bubble-headed skank who thinks that SEX is the only valuable commodity she has to offer in this world. Countless times in the book, she either sleeps with, or tells the reader she would be willing to sleep with, someone as nothing more than a courteous “thank you” for being nice.

Don’t get me wrong, sexual independence and equality…fine by me. But I got no inkling in Heinlein’s prose of sex being an uninhibited display of physicality between equals free to express themselves. Nope, didn’t see it. I saw tawdry, lowbrow objectification grounded in atavistic chauvinism rather than new age “free loveism.”

Granted, most of the sex Friday has in the book is consensual and she’s a willing participant. I say “most” because there’s an instance at the beginning of the book when Friday is kidnapped and gang-raped by 4 guys (I’m not kidding folks). Of course, Friday, for the most part, doesn’t hold a grudge against the rapists as she believes they are just “softening” her up for interrogation which she completely understands. Whoa…full stop…major HUH? Moment ahead.

Excuse me while I bang my head against the wall in frustration.

As a proud:

1. Father of two brilliant, happy and outgoing little girls,
2. Husband of a smart, confident, self-motivated woman,
3. Younger brother of two well-educated, independent sisters, and
4. Youngest son of an intelligent, successful businesswoman (and mom of 5)…

…I just wanted to bitch-slap Heinlein until I knocked the skeevy right out of him. Please don’t interpret this as some indulgent display of gender enlightenment by the PC police as I am about as opposed to militant PCness as I am about this book. Hell, the women I know can more than take care of themselves without my blundering around getting in the way. However, this book is horrible. It’s crap and I don’t want to avoid calling it what it is simply at the risk of appearing to pander.

There were dozens of instances in the book where I wanted to throw the book (with Heinlein attached) against the wall, but I’m going to mention just three of them to give you an idea of our protagonist.

1. A young man offers Friday his seat on a crowded passenger train. She accepts and then proceeds to lean forward as he stands next to her so as to allow him to look down her shirt. She does this as a gesture of thanks.

2. Friday explains her belief that it is inappropriate for her to allow someone to buy her a meal unless she is willing to give them a legitimate shot at sleeping with her. Now that’s class.

3. I don’t want to give away a spoiler so let me just tease you by saying that one of the 4 rapists from the beginning of the book reappears later in the novel and Friday’s interaction with him will cause you to fume, spit blood and hack up bile….TRUST ME ON THIS.

This is not some strong, independent woman who isn’t afraid of her sexuality and explores it with confidence and on her own terms. This is a timid, naïve woman with a massive inferiority complex who feels she “owes” a guy the opportunity of getting her into her pants because he offered her his seat on a passenger train. Are you F@#KING kidding me?

This book was a big, hairy Neanderthal of a novel with its knuckles dragging along the floor and had more in common with the soft-core porn of John Norman’s Gor novels than the previous work I’ve read by Mr. Heinlein.

A horrible, massive disappointment and it will be a while before I give one of his books my time. For now, Mr. Heinlein, let me just say:

[Lyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Two months before the 1982 Ridley Scott film Blade Runner was released, Robert A. Heinlein first published Friday.

Blade Runner was the film adaption of Philip K. Dicks’ 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? but Heinlein may also have been influenced by PKD, in that Friday concerns the creation of “enhanced” humans.

Both works also feature and highlight a strong female lead character. Friday for Heinlein and Priss in Blade Runner have created in speculative fiction an archetypal female: inhumanly strong, sexually active and dancing to the beat of a different drummer. This archetype may be seen in other later works like Neuromancer and Snow Crash.

Heinlein readers will not be shocked to read page after page of sexual discussions, sex talk and long dissertations of sexual freedoms. What was edgy and fresh in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and Stranger in a Strange Land in the 60s had become less so by the early 80s. This was still better than the studied creepiness Heinlein had devolved to in other of his later works.

Like many of his works, this is also a vehicle whereby RAH can explore and comment upon many of his ubiquitous themes like family structures, government (particularly a libertarian aversion) and social mores. This is also like Snow Crash in that Heinlein has described a balkanized, anarcho-capitalistic world order. Fans will also be glad to see much mention of Heinlein’s Past History universe and in style and pace this is also reminiscent of his work The Cat Who Walks Through Walls.

Fast moving and fun, Friday is a shining light in his later canon.

*** 2021 reread -

Of course with most of Heinlein's later works, from 1970 on, we are reminded that the old gentleman still liked the ladies.

First published in 1982, when our hero was a spry and virile man of 75, Friday reveals Heinlein to be the senior statesman of SF writers keeping his finger on the pulse of what's going on.

BTW - Pfizer first discovered Viagra in 1989, a year after the grandmaster's death. Too bad because if he had been able to take the little blue pill, Heinlein might be alive today at 113, still randy as an old goat.

Heinlein had the sign of the times as in the early 80s we see many seemingly unrelated art expressions describing a mildly dystopian, anarcho-capitalistic society where social mores and cultural differences have been blurred and merged. Bladerunner, Neuromancer are two but I can also think of Rush's 1982 album Signals and Howard Chaykin's 1983 comic American Flagg!. RAH joins these other expressions while revealing much of the same kind of vision with Friday.

This time around I also noted the exploration of Friday as a meta-human, as an enhanced life form, not necessarily artificial, and the prejudice she experiences and also loneliness trying to fit in.

I had also forgotten how violent this book was and even though it is somewhat softened by Heinlein's homely comic delivery, it may not be suitable for many readers.

*** 2023 reread -

I’m going to need to rethink my earlier assessment of Heinlein’s later works.

For years I’ve proclaimed myself an RAH fan, and I am still, and I gushed over the high water marks in his “middle phase” the glorious 60s, gave glowing reviews to his early Scribner’s juvenile books but lamented his descent into weirdness in his later years. I’ve considered Friday to be an exception to this later trend but still failed to truly grasp how good this is.

Now I see that Bob was decades ahead of his time and Friday is as relevant as ever. This is a great book, excellent visionary SF and it makes me wonder if I can now reread these other later books to see if maybe now I get it.

This time around I considered that Friday was Heinlein’s vehicle to explore a world where earlier mores and customs have been thrust aside while retaining universal ideals of loyalty, family and personal responsibility.

[Owen · Rating 2 out of 5]

The first few pages had me thinking "Wow, when the old goat isn't preaching his agenda of communal polygamist living and actually TELLS A STORY, he makes you remember how good he is at it!" Then he promptly settles in for about 100 pages of agenda and leaves most of the potential that this character had to fizzle. Even though Friday is just another incarnation of Heinlein's typical horny-bimbo-with-a-Ph.D. dream girl (and there's nothing wrong with that), her artificial person status, ninja-like ass-kicking skills and glamourously dangerous job should have made for a much more interesting read. When the major political events finally kick in, they seem to serve no purpose other than to provide a subject for endless witty breakfast table conversation after a long night of getting her synthetic freak on with large groups of blandly similar attractive geniuses. I've pretty much lost interest in the story itself and become distracted by a recurring mental image of ol' geriatric Bob as he was typing the manuscript while singing the following version of "My Favorite Things" in the voice of Herbert from Family Guy:

Bimbos with rayguns on top secret missions
omelettes and showers and fun new positions
corporate assassins and pilots who swing
these are a few of my faaay-vorite things!

