I don’t get the “ick” factor either. My current wife was 4 years old when I started college. No I did not know her then.
I had to waste some time with other, wrong women, but eventually it all came together. No cold sleep, quite a bit of time travel by just letting time elapse at it’s normal rate.
My cat, in the Winter or when it is raining, makes me check each door to see it the weather is different outside one or the other.
Friday Volume XXIV of The Virginia Edition
Another of Heinlein’s later works, this one is the second of the ‘late Heinlein’ novels that appeared in the 1980s. It was a nominee for the Hugo, the Locus and the Nebula awards.
For the life of me, I can’t see why.
In the end, this is a character study of a woman. Fine. But the character isn’t all that great. She’s constantly on the run and having her moves forced on her. She’s more a reactor than an actor. Along the entire route she runs (she spends most of the book on the move) she makes decisions tactically, but never strategically. She is, simply put, a protagonist who is not in charge of her own life.
In the introduction, James and Patterson go far around the barn trying to define Friday as a feminist work but I have trouble buying it. Yes, Friday the character is capable and smart, that’s nice. But two things work against perceiving the character as a feminist icon. First, she’s that way as a result of genetic manipulation. That’s certainly not the fault of the character but it does take away from seeing her as an example for others. Second, the overwhelming naivete shown by the character on several occasions. Friday is simply not a self-aware nor self-actualizing person (if I can wander into cant). Not unlike the Mary Cavanaugh character of The Puppet Masters - who is also a highly competent person in her own right but seems content to surrender that part of herself when a family situation comes along - Friday seems to think that holding her own value alone is secondary to the need to be a part of a family. Hell, at one point late in the book she states that she now knows she’s human because she had a human baby. In effect, the character is defining her value solely through the concept of childbirth and all of her other accomplishments fall by the wayside. Urgh. Dangerous territory for a male writer.
Heck, even in the very end when she lists what she does in her new, quieter life, her position on her town council is ‘secretary’. That’s likely inadvertent but ugh, what a choice for a position for a soi-disant feminist character.
Hell, at times Friday even appears childlike and simple in her response to others and situations. Some of that stems from her own insecurities - which stem from the prejudice her society shows against those people in their midst who are designed and not born through chance - but at other times it seems to stem from the character simply being childlike. That’s all well and good, but it’s not an example of what I would call feminism. Not even the rebelling-against-calcified-feminism that James and Patterson claim that Heinlein is attempting to confront.
Honestly, Friday the character is interesting, but more in what she says and thinks than in anything she does. An interesting aside is her continual denigration of people she perceives as ‘amateur’. However, that seems to change depending on her mood. In the opening chapter, upon being captured and interrogated, a character, Pete, who is holding her allows her to hit the toilet when she needs to. She refers to Pete as being ‘amateurish’ while noting that making a captive break toilet training can be useful in breaking someone. Late in the book, she again meets Pete and refers to his boss as an ‘amateur’ for disciplining Pete for allowing her to use the toilet.
As a character study of an isolated woman attempting to regain control of herself, I suppose Friday is worthwhile. But as an adventure yarn or as a novel that can grip the reader I find it lacking.
The one place the book does shine, however, is in the worldbuilding. In the book, which is a direct in-universe descendent of the earlier novella Gulf, the United States and Canada have broken up into at least these nation-states:
[ul]
[li]Republique de Quebec[/li][li]British Canada[/li][li]The California Confederacy[/li][li]The Chicago Imperium[/li][li]Las Vegas Free State[/li][li]The Atlantic Union[/li][li]The Lone Star Republic[/li][li]The Kingdom of Mexico[/li][/ul]
However, looming over it all is the existence of ultra-powerful multi-national corporations. While we - in our world - have concerns about how much influence corporations have, in the world of Friday it’s much stronger. Corporations in Friday field their own private armies and use them to enforce their will on other corporations and nation-states. Early in the book, Interworld (the employer of a supporting character) destroys Acapulco - and theoretically more than 1 million people according to the 2012 census of the metro area - and the perception is that Mexico was silly for not caving in earlier and forcing Interworld to take that step.
