On a miserably wet Saturday morning in 1982, when I was young and desolate, I went into the library, as I always did, without very much hope. As I reached the New Books section there, entirely unexpectedly, was Friday, a new Heinlein book. It was not just as if the sun had come out, it was as if the sun had come out and it was an F-type star and I was suddenly on a much nicer planet.
Friday is one of Heinlein’s “late period” novels. The general rule if you haven’t read any Heinlein is to start with anything less than an inch thick. But of his later books, I’ve always been fond of Friday. It’s the first person story of Friday Jones, courier and secret agent. She’s a clone (in the terms of her world an “artificial person”) who was brought up in a creche and who is passing as human. It’s a book about passing, about what makes you human. I think it was the first female out-and-out action hero that I read. It’s also a book about being good at some things but with a large hole in your confidence underneath. No wonder I lapped it up when I was seventeen!
What’s good about it now? The whole “passing” bit. The cloning, the attitudes to cloning, the worry about jobs. The economy. It has an interesting future world, with lots of colonized planets, but most of the action taking place on Earth—that’s surprisingly unusual. There’s a Balkanized US and a very Balkanized world come to that, but with huge multinational corporations who have assassination “wars” and civil wars. There’s a proto-net, with search paths, that doesn’t have any junk in it—that’s always the failure mode of imagining the net. It was easy enough to figure out you could sit at home and connect to the Library of Congress, but harder to imagine Wikipedia editing wars and all the baroque weirdness that is the web. Friday’s point of view works for me as someone with severely shaken confidence, and as always with Heinlein it’s immersive. Reading this now I can feel myself sinking right in to Friday without any problem. There’s a complex multi-adult family, not unusual in late Heinlein, but this one disintegrates in a messy divorce, which is unusual and well done as well. And it’s a fun read, even if it’s ultimately unsatisfying.
What’s wrong with it is that it doesn’t have a plot.
Even at seventeen I couldn’t love it uncritically. I can’t think of any book for which I have expended more energy trying to fix the end in my head. It’s practically a hobby. For years I would tell myself I’d re-read it and just stop when the good bit stops and skip the end—though I have to say I’ve never managed it. Heinlein’s ability to write a sentence that makes you want to read the next sentence remains unparalleled. But the book as a whole is almost like Dhalgren. Every sentence and every paragraph and page and chapter lead on to the next, but it’s just one thing after another, there’s no real connection going on. It has no plot, it’s a set of incidents that look as if they’re going somewhere and don’t ever resolve, just stop. It doesn’t work as an emotional plot about Friday growing up, though it’s closer to working as that than as anything else. (Even as that—well, I really have problems with the way she forgives the rapist, if that’s supposed to be maturity.) It really doesn’t work on any of the other levels you can look at it on.
Heinlein wrote about how he wrote in several places—Expanded Universe and some letters in Grumbles From the Grave. From this it’s quite clear that he worked hard on the background and the characters but that he let his backbrain do the plotting. There are comments like “There were Martians in The Door Into Summer for a few pages until I realised they didn’t belong so I took them out.” (Paraphrased from memory.) As he got older, it’s clear that he lost some grip on that ability to tell what didn’t belong. Friday is an example where you can see this in action. It sets things up that it never invokes, most notably Olympia and the connections back to the novella “Gulf.” It starts hares both in the human plot and the wider plot, and loses track of them. You can see how he did it, and you can imagine how he would have pulled it together, and what he might have gone back and fixed.
Even as it is, I love it for its moments of clarity and beauty. I wouldn’t be without it. I taught myself almost all I know about how to plot by lying awake trying to fix the end of Friday in my head.
I have not read Friday, but read – and loved – Job: A Comedy of Justice when I was in high school. For similar reasons I have been wanting to re-read it recently (almost twenty years have passed since I last read it), but I am worried that it won’t hold up. Anyone read it recently and have thoughts on it?
Agreed about Friday. It tends to be overlooked as one of his late novels. (The last time I checked, there were just two academic articles about the book-a lot less than, for instance, is the case with Starship Troopers-and I wrote one of them.)
But the book definitely has those points of interest-the clone issues, the “proto-cyberpunk” economic-tech stuff, etc.. And I think that rather a lot more people than is generally appreciated do look back to it-and try to “fix” it or at least redo it in some way. Charles Stross’s recent Saturn’s Children (which I haven’t got to yet) has been received by a lot of critics as a Friday homage.