Now that I've got that out of my system I would suggest that you go track down one of the books in Arthur Clarke's Venus Prime series - similar concept and much better execution.

[Sasha · Rating 1 out of 5]

I read this book several times as a teenager, because it had sex scenes. I may still have a thing for short-haired women in high-collared jumpsuits. (May. I don't actually know, since that doesn't exist.)

So I dug it back then, even though I realized at the time that it had both storytelling and philosophical problems. But now I'm 40, and this book is terrible.

It has zero plot, first of all. Just no plot at all. It's, like, here's a superspy and she has a bunch of sex, and that's it. Which you can see why that appealed to 13-year-old me, but at this point, y'know, I've been a superspy for years now and I'm over the casual sex. (See, 13-year-old me? Dreams come true!)

Heinlein was some sort of libertarian Ayn Rand fan, so you know how that goes. (It goes stupidly.) People like to say his politics were "complicated," which means "shitty" when it describes politics or relationships. He was militaristic, pro-free love, fascistish, anti-racism. He was one of those dudes who thinks he's a feminist because he's figured out what women should hurry up and act like.

But anyway, let's talk about the elephant in the room. The rape elephant! Friday opens with a gang rape, during which our heroine's superspy training allows her to relax and enjoy parts of it, while commenting on each assailant's sexual prowess, and...what? Wow, you just got really mad! You seem incensed! What's the problem? She's a superspy. It's not like Heinlein is claiming that all women should relax and enjoy being gang raped. Just this one in this book that he imagined and then wrote down and had published. And it's all okay anyway; want a spoiler? She ends up marrying the most sexually proficient of her rapists. So...see? All good.

Listen, Heinlein is a shitty writer with shitty ideas. If you're thirteen and you want some smut, drop me a comment and I'll suggest some books for you. You can do better than this.

[Manny · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not as good as Saturday.
_________________________________

The most memorable passage in Friday occurs on page 1. I quote it here in full:

This book is dedicated to Ann, Anne, Barbie, Betsy, Bubbles, Carolyn, Catherine, Dian, Diane, Eleanor, Elinor, Gay, Jeanne, Joan, Judy-Lynn, Karen, Kathleen, Marilyn, Nichelle, Patricia, Pepper, Polly, Roberta, Tamea, Rebel, Ursula, Verna, Vivian, Vonda, Yumiko, and always – semper toujours! – to Ginny. R.A.H.

Ever since reading the book in 1982, I have wondered who these women were, and whether we should think that Heinlein had slept with all of them. This morning, I finally got around to doing some research on the subject. A little googling led me to the astonishingly comprehensive Heinlein Dedications Page, which gives the following key:

Ann = Ann Nourse, wife of Alan Nourse (see Farnham’s Freehold dedication).

Anne = Anne Passovoy, a fan and filksinger (from L’Envoi list).

Barbie = Barbara Stine (see Have Space Suit - Will Travel dedication).

Betsy = Betsy Curtis, nurse and correspondent of Heinlein’s.

Bubbles = Mildred (Bubbles) Broxon.

Carolyn = a niece, now married to Douglas Ayer.

Catherine = Catherine Sprague de Camp (see Assignment in Eternity dedication).

Dian = Dian Crayne, science fiction author, aka Dian Girard.

Diane = Diane Russell (see The Star Beast dedication).

Eleanor = Eleanor Wood, Heinlein’s agent, now agent for the estate.

Elinor = Elinor Busby, wife of F. M. Busby. Co-editor of the fanzine Cry of the Nameless. See also the dedication of The Cat Who Walked Through Walls.

Gay = Gay Haldeman, wife of science fiction writer Joe Haldeman.

Jeanne = Jeanne Robinson, science fiction writer, wife of SF author Spider Robinson (1948 – ).

Joan = Joan D. Vinge (1948 – ), science fiction author.

Judy-Lynn = Judy Lynn Benjamin Del Rey (1943 – 1986), wife of Lester Del Rey (1915 – 1993).

Karen = Karen Anderson, wife of Poul Anderson (see Podkayne of Mars dedication).

Kathleen = Kathleen Heinlein, Heinlein’s brother Rex’s wife (see I Will Fear No Evil dedication).

Marilyn = Marilyn Niven, aka “Fuzzy Pink.” Wife of Larry Niven (1938 – ).

Nichelle = Nichelle Nichols, Star Trek actress, possible model for the President character in “The Happy Days Ahead,” which was published in Expanded Universe.

Patricia = Pat Cadigan.

Pepper = Pepper Sorrell, a friend of Heinlein’s.

Polly = Polly Freas, wife of Frank Kelly Freas.

Roberta = Roberta Pournelle, wife of Jerry Pournelle (1933 – ), himself a dedicatee of The Cat Who Walked Through Walls.

Rebel = Mrs. Albert Trottier.

Tamea = Tamea Dula, a lawyer, who is married to Art Dula, Virginia Heinlein’s lawyer.

Ursula= Ursula Le Guin (1929 – ), science fiction author.

Verna= Verna Trestrail Smith, daughter of E.E. ‘Doc’ Smith (see Methuselah’s Children dedication).

Vivian = Vivian Markham, married to Robert Markham. They are mentioned in Tramp Royale as they were passengers on the ‘Gulf Shipper’ at the start of the trip, and the Heinleins stayed with them in Hawaii when they returned to the U.S.

Vonda = Vonda McIntyre (1948 – ), science fiction author. Listed as a source of help in Heinlein’s article, “Are You A Rare Blood?”, and described as a biologist in his notes on that article.

Yumiko = President of Japanese fan club for Heinlein. She is the daughter of Tetsu Yano, Heinlein’s Japanese translator and a science fiction writer, who gave a short, but moving, speech at the awarding of the NASA Medal for Distinguished Public Service to Heinlein [Kondo, 309].

Ginny = Virginia Heinlein

Well, if "Ursula" is Ursula K. Le Guin, then I will assume that the answer to my second question is no. I positively refuse to consider other alternatives.

[Gary · Rating 1 out of 5]

For my entire adult life, and a bit back before becoming an adult, I have walked to the “Science Fiction” section of the book store and seen this book lurking there. The cover with the unzipped jumpsuit, “Ooh, silly me, is that my right breast?” has always vaguely piqued my attention, but never quite enough to inspire me to actually purchase the thing. There are, after all, Boris Vellejo covers not too far away, and those are going to draw my eye and empty my wallet faster when I’m looking for something “light” to read. Thinking that it would form a contrast with some of the other fair I’ve been doling out to myself, at long last I pulled the trigger on this one.

I am very, very sorry that I did.

