Books - Friday

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	Books - Friday

Friday is a 1982 science fiction novel by Robert A. Heinlein. It is the story of a female "artificial person", the character of the title, genetically engineered to be stronger, faster, smarter, and generally better than normal humans. Artificial humans are widely resented, and much of the story deals with Friday's struggle against prejudice and to conceal her attributes from other humans. The story occurs against a backdrop of general social collapse, widely thought to represent the irreversible decline of Western Civilization.

Plot

Many readers view the book as satirizing feminism, albeit in a sympathetic way, as the beginning and the end are both apparently framed by male chauvinist cliches. The novel starts with Friday being raped by enemy agents and apparently relaxing, pretending to enjoy being raped. At the end, Friday, the most advanced being in the galaxy, is living in an interstellar suburb, baking cookies and running a brownie scout troop. In both cases, though, the reality is the opposite of the cliches; Friday gets revenge on her rapists, and as to the brownie leader, well, the whole logic of the book leads one to believe that this is a cover for Friday's big move to save humanity.

Heinlein clearly extrapolates trends which unfurl around us today. For example, he predicts an internet complete with multimedia and search engines long before it existed, and describes a leviathan called Shipstone, Inc., an indispensable and manipulative megacorporation eerily suggestive of today's Microsoft. He speaks of a world tendency for large states to splinter into many smaller ones a full decade before the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Heinlein also plays on the darker undercurrents threatening mankind, among them organized crime, pestilence and famine, and various forms of know-nothingism, religious terrorism included.

Friday is loosely tied to the novelette "Gulf", which appeared in Assignment in Eternity
, since both works share a character, "Kettle Belly" Baldwin. The motif of a secret superman society in the latter work, however, is not repeated in Friday, where the heroine is an artificial person, and is not part of a secret society (her only reason to be secret about her artificialness is to avoid discrimination).

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Books - Friday

Plot

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