Other interesting parts of the worldbuilding are the existence - and prejudice against - artificial persons (genetic constructs that look like humans) and living artifacts (genetic constructs that do not look like humans). Friday herself is an AP and suffers from significant character issues deriving from the discrimination she fears even though she’s been successfully passing as a natural born human for most of her life. That insecurity is her driving force, the need for commonality and the acknowledgement of her humanity. Still, in the end it’s others who achieve this for her, not herself that does so.
I could wish, if Heinlein were truly attempting to write a book to challenge the then-current perception of radical feminism, he had done so with a more dynamic character. Not since John Thomas Stuart XI of The Star Beast has there been a main character in a Heinlein novel so dedicated to falling into success as opposed to working to achieve.
Still, the reintroduction of Hartley Baldwin of Gulf and the display of the failure of Gulf’s attempt to introduce an almost Neitzchean superman to take over the world is worth reading. Especially the fact that Baldwin never refers to it directly but does say that the civilization in which he operates is doomed but he is fighting a holding action to delay the inevitable. That rewards a Heinlein reader who has dived into his older work when reading this one.
Books Completed:
Vol 1: I Will Fear No Evil
Vol 3: Starship Troopers
Vol 5: The Door Into Summer
Vol 9: How to Be a Politician
Vol 10: Rocket Ship Galileo
Vol 11: Space Cadet
Vol 14: Between Planets
Vol 18: Tunnel in the Sky
Vol 20: Citizen of the Galaxy
Vol 22: The Future History of Robert Heinlein Vol. I
Vol 23: The Future History of Robert Heinlein Vol. II
Vol 24: Friday
Vol 26: Job: A Comedy of Justice
Vol 30: Sixth Column
Vol 32: Creating a Genre (short stories)
Vol 35: Glory Road
Vol 36: The Puppet Masters
Vol 44: Screen Writing of Robert A. Heinlein Vol. I
Up next: New Worlds to Conquer
I think the reason everybody was so thrilled with Friday is because I Will Fear No Evil sucked so hard they thought RAH would never produce a decent novel again.
Unfortunately, I fear they were right.
The problem with *Friday *is that it’s a damned good old-school Heinlein sf/thriller for half a book, and then it’s almost random events for ten chapters more. For the life of me, I have never been able to make sense of the story and plot after she leaves Georges in New Orleans. Yes, yes, I can piece together what happens, but it’s like reading random ten-page excerpts at intervals from among a thousand pages. The inconsistencies and contradictions just pile up and up.
Apologies to Bill and RJ, but it’s a feminist novel the way Irving Wallace’s The Fan Club is. That is to say, not. Not not. It’s a prefeminist man’s idea of what a feminist novel should be, beginning with the infamous rape scene. Which has nothing much to do with Heinlein’s overall attitude towards women etc.; he was just fumbling in a dark corner never lit by his education and experience. (FWIW, the majority of “feminist” fiction is in the same boat, even those written by women feminists.)
I remember enjoying Friday when it first came out, esp. as compared to his previous several novels, but it’s been a loooong time. I should go back to it sometime.
Well, the immediate successor to IWFNE is usually regarded as one of his masterpieces…
Further thought as I rummage the Friday boxes in my brain… one of the problems is that it’s almost irrelevant that Friday is a woman. For all the window dressing and hoo-rah, she’s not a very feminine character in action or behavior, and it would take little effort to rewrite the story with a male protagonist. Even the pregnancy is almost an afterthought and seems to be contrived more to make the ending more satisfying than to provide real peril earlier.
And the one after that went all cuckoo. TEFL was partially saved by the fact that it was Lazarus-centric. Even then, the last part (Missouri) was a sign of The End Times for Heinlein as an innovative writer.