This book is the worst reading experience I have had in over a decade. It’s a shameful piece of work that really should be acknowledged as a culminating nail in the coffin to a literary midget masquerading as a giant. Aside from the reprehensible themes, childish logic, an outright vile representation of women, politics and culture, the language is flabby, the plot meandering, the dialogue reads like a poorly scripted soap opera, and the characters are motivated by a perverse sense of the author’s sexual depravities and megalomania. Reading this book is like watching a Hentai version of The Turner Diaries written by a poor man’s John Galt.

I’ve read maybe six or eight other Heinlein novels in my time. Starship Troopers, Strangers in a Strange Land, Job: A Comedy of Justice, etc. Enough to have certain expectations about the content, both positive and negative. That is, I did not have particularly high expectations. Unfortunately, in this book, Heinlein fails to achieve even the least effective of his writing strengths while diving headlong into his deficits of character and embracing them as if they were virtues. It’s a despicable, masturbatory indulgence in which Heinlein presents his fantasy of femininity and social status wrapped up in obvious and poorly executed straw man caricatures of those whose political and social beliefs he opposes. I’m not kidding. They are literal caricatures. He puts an Indian headdress on the “chief of California.” That’s the level of humor and sophistication in this book. Notoriously lefty and democratic California in Heinlein’s imagination leads to a leadership that confuses “chief executive” with “chief of the tribe” and puts a feathered hat on the head of their government leader.

What’s worse than any of the outright obnoxiousness of this book is that it manages to commit the worst crime of science fiction entertainment: it’s BORING. BORING with a capital “What-the-Hell-are-you-talking-about?” There are seemingly unending dialogues about the particulars of credit cards in Heinlein’s dystopia (which he might suggest is a utopia.) Can I use my card here? Yes, I can. No, I can’t? Sorry, I thought I could. Will this card work now that the border is closed? What about your card? Let’s use this stolen card, but you’ll have to do it because it’s got a man’s name on it, so I can only do electronic transactions on it. Let’s use your card this time, the stolen card next time, and then my card when we get to the next city. What forms do I have to fill out to get a card in this country? Can we talk about this card but using the specie of another country?

Who could possibly care? This kind of thing may be entertaining to some CPA who dreams of one day committing credit card fraud in a dangerous time, but for the rest of us it is abject boredom at 21% APR. How Heinlein managed to put his own shopping around for a better rate on his credit cards into fiction and people read it like it is entertainment is utterly beyond me. And, you know what? It’s not science fiction. It’s not speculative science fiction. It’s not social science fiction. It’s just tortuous fictionalization of accounting and arbitrage. There are pages and pages of this. It goes on interminably as if it weren’t rambling filler from an author long past his own expiration date. It’s just sad.

...and then: the lottery. The main character wins the lottery after negotiating the price of the ticket from a street vendor. Now, what is the point in an author presenting a laissez faire society as a merit and then having his main character win a lottery as a plot point? Wish fulfillment?

Now, I’m going to get into something that I’ve been avoiding because, frankly, it’s just too disgusting and pathetic to merit a whole heck of a lot of thought... but I’d be remiss not to mention the way Heinlein presents sex, sexuality and women in this book.

Here’s some prose from the opening after the main character has been ambushed and captured by unknown assailants:

But why waste time by raping me? This whole operation had amateurish touches. No professional group uses either beating or rape before interrogation today; there is no profit in it; any professional is trained to cope with either or both.

So, we get treated to a rape scene. What’s worse is Heinlein’s handling of the subject:

For rape she (or he—I hear it’s worse for males) can either detach the mind and wait for it to be over, or (advanced training) emulate the ancient Chinese adage. Or, in place of method A or B, or combined with B if the agent’s histrionic ability is up to it, the victim can treat rape as an opportunity to gain an edge over her captors. I’m no great shakes as an actress but I try and, while it has never enabled me to turn the tables on unfriendlies, at least once it kept me alive.

And:

After he became flaccid he said, “Mac, we’re wasting our time. This slut enjoys it.” “So get out of the way and give the kid another chance. He’s ready.” “Not yet. I’m going to slap her around, make her take us seriously.” He let me have a big one, left side of my face. I yelped.

Now, the existence of a violent, sexual, or in this case sexually violent scene in a book does not, of course, mean anything in and of itself. The author’s treatment of the subject, however, is vitally important. In this case, Heinlein’s premise is that a violent gang rape is something that a woman (or a man, apparently) should not only be able to shrug off psychologically, but should ideally turn into situation where the victim can gain a tactical advantage. It’s a matter of training. (Fortunately, he leaves the details of that training unaddressed.) Later, the main character has no emotional problems that result from the assault and objects mostly to the physical hygiene of one her rapists (the one who slapped her) as the most unpleasant aspect of the event. Within days she’s off engaging in partner swapping sexual escapades as if nothing untoward had happened.

Quite simply, this premise is the product of a deeply flawed mind. The intellect that developed and presented such a concept as an ideal is someone with a serious lack of empathy or even basic human decency. It’s a repugnant premise, and one that not only should be recognized for what it is, but should color the reputation of the author and his legacy permanently.

Through the rest of the book we get Heinlein’s view of free love. His main character pursues her sexuality vigorously... but only in response to someone pressing her first. Her sexuality is presented as being open and free, but if examined carefully, she responds to sexual advances with deference and submission rather than a frank and open sex drive. Throughout the book her sexuality is at the service of those around her.

Heinlein does have a dynamic that could be used to rationalize his characterization in that his main character is an artificial person, one whose genetic profile has been “upgraded” in various ways from the human standard. Though it is not described as part of that upgrading, those enhancements could, in theory, include a sort of psychological or neurological change. While we do get information about her physical changes on more than one occasion, there is no content about any such changes to her mentality other than the circumstances of being raised in a crèche for similar “artificial” people. So, if one were inclined to give Heinlein the benefit of the doubt, it would have to be based on something outside the actual text.

What’s worse, it is here that we run into one of the other flaws of Heinlein’s clearly retrograde character and writing. One of the themes of this book is the rights of “artificial persons” in his future world. They are considered second class citizens, and often denied basic rights. His lead character often faces prejudices based on her status as an AP. Heinlein borrows or references any number of racial and social struggles in drawing upon this aspect of his novel.

However, if a reader is inclined to give Heinlein an out on the issue of rape and the sexuality of his main character based on the fact that she has been genetically altered to acclimate things like rape and the sublimation of her sexuality to the will of others then... she’s not human. She is a living sex toy. Her desires and behavior are the product of her design. In short, she has no human rights because she actually isn’t human. The ire that Heinlein presents at the prejudice against artificial people is, in fact, supported by his portrayal. It’s a wildly hypocritical plot device that appears to have completely escaped the author. Maybe it was simply beyond him intellectually, but it doesn’t read that way. It reads as a man unable to grasp how fallacious his logic is in the pursuit of weakly considered straw man argument.

The book is filled with such fallacies. In fact, I only made it through the whole thing because I was hoping that there would be some indication that it was a subversive exploration of such fallacies in science fiction literature. I hoped that in the end, even with it’s stunningly dull rambling sections on politics and finances, the book would wind up being an elaborate parody or satire of the themes that it presented. Sadly, no such reveal ever came up. The book is exactly what it purports to be.