On a more personal note, I’ve got an (alas, unpublished) novel of my own that partly grew out of working with the same plot elements.
I’d have used clone to mean genetic duplicate. There is no genetic duplicate for Friday – nor does her child carry any of her own genetic information. See e.g. U.N. Man by Poul Anderson for genetic duplicate and some implications.
[notice that genetic duplicate doesn’t mean duplicate – there have been major differences in the personality of domesticated animals as cloned currently and of course that issue is itself addressed in some very good – Hugo winning – SF much later than U.N. Man)
Friday is enhanced by gene selection – a topic Mr. Heinlein explored as early as Beyond This Horizon with the control natural bartender IIRC. The impact of susceptibility to a cold on the social acceptability of a genetic experiment as embodied in a woman is addressed at some length in that book.
Granted Friday the book doesn’t have a story and not much plot and is largely a travel log – Inside USA from a single view point. That I suggest is in large part the intention. Just as Lazarus Long echoed earlier folks and Loonies in moving on to the new frontier as things got too crowded so too I think Mr. Heinlein believed that the freedoms he valued would exist in our time line’s crowded future only in patchworks of limited time and space in a fractured society.
A fractured society because the global uniform society – the lost Utopian dream of U.N. Man say – would lead to a general, but not necessarily uniform, loss of freedom. Then too big energy is Mr. Heinlein’s proxy for a whole industrial/military concentrated power complex.
That is the world of Friday is one in which General Semantics did not give us the well organized more or less Utopia of Coventry – and never will. The failure of Mr. Heinlein’s own youthful optimism.
For once, and rarely, I think the words of a character can be properly seen as the author’s. Kettle Belly Baldwin I think joins Mr. Heinlein in saying I tried – now the time has come for the best and brightest – the children of spirit if not of body – to get out of Dodge.
On another note I think Mr. Heinlein benefitted from the shorter lengths common in the genre in earlier years – perhaps the magazine serial length influence and so suffered rather than gained when freed to publish at any length. I find no improvement in the current uncut or author’s cut editions. Combining the themes I think Friday would have been a better story (hat tip Teresa story/plot) with most any story at all but the length of the trip makes a better travel log.
I must agree that Friday one of my fave Heinleins.
But then I have to point out that a good portion of that affection comes from reading it when I was seventeen and didn’t care that had no plot and was written by a pervy old man who felt all strong women really wanted children and to be raped and saved by strapping young pilots.
Yech.
But I love the fact he refers to “Hubbardites”, heh….but he was wrong…now we call ’em Scientologists.
So it wasn’t just me.
I found the novels I read as new seemed to just peter out without having any point to them- Friday, The Number of the Beast, The Cat who Walks Through Walls– or just meander the entire length (Time Enough for Love, etc.)
Friday began with a bang, and yes, brought up a lot of cool ideas and plotlines- and then everything was just dropped.
I need to find Gulf somewhere and read it.
sps49: “Gulf” is in Assignment in Eternity. It’s the first story in it and therefore the first Heinlein I read, as he’s one of the authors I read from the library in alphabetical order.
Another of Friday‘s important virtues is that background. What if there were a real breakthrough in batteries/energy storage?
Smonkey @@.-@, Heinlein wasn’t “wrong”; the Church of Scientology has been called that since the early ’50s. And Heinlein would have known that, since he and Hubbard were old friends, or at least associates.
Neil in Chicago (#7): Poul Anderson’s “Snowball” (1955) takes on that question, and was a likely inspiration for that part of Friday.
There’s also Randall Garrett’s “Damned If You Don’t” (which Vernor Vinge paid homage to in “Bookworm, Run!”), though that’s more of a breakthrough in generation instead of storage.
I think, in a certain odd way, Friday is a love letter to humanity and the United States. I am thinking about the very specific rejection of “genius separatism” that Baldwin undertakes, and about the genuine affection Heinlein has for some of his “salt of the Earth” characters. (Forgive me, it’s been a while since I read this.) Less obviously, I think the story is about being an intellectual in a profoundly anti-intellectual society, to wit the United States. You can be smarter, and even faster and stronger, and still not be able to make it there, or make it work.