Friday (novel)
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| First Edition cover of Friday | |
| Author | Robert A. Heinlein |
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| Cover Artist | Richard Powers |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Science fiction novel |
| Publisher | Holt, Rinehart and Winston |
| Released | April 1982 |
| Media Type | Print (Hardback & Paperback) |
| ISBN | ISBN 0-03-061516-X (first edition, hardback) |
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 both 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 theorized decline of Western Civilization.
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[edit] Plot summary
The book deals with Friday, an artificial person superior in many ways to an ordinary human, but subject to great prejudice when she is discovered. Employed as a courier who can really care for herself in a Balkanized world, she is forced to journey all over North America when she is caught up in civil disturbances. She reaches safety, but is soon displaced by her boss's death. Sent on a space journey as a courier, she realizes that the journey is likely to end with her death, and evades the ship's authorities to settle on a pioneer world with some friends.
[edit] Allusions/references to actual history, geography and current science
Heinlein clearly extrapolates trends which unfurl around us today. For example, he predicts ubiquitous personal wireless telephony and an Internet complete with multimedia and search engines long before they existed. He describes a leviathan called Shipstone, Inc., an indispensable and manipulative megacorporation. 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.
[edit] Allusions/references to other works
Friday is loosely tied to the novelette "Gulf", which appeared in Assignment in Eternity, since both works share characters — "Kettle Belly" Baldwin and "Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Green". (The latter two do not appear in Friday, but are mentioned as two of the title character's genetic progenitors.) The motif of a secret superman society in the latter work, however, is not mentioned in Friday, where the heroine is an artificial person, and is not part of a secret society (the principal reason to be secret about her artificialness is to avoid discrimination). However, at his death, Baldwin leaves Friday a subsidy to finance her emigration to any planet of her choice, except Olympia, where the "supermen" went at some indeterminate point in the past.
The Shipstone, the extra-solar colonies Fiddler's Green, Proxima and Botany Bay, and the start of the balkanization of North America are mentioned in The Cat Who Walks Through Walls.
[edit] External links
- Friday publication history at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