So, on the whole, I’m going to have to give this book a single star, but only because there is no negative star capacity on Goodreads. I can only recommend this book to someone with an academic interest in the decline of an author whose reputation is overblown, his importance over-estimated, and whose work has clearly caught up to a sadly lacking intellect.

[Jake Mosely · Rating 3 out of 5]

Heinlein's age really shows in this one. The most noticeable things about Heinlein's later works are his twin obsessions with free love and breakfast. This book features several pointless sexual encounters and equally pointless detailed descriptions of breakfasts. While the sexuality can come off a bit "creepy old dude" the breakfasts are entertaining, well described slices of an old man's true joys extrapolated into his story. I really would only recommend this one for those with previous Heinlein experience or folks wanting help planning breakfasts.

[CD · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am naming this an all time favorite as it is Heinleins own response to all those misguided self-righteous 'literary critics' and college lit professors who needed a scapegoat in popular fiction for a twenty year period of time.

There are reviews here at Goodreads that obviously have been written by those readers so tainted by the 'legend' of Heinlein and his misanthropic misogyny, jingoism, and racism that they fail to recognize or can only grudgingly admit there is much more else to RH and the knocks on his character are mostly unwarranted. Heinlein was either ahead of his time or just out of sync with the contemporaneous version of Political Correctness (years before that term was widespread) or some other zeitgeist.

A very well written storied view of the near future of a world ruled by corporations. Indeed, the the corporations are the form of government and their security and espionage arms battle for small to large gains. All this is backdrop for technology run rampant to the extent that some humans are cloned/engineered/manufactured to one extent or another. Friday is such a girl. Her purpose in life is to 'serve' one of these intelligence/espionage entities and she accepts her lower class/caste state with a certain equanimity that becomes fundamental to the story when she thinks she's overcome this prejudice.

Violence and terror permeate this story in a way that makes one wonder if a glimpse into a crystal ball was granted to Heinlein of the beginning of the twenty-first century. Everything that has been ascribed to being 'wrong' with the author as a human being is pretty much addressed by him via this story. He leaves no doubt as to his stance on what the true evils of the world his era faced and what was coming nearer in the world we dwell in today. Racial and gender equality are obviously important to Heinlein and that and any other form of bigotry is reviled by this author in a clever and demonstrative story. Other ills of the 20th century political and social get a similar damning treatment, much of it subtly and as part of the fabric of the novel.

Should you not be a fan of speculative/science fiction, futurism, or other 'fantasy' type writing, don't worry, read this one book anyway!

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is an old friend of mine. I originally picked it up after seeing the cover art and reading the description in Michael Whelan's "Worlds of Wonder" - a book of his art. It was the first Heinlein I'd read.

When I first read this book, Friday was among the first female action heroines I'd run across. She was smart. She was sexy (er... almost to excess), she was tough, and, I thought, still feminine. Subsequent readings dimmed that a bit. Friday is a good attempt to create a believable female character, but she's not very successful, and the excuse that she's an artificial person and not normally socialized only goes so far. Heinlein is often accused of making "men with breasts" for his female characters, and Friday often strays into this territory. There's also the matter of a rape, and Friday's (lack of) reaction to it really strains believability to the breaking point.

Still. The book was hugely influential for me for several reasons. First, Friday is cyberpunk. It has all the usual trappings - dystopian, dysfunctional future, corporate mastership of pretty much everything, main characters frequently operating outside the limits of the law. The only thing missing is that Friday herself is only minimally an anti-hero.

Second, of course, Friday is female. And an action hero(ine). It's a breath of fresh air in fiction that the action heroes don't all have to be male, that toughness doesn't have to come from masculinity, and so on. I found this absolutely compelling.

Third, of course, is Heinlein's storytelling. The man could spin a good yarn, with interesting plotlines, interesting people, often witty dialogue. I don't think he was going for absolute realism with Friday, and with that caviet, the story pulled - and still pulls - me in.

I still have that old copy with the Whelan cover art. Despite the flaws I can see in it now, it's still an old friend, and a fun ride to reread. 4 stars.

[Rachel · Rating 5 out of 5]

(written 5-05)

Yyyyyyeah! Loved it. Heinlein sure knows how to write a good story, even if his female characters are always bi-curious sex maniacs in favor of free love with multiple partners. For an artificial person, Friday seems pretty damn human. I liked the mystery in the plot and just how bad-ass she was.

"I did not offer to pay the Hunters. There are human people who have very little but are rich in dignity and self-respect. Their hospitality is not for sale, nor is their charity." 178

"A religion is sometimes a source of happiness and I would not deprive anyone of happiness. But it is a comfort appropriate for the weak, not for the strong - and you are strong. The great trouble with religion - any religion is that a religionist, having accepted certain propositions by faith, cannot thereafter judge those propositions by evidence. One may bask at the warm fire of faith or choose to live in the bleak uncertainty of reason - but one cannot have both." - Boss 253

[Thomas · Rating 1 out of 5]

Lordy. I'm aware that Heinlein's later works are self-indulgent examinations of everything he held dear (e.g., free love, libertarianism, and breakfast), but I'm shocked how much he crosses lines with this book. It starts off early, too, with the titular character being gang-raped in the first chapter, and how she decides to cope with it by liking it. The worst thing about it all is one of them has bad breath, and furthermore, she notes that rape is worse for men, so what does she have to complain about?

After surviving this encounter, her boss insists on having her grow a new nipple after one of the rapists cuts it off with a steak knife because she has "an unusually comely body; damage to it is deplorable", so clearly physical appearance is all that matters in the future. It's just ... I mean, I get that later Heinlein is an exercise in counting all the WTF? moments, but I don't even know how to process this kind of thing.

Did you know this book was nominated for a Hugo and a Nebula? I wouldn't have guessed it in a hundred years. There's an admirable theme buried beneath the ranting, about what individuals do when they don't fit in anywhere, but that's the 3 ounces of sensible packed in 12 pounds of crazy. It's touched on so briefly, and is so overshadowed by the free love that it's hard to imagine it's the point of the novel.

I mean, people use Heinlein's fiction as some sort of benchmark in the field of SF, and I don't get it. His style is so chatty and arrogant that his characters come across as insufferable. They know everything, are never wrong, and deal with any minor hiccup in their day with the most unreasonable responses. Reading a Heinlein novel is like watching that video of the woman in the Apple store over and over for a week.

Oh, were credit cards a new thing for Heinlein when he wrote this book? Because he spends an inordinate amount of words talking about them, about how good they are, how the banks support them, how they're the pinnacle of convenience, etc. Was 1985 the year credit cards broke, or was he just a little slow on the uptake in that regard?

I read this as an ebook, and the number of typos and OCR errors were ridiculous. The word "turn" was "tum" in every. Single. Place in this book. A few of them here or there are to be expected, but someone should have spent some time proofreading this edition before expecting people to pay money for it.

The crazy thing is this is actually a book that reads fast, and is insanely compelling. I've noted before that Jo Walton commented on how Heinlein knew how to write sentences to make you want to read the next one, but it bears repeating, because as offensive and insensitive as this book is, it's hard to stop reading it. It makes me waffle between one and two stars, but then I remember that Friday winds up marrying one of the rapists from the first chapter, and I'm done.

