Extended Friday

By the time the early 1980s rolled around, Robert Heinlein had amassed a curious dual reputation. He was the Science Fiction Writers of America's first Grand Master. He was one of the genre's "Big Three" along with Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke. With Stranger in a Strange Land, he had written one of the first sci-fi novels that grappled with questions about the human condition at levels approaching those usually reserved for sniff-down-your-nose literature.

And for most of the previous 15 years, almost everything he had published was uninspired, unintelligible or both. While Glory Road and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress both had their moments, Farnham's Freehold zigged and zagged in unexpected places and sank whatever interest it might have developed by relying on a thoroughly unlikable lead character. The lumbering Time Enough for Love cried out for even a little of the authorial discipline that had made Heinlein a top short-story writer. And I Will Fear No Evil was published while Heinlein was struggling with potentially lethal peritonitis, meaning his ability to give it anything like the attention it needed was just not there. Fear is the kind of novel that a sprawling hot mess looks at and says, "Bless your heart."

After Time Enough was published in 1973, Heinlein continued to struggle with his health. Finally fit enough again to create a novel, he greeted the 80s with The Number of the Beast. It did little or nothing to correct the idea that the great author's muse had packed up and moved on, mixing satire, parody and homage in confusing dead ends and whatnot.

Then came 1983 and Friday. The story of an advanced "artificial person," it tells about a series of incidents in the life of Friday Jones sometime in the 21st century as she searches for something -- mostly herself. Friday is a courier for a military and espionage private contractor in the Balkanized remains of the United States and Canada. Her work takes her around the world and sometimes off of it to space stations and other places near Earth. We meet her when an operation goes bad and she is captured and tortured for information from her employer. After some recovery time, she takes vacation with her family, a group marriage in New Zealand. But when they learn her heritage they divorce her, and she finds solace with some new friends, the wealthy Tormeys. It's while visiting the Tormeys that Friday is cut off from her employer and headquarters by a worldwide series of terrorist strikes called Red Thursday. The middle third of the novel is a travelogue across the different countries that used to be the United States as she attempts to get back to HQ. Once the reunion finally happens -- in a totally different context than she expected -- Friday takes on some new assignments before her boss's death dissolves the company. Her first private assignment heads her out of the Solar System to one of the distant colony worlds, but also puts her in danger of losing her life even if she succeeds.

The narrative takes awhile to describe because it's less of a single plot and more of a string of events through which Friday moves. The novel might have been better split into three or maybe even four connected shorter stories so that a reader would realize upfront he or she is not dealing with a strictly one-piece arc on Friday's journey to find a real place for herself. It could also benefit from a trim -- a sequence where Friday enlists with a private military contractor in order to try to get back into her home Chicago Imperium is really just padding and definitely takes longer than it needs to for even its small benefits.

Nevertheless, Heinlein's decision to exchange his thinly-clad philosophical musings for something like an actual series of events and happenings was warmly greeted by sci-fi readers. Friday was nominated for both the Hugo and Nebula awards for best novel, something no one had even bothered trying to do for Number. It has Heinlein's trademark immersive world-building, offering a picture of where and how our characters live with just one or two well-chosen details. It features some of his pretty on-target forecasting, showing a society in which cash is all but absent and governments and others keep track of people by the use of credit or electronic money. Heinlein also suggests that some future conflicts will be fueled not by nation states but by corporations, through hired mercenaries offering fighting, courier or espionage services.

Friday's aforementioned "strung-together" characteristic weakens it, no matter how much it improves on its predecessors of the previous 15 or so years. It also suffers from Heinlein's career-long difficulty in writing women characters. Friday herself, though female, has a pretty masculine personality. She seems a lot more like a "tough broad" character from 1940s movies with an amped-up sex drive than a real woman, which only highlights for readers the reality that we're listening to what a man thinks a woman's voice is like. Heinlein starts out by showing how much of Friday's life is driven by her awareness of her lab-grown heritage and search for a place to belong, but he tends to wander away from that drive too often to let it be the peg on which a complete narrative could hang.

Like a lot of Heinlein fans, the return of actual events to a Heinlein novel put me over the moon when I first picked up Friday. Reread many years later, its flaws are pretty clear and it doesn't match up as well to his better work. But when considered with his other "late period" output, spanning from 1980 until Heinlein's death in 1988, Friday takes the prize. Its linear structure, likable central character and refusal to dally with mysticism and multi-dimensional frippery all offer something none of the others can match.