Tuesday, April 14, 2020

Like Jo Walton, I love this not-so-great novel.

Friday by Robert A Heinlein
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. --Jo Walton
https://www.tor.com/2009/06/14/the-worst-book-i-love-robert-heinleins-friday/

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