I know Heinlein's early, juvie novels are worth reading, but I can't see myself wanting to read anything else from his later years, save for when I want to pursue another hate-read, because based on everything I've read about Heinlein, Friday is his best work from his later years.

And that's fucked up.

[H (trying to keep up with GR friends) Balikov · Rating 3 out of 5]

Friday is her name and she “ is a secret courier…employed by a man known to her only as 'Boss'. Operating from and over a near-future Earth, in which North America has become Balkanized into dozens of independent states. “ You may recognize some of the chaos, into which Robert Heinlein adds his own fancies about culture and human relationships.

Heinlein had a long run as a “top shelf” science fiction author. He wrote prolifically and was determined to provide his view of the future. Some of it focused on how our planet would be changed by technology and other works looked at mankind and politics beyond Earth. His “style” was of another period, as were some of his cherished beliefs. He fell out of favor because of the latter more than the former. I am not exactly sure why people tend to conflate PKD’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? with Friday. Sure PKD’s adaptation, Blade Runner, came out right after Friday and both deal with “artificial humans,” but there isn't much to get all academic about.

Friday has many of the elements that make Heinlein a joy to read:
- an interesting protagonist
- a fascinating political world
- excellent ideas about the arc of technology
- a comforting sense of seeing ordinary people doing extraordinary things


"“When you have never belonged and can never really belong, words like that mean everything. They warmed me so much that I didn’t mind not being human."

"I had porridge with thick cream, two beautiful eggs, Canterbury ham, a fat chop, fried potatoes, hot muffins with strawberry jam and the world’s best butter, and an orange, all washed down with strong black tea and sugar and milk. If all the world broke fast the way New Zealand does, we wouldn’t have political unrest."

Here we have some good discussion about intelligent constructs and the future of humanity:

"“Well— Georges, have you worked with intelligent computers?” “Certainly, Marjorie. Artificial intelligence is a field closely related to mine.” “Yes. Then you know that several times AI scientists have announced that they were making a breakthrough to the fully self-aware computer. But it always went sour.” “Yes. Distressing.” “No—inevitable. It always will go sour. A computer can become self-aware—oh, certainly! Get it up to human level of complication and it has to become self-aware. Then it discovers that it is not human. Then it figures out that it can never be human; all it can do is sit there and take orders from humans. Then it goes crazy.”"

But Heinlein “fleshes out” his novel with an extra dose of most of the things he has been ruminating about for the previous several decades:

"Democracy is probably all right used in sparing amounts. The British Canadians use a dilute form and they seem to do all right. But only in California is everyone drunk on it all the time."

"Geniuses and supergeniuses always make their own rules on sex as on everything else; they do not accept the monkey customs of their lessers."

"Sick cultures show a complex of symptoms such as you have named…but a dying culture invariably exhibits personal rudeness. Bad manners. Lack of consideration for others in minor matters. A loss of politeness, of gentle manners, is more significant than is a riot.” “Really?” “Pfui, I should have forced you to dig it out for yourself; then you would know it. This symptom is especially serious in that an individual displaying it never thinks of it as a sign of ill health but as proof of his/her strength."

"I did start making tallies. It is a bad sign when the people of a country stop identifying themselves with the country and start identifying with a group. A racial group. Or a religion. Or a language. Anything, as long as it isn’t the whole population.”"

"Sex is a better tranquilizer than any of those drugs and much better for your metabolism. I don’t see why human people make such a heavy trip out of sex. It isn’t anything complex; it is simply the best thing in life, even better than food."

Still there are some comments that just make me laugh:

"Vicksburg low town is a lusty, evil place, as swarmingly alive as a dunghill. In daylight city police travel in pairs; at night they leave the place alone. It is a city of grifters, whores, smugglers, pushers, drug wholesalers, spivs, pimps, hire hatchets, military mercenaries, recruiters, fences, fagins, beggars, clandestine surgeons, blackbirders, glimjacks, outstanders, short con, long con, sting riggers, girlboys, you name it, they sell it in Vicksburg low"

Friday has a mission: "You and I know that an artificial person can’t be told, offhand, from a natural person. You’ll be carrying, in stasis, a modified human ovum." The perils of Friday in carrying it out leads to a mostly satisfying (and predictable) finale.

All in all, one of the better of his latter works. 3.5*

[LittleAsian Sweatshop · Rating 5 out of 5]

I admit it. I'm a Heinlein junkie. I'm not sure if there is a rehab or a self-help group out there for me, but even if there was one, I'm not sure if I would even want to go to it. It's Heinlein after all! I've read everything from his lesser-known earlier works like "Orphans in the Sky", to his Juveniles like "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress", to his Lazarus Long series, even is famous "Stranger in a Strange Land", to even his non-fiction work. And although I love them all, I must say, that Friday is undisputedly my favorite.

What makes Friday so alluring? It is a tale of acceptance and belonging and what is the human soul. It is a story of an "artificial person", Friday Jones, whose "mother was a test tube, and her father a knife". She is a professional courier (that is to say, she is a carrier pigeon for top-secret documents and important information), who seems to be normal and well adjusted in every way. However, underneath her cheerful and charming exterior lays a frightened little girl who seeks acceptance in the most desperate ways, but fails in her quest to find a family. During these chronicles, she discovers many things about herself. Small, personal bits of information, a strength and resourcefulness that she never knew she had. Eventually, she finds a family and as she says, she finally "belongs".

The story is quite simple, so why is this story so spellbinding?

Besides the beautiful blend of technology, history, and characterization, there is also a cohesive story line as well as a thrilling plot. Friday asks the age-old question, what is a soul? What makes a human, a person? Although she is beautiful, accomplished and talented, once she reveals that she is an AP, she is outcast and sneered at. She is considered less then a human, because she was not born, but created.

This question has undoubtedly been raised in the works of the Grand Masters of science fiction. Asimov took a mechanical point of view in "The Bicentennial Man". Phillip Dick echoed Friday, and the concept of APs in "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" with the plight of the Replicates. So why does Friday tug at me so?

Because it is told from the human point of view. With the exception of Friday's superhuman speed and strength, she could be very well be anyone. She has the same fears and desires, and her childlike charm and insecurity makes her all the more human.

Her quest to find a family and for acceptance is a long and winding one. She is not on a crusade to change the world, nor to battle the great evil of prejudice and racism, but to find her niche in the world. Her caring and nurturing nature is juxtaposed with her lethal skills, giving her the dimension that is necessary for us to follow her story.

Friday makes us care about her trials, and her hurts become ours. And as a result, makes us ask ourselves what defines us as human, and feel the anguish at discrimination.

It is the ability to not only inflame, but also to soothe, that makes Friday so memorable.

[R.S. Carter · Rating 4 out of 5]

A friend of mine slipped me this soft cover at my book club. He thought I would enjoy it. He was right.

