Friday (book)

.]]

PLOT

Many readers view the book as satirizing Feminism , albeit in a sympathetic way, as the beginning and the end are both apparently framed by male chauvinist cliches. The novel starts with Friday being raped by enemy agents and apparently relaxing, pretending to enjoy being raped. At the end, Friday, the most advanced being in the galaxy, is living on an obscure pioneer world, baking cookies and running a brownie scout troop. On this pioneer world, lacking advanced medical technology, she is unable to have her artificially-induced sterility reversed. In both cases, though, in their view, the reality is the opposite of the cliches; Friday gets revenge on her rapists, and as to the brownie leader, some see it as a cover for Friday's big move to save humanity.

Heinlein clearly extrapolates trends which unfurl around us today. For example, he predicts an internet complete with multimedia and search engines long before it existed, and describes a leviathan called Shipstone, Inc., an indispensable and manipulative Megacorporation eerily suggestive of today's Microsoft . 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.

Friday is loosely tied to the novelette " Gulf ", which appeared in '' Assignment In Eternity '', since both works share a character, "Kettle Belly" Baldwin. The motif of a secret superman society in the latter work, however, is not repeated 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).

EXTERNAL LINKS

Information About

Friday (book)