My memory of Friday is that is didn’t come to a spreeching halt for a lot of pointless philosophizing, which made the novel a fun and fast read. It’s been ages since I read Friday, but I just re-read Starship Troopers after seeing the Rifftrax version of the movie. My God, RAH underestimated the progress that was made in the social and behavioral sciences between the late 1950s and the 2010s, let alone the 2300s. Whenever he talks about behaior management he sounds incredibly old fashioned.
I’m with the “No masterpiece - a muddle…” crowd. One element I remember - it’s a long time since I read it - was the nightmare that was Friday’s New Zealand line marriage. The alternative viewpoint to Mannie’s utopian picture of the Davis family on Luna.
I liked Friday, and I Will Fear No Evil. Better than Number of the Beast anyway, and that’s still an ok book.
Agreed that *Friday *seemed like it was going to be some other story, then changed.
But there’s precedent- he totally got away with that in Glory Road. Perhaps a younger Heinlein could have saved Friday.
Or perhaps he’s have just filed her away, and that would be too bad.
Yes, good observation. One of the big problems for me was how muddled the timeline got with respect to telling the story of the marriage. Time markers were easy to miss in the first sentences of a section, and alla sudden it’s, “What? When did that happen?” Only by very careful reading can a first-time reader keep the sequence of events completely straight, I think.
I don’t think the two changes are all that similar. GR was a very smooth progression of the story, just in an unexpected direction. Friday cruises along a highway at a good, smooth clip and then is without warning bouncing through a dark forest at night.
The handling of lesbianism was also somewhere between simplistic and childish, a real case of ew-ick-I’ve-got-a-woody. Friday is supposed to be utterly complacent about sexuality, but resists advances from other women Most Heroically until she stoically Gives In for the Good of The Cause… and then her “marriage” to Goldie has a much of a veil as any hetero couple in Heinlein’s golden era writing. All inept tease and covered eyes.
Oh, not similar at all in how they were carried out. Glory Road is awesome.
Just saying he’s got ‘some’ cred with that sort of plot twist.
I’m sitting here realizing how young I was when I read all this. I found Glory Road in 5th grade, I Will Fear No Evil that year or the next.
Friday wasn’t out yet, but I had read the preceding story, Assignment in Eternity. I was still a virgin when I read Friday- it all seemed plausible enough.
Yeah, Friday was far below his best, but it’s also the best of the works from his late period, and decent, at least, if judged independently of who wrote it.
Hmm. I’m not sure I buy that. Handled correctly, a story written where the gender of the protagonist is irrelevant could be very feminist. Case in point is the portrayal of Hit Girl in the first Kick Ass movie (I haven’t seen the new one). In that, we see a female action hero who is utterly unsexualized. Even at 12 it wouldn’t have surprised me to see her dressed skimpily or whatever. But she was portrayed just as a boy with the same skills would be.
The biggest problem I have with the character is that she has all this ability, brains, talent, strength and so forth…and she just cashes it in to attain a feminine ideal. Feh.
Have you read Outiesby Jennifer Pournelle (Jerry Pournelle’s daughter)? Set in the universe of The Mote in God’s Eye the main protagonist is gender neutral. An interesting conceit but really doesn’t save a pretty poor book.
I agree about Friday, the whole second half and the ending in particular is a real let down after a classic Heinlein opening.
Are you talking about Hit Girl, Friday, Podkayne, Allucquere/Mary, or Maureen? 
To me, the only place the character of Friday shows any real spunk was with the NZ family when she outs herself. That’s (to me) one of Heinlein’s best moments–from the “outing” to the consequences to her meeting up with the hawt pilot, just great writing.
Other than that, yeah, she’s way too passive.
Note that in addition to tying in with Gulf, it also ties into Job. The Beanstalk in Texas is the same Texas where Alex visits you-know-who.
Third best, IMO. I liked Job much better…and Sunset, while flawed, was a much better character study, IMO. For me, Friday could have been the best, but the whole second half from the time the war breaks out is just a mess.
Sure about that? IIRC, Jerry’s world had regular shuttles, not a beanstalk.