While the exploits of our genetically-engineered superhuman in love, sex and war are fun to read about, Heinlein's futuristic milieu's are always the front runner. The world is broken and the worst of the extremes have begun vying for power. What side would you rather be on? The fascist socialists who kill anyone with a savings account or the theocracy hell bent on removing rights from everyone except white men?

At least sex isn't an issue, and there's plenty of it. Similar to Stranger in a Strange Land, Heinlein has created a world with open, free love, communal sex groups, and perfectly acceptable one-night stands. It's all about the love. Friday manages to bed nearly every single character she meets, male or female - if she doesn't kill him/her first.

Sigh - I love the way Heinlein thinks. So much of this book seems be relevant to today - at least regarding the current political and extreme polarization. Too bad Heinlein's sexually liberated future isn't reflected today. Oh, what fun that would be!

[Metodi Markov · Rating 1 out of 5]

"Фрайди" е безнадеждно остаряла фантастика, която има претенци да е забавна, но за съжаление не е.

Далеч е от най-доброто съчинено от Хайлайн. Все пак я дочетох, но от средата ѝ настана голяма мъка, доста скучно ми беше. Пък и тоя мазничък край...

Цитати:

"Колкото и изумителни да са заплатите на обществените служители, неизкоренимо е убеждението им, че са оставени едва ли не да гладуват. Ясно е, че всички те са си крадци по душа, иначе нямаше да се подредят на държавната хранилка. Достатъчно е да помните тези факти и да внимавате — подкупният служител няма самоуважение, затова изисква да проявите поне привидно респект към него."

"Нужен ви е Едгар Алан По, за да извлича упорито красота от липсата на звучност в английския. :)"

P.S. Но ето пък от къде се е взела идеята за Кенгурото на Къртис Чен, така че, все някаква полза е имало. ;)

[Malum · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is one of the most Heinlein books ever Heinleined. Nearly all of his tropes are here: Open relationships/shared partners, promiscuous sex being no big deal and as taboo as shaking hands, shady corporations, war, people fighting for personal freedoms, people hiding from crooked authority figures who are on their trail, noble older men, an emphasis on scholarship and learning, people getting rich by luck and/or tricky shenanigans, anti-bigot sentiments, anti-organized religion sentiments...I could probably go on but you get the idea. It's like he took themes from his greatest hits and smashed them all together here and, if you are a Heinlein fan, you will probably have a pretty good time because you can almost feel him winking at you at you every time he whips out something that he knows you will recognize.

You might not have a GREAT time, though, because this book is not without its problems. The main problem is that the book is just so unfocused. This might be because Heinlein tried to cram so much of his personal philosophy in here, but the plot is almost an after thought. Friday aimlessly goes from one situation to another just to set up set pieces for Heinlein to riff off of.

Another issue is that some people might go into this book thinking that it is full of action. The very beginning of the novel doesn't help dispel this idea, either. But, the further you get into the book, the more you realize that this is most definitely not an action novel. It moves at its own pace and, even though Friday can tear just about anyone to shreds in two seconds, we rarely get to see any of this potential. Mostly we just follow Friday around as she gets into (and out of) relationships and travels around from place to place. Again, if you like Heinlein's body of work this probably won't be a very big deal to you. If you are new to Heinlein, however, I strongly suggest starting with a different novel.

[Peter Tillman · Rating 3 out of 5]

2022 reread: Well. Book of its time (1982), and old Bob was quite the storyteller. Despite its age and Heinlein's peculiarities, it was a worthwhile reread, though I can't see reading it again. 3 stars, marked down from ~4 in 1994, which is what my old booklog rated it then. Still a pretty good read, and a bang-up happy ending.

The review to read here is by Thomas in Durham, NC. Google can't find the direct link, and GR's page redesign no longer supplies same. Sigh.

Jo Walton's review is the one to read: https://www.tor.com/2009/06/14/the-wo... "The worst book I love . . . It’s a fun read, even if it’s ultimately unsatisfying." One of her better reviews!

[Deodand · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oh Mr. Heinlein, you are a flaming sexist, and crazy as a shithouse rat. But I love you anyway! I can't help it.

Please read any Heinlein novel with your eyes WIDE open. His ego was huge and he liked to pretend he was every character in his books, including the females.

[Levent Pekcan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sevdiğim bir yazarın eseri olmasına rağmen açıkçası elime geçene kadar adını duymadığım bir romandı. Bir dostun hediye etmesiyle elime geçti, merakla okudum. Heinlein'ın en garip, arada kalmış işlerinden biri diyebilirim.

Kitap boyunca Heinlein'in işine ne kadar hakim olduğunu, hiç zorlanmadan yazdığını hissettim ve düşündüm. Friday, 1982 yılında yayınlanmış bir roman. Kitap boyunca Heinlein çok eşlilik, serbest aşk, eşcinsellik, grup seks vs. bazı hassas konulara sıkça dokunuyor. Ancak ben yazarın bu konulara sanki sırf "dur bakalım öyküdeki şu hatunları seviştireyim de karışsın biraz ortalık" düşüncesiyle, pek de samimi olmadan dokunduğunu düşündüm. Heinlein'in bu romandan 20 yıl önce yazdığı büyük eseri Stranger in a Strange Land'de bahsettiğim konulara değindiğini ve olumlu/olumsuz büyük ses getirdiğini biliyoruz. Friday'i yazarken Heinlein içinden "bakalım yine karıştırabilecek miyim ortalığı" demiş sanki.

Heinlein'in Friday'de kurduğu dünya insanların uzay gemileriyle yıldızlar arasında seyahat edip, sonra at arabalarıyla evlerine döndükleri bir dünya. Bunun niye böyle olduğu konusunda bir detay vermemiş yazar. O tarihlerde herhalde yeni yeni hayata girmeye başlayan kredi kartı kavramının yazarın ilgisini çektiği belli, öykü boyunca sıkça kredi kartlarından söz ediliyor. Diğer bir ilginç detaysa, Heinlein'in Interneti çok net ve bugüne uygun şekilde tasvir etmesi.

Kısacası, Friday hem bazı toplumsal kavramlara, hem de "insan nedir?" gibi bazı temel bilimkurgu sorularına tanım yerindeyse çomak sokan bir roman. Ancak amacına ne kadar ulaştığı oldukça tartışmalı. Sonuçta ortaya çıkan anlatı daha çok bu bahsettiğim "ortalığı karıştırma" çabasına zemin olsun diye yazılmış, başı sonu belli olmayan zayıf bir iş bence.

Friday bence Heinlein kitaplığının farklı, ama biraz zayıf bir parçası.

[Tom · Rating 1 out of 5]

Heinlein, in his later years was a major perv.

I had first read this many years ago, and remember it as an adventurous romp about a Balkanized Earth (and beyond) featuring plenty of sexytimes starring his nympho-with-a-brain super agent. I remembered Friday as being a kind of female James Bond. What I couldn't remember was any specifics of the villains' plot, etc.

After rereading, I know why that is...because THERE ISN'T ONE.

