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nothing here." Friday is the nadir of Heinlein's feelings for Western civilization. We are beyond hope, he says in Friday. We have cocked it all up irredeemably, and not even special organizations can reverse what is happening. |
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Friday, heroine of the novel, is a competent woman, an "AP" or Artificial Person, who gets gang-raped at the beginning of the novel and spends most of the rest fighting her way out of one hole or another. Eventually she comes across the capable "Boss" figure who dominates most Heinlein novels. Things go uphill from there. She ends up pregnant and happy and off-planet, finally belonging to a family group. Which is the be-all-and-endall of Heinlein's message to us in this novel. Choose your friends well, and find a safe haven during a storm. As such it's preferable to the solipsistic escapism of The Number of the Beast and the selfish attitudes of Time Enough for Love. |
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Friday is also the most visual of Heinlein's modern novels and suffers least from his tendency to converse. It is a fast-paced, all-action adventure story in the old mould, a fact which won it favourable comparison from the critics with The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966). Even so, the world we see in Friday is a false world. It does not encompass enough. Once again it is a world of the competent and the also-rans. And the also-rans aren't given a moment's consideration. |
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This over-simplified viewpoint is a kind of cartoon. Heinlein's world is rough-cast and unfinished. And so the world is, but it is also far subtler and more complex than Heinlein seems able to imagine. He treats his cartoon as the reality and makes his deductions accordingly. |
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Brian W. Aldiss and David Wingrove, Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction (New York: Atheneum, 1986), pp. 386-87 |
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When Farnham's Freehold appeared, at the height of the Black Power movement, it met with a storm of critical indignation. The title hero is flung into a future in which the rule of North America has passed to the Black Muslims. (. . .) As in "If This Goes On-," yet another fundamentalist sect has come to power, and with the same disagreeable results. At the same time Heinlein dramatizes Mark Twain's prophecy of 1885 that within a hundred years the formerly enslaved blacks of America would turn things around and "put whites under foot." Or at least they might be disposed to do so, if emancipation were not completed with the |
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