Friday

Rating:
Summary: Some of you don't get it
Review: This is a great story. Sure it meanders along and never really ends itself...but it is more REAL than some of Heinlein's stories. How often in real life do you have adventures with beginnings, middles, and ends? Not often. We go through life walking in circles, with never a pre-determined end goal. So what if this book never reaches a proper conclusion, it makes it that much more real. Don't forget also, the "message" of this book is partially about bigotry, but also about the collapse of society in general. And when society falls down, all rules are changed. Look at how different the ending is to the beginning. In addition, if you think that Friday is only about sex...notice how little of it she ever actually gets? No wonder she's always [hot]. This book also contains some of the best quotes (Dr. Baldwin's quotes on religion). The primal message of this book is different from his others: when society goes down the crapper, dont fight it, or fight for the future, just run away and let it fall. This book should not be compared to other Heinlein books, not because it is inferior, but because it presents a different kind of story, in a different way, and is a great STORY as opposed to a lecture like some of his.

Rating:
Summary: Some of you don't get it
Review: This late-period Heinlein novel is at least better than the one it followed (_The Number of the Beast_). Most of it is fun to reread.

The protagonist here is an Artificial Person (AP) named Friday Jones, who works as a courier for the organization headed up by Hartley 'Kettle Belly' Baldwin (last seen in the 1949 short stort 'Gulf'). Friday's very cool all around but she has a little self-esteem problem owing to the fact that much of the world thinks APs aren't genuinely human.

Well, of _course_ they are; they're genetically engineered to be able to outperform us ordinary mortals in strength, speed, and intelligence, but they're human (genetically and otherwise) all the same. (So you should ignore reviewers' comments describing Friday as a 'cyborg'. She's no such thing.) And that's really the heart of this novel -- Friday's long and sometimes excruciating journey to _belonging_. (In this respect, the novel very nicely _undoes_ all of the Uebermensch crap Heinlein wrote in the 1940s.)

That's the heart, but the novel has a couple of spots on its soul. As other readers have noted, Friday's response to her rape (and her rapist) is more than a little jarring, and I don't think it's possible to explain it away as a result of her upbringing and genetic enhancements. And I could have lived without the several pages of astrogation and starcharts (although I do enjoy Heinlein's little doodle of a centaur).

The sequence of events starts off well enough, but it sort of rambles and meanders. Oh, well; most of it is interesting, anyway, although the secret-agent intrigue peters out partway through. And there are memorable characters -- nothing quite at the level of the Long family, mind you, but still some pretty interesting people.

Plus there's some extremely cool stuff in the background. Heinlein the prognosticator scores especially well here, creating a fictional analogue of the Internet (in 1982) and setting his tale against a backdrop of corporate infighting and political Balkanization that is almost never, but should be, credited in histories of cyberpunk.

I like it -- at least well enough to reread it fairly often. I wouldn't recommend starting with it if you're new to Heinlein, though.