Starting with a ambush capture scene, the book seemed perfectly setup to deliver a standard action revenge plot. But it doesn't. Ever. Oh, we get a few abortive, very poor excuses at a couple of points down the road, but nothing that ever coalesces, up until literally the final 50 pages. At that point it feels as if R.A.H. realized he needed to provide something to justify readers' expectations, and tacked it on, right along with the utterly saccharine and at odds with what little theme the novel attempts ending. Seriously, there is nothing to this book, it's a prolonged sketch of what I can only assume is Heinlein's dream girl.

It's an interesting world, it's not littered with his usual sock puppet sermonizing, and Friday is actually an interesting character. Who, despite super speed, strength, etc., always seems to solve her few problems by being super sexy. The biggest problem is she's NEVER tested, which is weird to claim when the book opens with a gang rape, but I doubt any reader would contradict it. I think if a present day feminist read this their head might explode.

[Alan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rec. by: Artifice; Farah Mendlesohn
Rec. for: Blade runners, perhaps, and others who may doubt their own humanity

The first time I read Robert A. Heinlein's Friday was shortly after it was published in April 1982. I bought this novel brand-new in hardcover, even—an extravagance for me at the time (and still the kind of expenditure that gives me pause, to be honest). A year or so later, I also purchased a high-quality print of the Michael Whelan painting that became the cover of the mass-market paperback (a much better image, to my mind, than that hardback edition's muddy dust-jacket).

Friday is, I think, the best of Heinlein's later novels (any of the ones he published after, say, 1970)—it's relatively tightly-plotted, not nearly as discursive or bombastic as (for example) Time Enough for Love, and its heart is in the right place. However, Friday is still late-period Heinlein.

There is no place in my house to display that Michael Whelan print, now. Liking Heinlein's work nowadays is not necessarily anything to crow about, or to put on display.

Oh, and before I go any further... Friday should have all the trigger warnings, too. For example, the book begins with an extended rape and torture scene that is perhaps made even harder to read by Friday's calm acceptance of the situation.

And yet, even so... I still found a lot to like in this novel, upon rereading it again in 2025—and much that has stayed relevant to the present day.

Not everything, though. Heinlein's projection of the future may be correct in broad outline but it's wildly wrong in detail—we have our own near-ubiquitous public surveillance, for example, but it's by fixed cameras (for the most part) rather than floating "Public Eyes." And public Internet cafés having their own keyboarding assistants on hand to help customers... type search queries? Not so much.

Heinlein also cannot resist his usual libertarian(ish) digs at bureaucracy, the faithful and mostly anonymous government workers who help hold society together. Early on, Friday opines,

No matter how lavishly overpaid, civil servants everywhere are convinced that they are horribly underpaid—but all public employees have larceny in their hearts or they wouldn't be feeding at the public trough.
—p.5

Speaking as a (relatively low-level) public employee myself... fuck that noise, Bob.

On the other hand... I may have gotten my own oft-repeated Jenny Holzer-like quote, "Your family is in the best position to betray you," from reading Chapter 2.

*

I keep running into human practices not covered by my training.
—p.81

Beautiful, talented Friday is an "Artificial Person," the product of cut-and-splice genetic engineering which, at the time, was pure science fiction. As she often repeats, "my mother was a test tube and my father was a knife." And so even though she is 100% human, her DNA indistinguishable from that of any one of us, she is technically (and in many jurisdictions legally) not considered a human being at all.

This is both the central conflict and the defining trauma of Friday's existence... she is a human being, with what we are pleased to style inalienable rights—but she cannot bring herself to believe in her own personhood. Friday was taught, systematically and from a very young age, to think of herself as other than the girl she was, the woman she has become. And this is where I think the genius of Heinlein's novel lies: he shows us Friday's traumatized mental state from the inside, and helps us understand exactly why it is so wrong for so many others to have treated her as a thing.

Friday was published just a couple of months before another extended meditation on what it means to be human—or, as the slogan goes, "More Human Than Human": the film Blade Runner, which premiered in June 1982.

I have written about that movie myself, at some length.

*

As is always the case, Heinlein's characters talk a lot... and as is often the case, what they say is eminently quotable.

Regarding artificial intelligences of another sort:

"Yes. Then you know that several times AI scientists have announced that they were making a breakthrough to the fully self-aware computer. But it always went sour."
"Yes. Distressing."
"No—inevitable. It will always go sour. A computer can become self-aware—oh, certainly! Get it up to human level of complication and it has to become self-aware. Then it discovers that it is not human. Then it figures out that it can never be human; all it can do is sit there and take orders from humans. Then it goes crazy."
—Friday and Georges Perrault, pp.95-96

I'm... not sure Heinlein was wrong about that.

These words could be about many current events...

"Brother, I am not joking, I am weeping. One gang plans to shoot me on sight, another merely outlaws my art and profession, while the third by threatening without specifying is, so it seems to me, even more to be dreaded."
—Georges, p.107

It is not written in the stars that I will always understand what is going on—a truism that I often find damnably annoying.
—Friday, p.173

A credit card is a leash around your neck. In the world of credit cards a person has no privacy... or at best protects her privacy only with great effort and much chicanery. Besides that, do you ever know what the computer network is doing when you poke your card into a slot? I don't. I feel much safer with cash. I've never heard of anyone who had much luck arguing with a computer.
—Friday, p.203

Heinlein seems to have understood (or at least his characters did), long before it was common to say so, that gender and sexuality are spectra, not binaries:

All normal human beings have soi-disant mixed-up glands. The race is divided into two parts: those who know this and those who do not.
—Dr. Hartley M. Baldwin, p.223

"{...}but a dying culture invariably exhibits personal rudeness. Bad manners. Lack of consideration for others in minor matters. A loss of politeness, of gentle manners, is more significant than is a riot."
—Dr. Baldwin, p.251

Now, I'm not sure I buy this assertion any more than Friday did at the time—her reply was, "Really?"—but then... I don't have any offworld colonies to emigrate to, either.

*

Once Friday does go offworld, seeking a colony planet to settle on, Friday comes to an unfortunately abrupt conclusion... not only does the novel's ending feel rushed, it also comes across to me as terribly contrived, depending on far too many coincidences.

But by this point we are rooting for a happy ending for Friday... and Heinlein does at least deliver that.

*

After reading Friday (but not before, unless you really don't mind spoilers!), I would also highly recommend Farah Mendlesohn's sensitive analysis of Friday in The Pleasant Profession of Robert A. Heinlein (scattered throughout the book, but especially on pp.306-313, and in the book's conclusion on pp.428-429). Mendlesohn's work was a significant factor in my own choice to read—and appreciate—this Heinlein novel once again.

[Mike · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not my favorite Heinlein book, and not his best, but certainly not the worst. After The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, much of his works started becoming a little redundant in their characterizations ('good' women are always super smart and sexy and love to fuck, 'good' men are always brave and strong, both have frontier ideals and want a free society of people just like them who all fuck each other without jealousy and live in group marriages) and a little slower in their plot machinations (they spend more time on characterizations of people that, if you've read Heinlein of this period, you're already familiar with).

That said, I don't find any of it sexist at all (quite the opposite), and I don't see how you can see it like that. He was also one of the first to recognize that computers will become conscious with emotions, and to develop a comprehensive future history. But if you're unfamiliar with him, read his 50's and 60's novels first (esp The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Podkayne of Mars, Starship Troopers, and _then_ Stranger in a Strange Land, and maybe some juveniles after that). He is definitely great though and I intend to read all his books someday, and btw, I did enjoy this one. :)

[Христо Блажев · Rating 4 out of 5]

Фрайди има мераци към целия свят: https://knigolandia.info/book-review/...

В едно не чак толкова далечно бъдеще Земята е открила евтиния източник на неограничена енергия – и макр той да е монопол на най-могъщата корпорация, достъпността му не е под въпрос. Следователно остават още безброй възможности за конфликти, основно политически, и освен САЩ, сякаш и останалата част от планетата е минала през балканизация. А Фрайди, главната героиня в едноименната книга на Робърт Хайнлайн, е куриер, който може да пренесе всичко навсякъде – дори през укрепени и настръхнали от оръжия граници, както и извън планетата в обсега на започналата космическа колонизация. За тези ѝ умения особено ѝ помага фактът, че не е човек, или поне не е раждана – създадена е в лаборатория. А отношението към изкуствените създания и илюзията, че всеки може да ги разпознае с лекота, са едни от основните разломи в това странно бъдеще.

Лира Принт
https://knigolandia.info/book-review/...

[Kathryn Flatt · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read "Friday" many years ago, and only because I forgot to send back the monthly card for the book club I was in and this was a default selection! Yet it stays in a level of memory that is easily retrievable. The main character, Friday, is the kind of heroine that always captures me--strong, resourceful, brave--the kind of woman protagonist I strive to create in my own books.

The thing that continues to amaze me is how prophetic it is, considering it was published in 1982. The world is a different place in this book. The United States of America has given way to a number of territories run by corporations. In one passage (and I don't think this is really a spoiler), Friday is in the Big Bear Territory (formerly California) and stops at a lottery kiosk. There are dozens of different lottery ticket selections, which seemed rather preposturous when I first read it but has since become part of everyday life. Another premise-turned-fact is what Heinlein calls "S-groups" where individuals build a sort of family without marriage entering into it. Like civil unions, maybe?

"Friday" is a fast-paced read, challenging the reader to keep up with rapid-fire changes in scenery and situation, but isn't a challenge a lot more fun?

[Olethros · Rating 3 out of 5]

-Viernes, con “V” de “viejo verde”.-

Género. Ciencia-Ficción.

Lo que nos cuenta. Viernes es una mujer fruto de la ciencia y la ingeniería genética, con modificaciones quirúrgicas muy útiles para potenciar su entrenamiento como agente operativo de campo. En la actualidad trabaja como correo para una persona a la que conoce como “Jefe”, para quien hace entregas y recogidas en un mundo plagado de corporaciones, micro-estados y delincuencia.

¿Quiere saber más de este libro, sin spoilers? Visite:

http://librosdeolethros.blogspot.com/...

[Lafcadio · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have my suspicions about Heinlein's women. Friday seems the embodyment of them all.

[Mei · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of my all-time favorite Heinlein novels. Friday is a wonderful heroine - not one-dimensional, and so on.

The world that Friday lives in was echoed slightly in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash (another all-time favorite novel of mine). In Friday, the protagonist is an artificial person ("AP") with enhanced reflexes and intelligence. She is a highly trained courier: "it WILL get through."

There is one rape scene which can set one off a bit, but I found it to be accurate to the story: in context, Friday had been trained how to deal with all of the forms of torture available to people who want to extract information, including rape. She goes on at length about how clumsy and ridiculous torture is.

I liked the way Friday was at once soft and "prone to fits of weeping" (as I think she put it) as well as being strong, fast, and upright.

The part that got me maddest was the prejudice that she endured as an AP. The other "created" lifeforms in the story - Living Artifacts or LAs - did not have to be human at all (one was a dog, Lord Nelson, with voice and minimal intelligence) - and did not have to suffer such injustice. The prejudice just made me so mad - even as we are ever closer to having real human clones.

I also loved the cover art - and only found out later that my favorite covers were all Michael Whalen. Well, what do you know about that?

[Simon Mcleish · Rating 4 out of 5]

Originally published on my blog here in August 1998.

Somewhat unusually for Heinlein's later work, Friday contains no characters shared with any other novel or short story. It's heroine, a girl named Friday, is a special courier; she carries the sort of messages that require skills associated with the likes of James Bond to get them through.

The novel begins halfway through an assignment, with Friday recently landed from a flight to Nairobi and attempting to shake off following agents. She returns to base, only to find that it has been taken over by an enemy who captures and tortures her. A counter-attack from her own side follows, and we are well away.

Following the death of her boss, and a series of assassinations around the world causing anarchy, Friday is recruited to carry out an assignment carrying a fertilised embryo across space to a royal couple on one of Earth's colonies; realising half-way there that this is the sort of mission that generally brings a quiet death at its end rather than a reward, she determines to escape from the ship.

This is an enjoyable novel, particularly by the standards of Heinlein's later work. Friday is a reasonably believable heroine. The torture sequence is not for the squeamish.

[Mario · Rating 5 out of 5]

Phenomenal story. The ending was a little weak for my taste, but it was otherwise consistent with the story. Just because I want all of the loose threads to tie together doesn't mean that they should, so while the ending was a bit of a letdown, it was completely appropriate for the story, so I guess it was fine.

I do not at all agree with some reviewers that would describe the book as misogynistic, or that Friday is merely a man with [boobs] (although I have not yet read any other Heinlein, so it could be part of a pattern, but even there I would argue against looking for patterns across separate works as a general principle). She certainly has some masculine traits (primarily a blunted affect), but good women should have some masculine traits, just as good men will have a number of feminine traits. I'm not sure how a failure to live up to stereotypes is a weakness for a character (or a character weakness for that matter), or how feminism is advanced by insisting that female characters conform to certain readers' limited expectations about proper gender roles -- which is exactly what the criticism amounts to, as far as I can tell.

Anyway, I loved it, but I'm a sucker for both politics and space.

[Kathleen Dienne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Asking me to pick my favorite Heinlein is like asking me to pick my favorite friend. My favorite changes depending on my feelings, my life at that moment, and probably a heap of things I don't even notice.

I loved science fiction and fantasy from an early age, but the heroes I found were almost entirely male. Females were either supporting characters or props.

Friday is tough, independent, brave, and makes things happen. She wrestles with insecurity, but it never keeps her from taking action. At the same time, she wasn't afraid of being female - she didn't long to be a man. I needed to read these things as a teenager.

The ending bugged me a little when I was a teenager, I admit. All those gifts and she decides the best use of those gifts is to... be a farm wife? Really? As an adult and a fully formed feminist, though, I say great. The point of life is to decide for yourself what is best for you, and to go out and grab it if it doesn't hurt anyone else.

The fact that Friday can speak to me at so many different points in my life, with so many different and changing needs, makes this one of my all time favorites.