Friday (1982)
Friday is a 1982 science fiction book written by Robert A. Heinlein.
Friday is an artificial person, built stronger, faster and sharper than the humans around her, and trained as a combat courier for a shadowy employer she calls Boss. She moves through a 21st-century North America splintered into feuding statelets, carrying packages whose contents she rarely knows across borders that shift under her feet. The work is dangerous, but the harder problem is contempt: artificial people are widely despised, so Friday hides what she is. Heinlein writes her as clever, sensual and self-possessed, narrating her own scrapes with dry competence. A road novel of a fractured world, told by someone that world refuses to count as real.
Quick answers
What is Friday about?
Friday is an artificial person, built stronger, faster and sharper than the humans around her, and trained as a combat courier for a shadowy employer she calls Boss. She moves through a 21st-century North America splintered into feuding statelets, carrying packages whose contents she rarely knows across borders that shift under her feet. The work is dangerous, but the harder problem is contempt: artificial people are widely despised, so Friday hides what she is. Heinlein writes her as clever, sensual and self-possessed, narrating her own scrapes with dry competence. A road novel of a fractured world, told by someone that world refuses to count as real.
When was Friday published?
Friday was published in 1982.
Who made Friday?
Friday was written by Robert A. Heinlein.
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A few thoughts on Friday
Fans should meet the other synthetic people wrestling with what they are. Ghost in the Shell pushes the same questions about a manufactured body and a borrowed identity into cyberpunk noir, and Appleseed builds a whole society around engineered humans treated as a lesser class. For the film that fixed this unease in the culture, Ridley Scott's Blade Runner remains the essential companion.
Artificial people fighting to be seen as human
Friday is built better than baseline humans and hated for it, so she hides what she is inside a job that requires trust. Ghost in the Shell and Appleseed put engineered bodies through the same passing act in cities that quietly despise them, Alita: Battle Angel gives a scavenged cyborg the same fight for standing, and Blade Runner's replicants live under an identical deadline of discovery.
Couriers and travelers crossing a splintered future nation
Friday spends the novel moving packages across a North America broken into feuding statelets, never quite safe anywhere she stops. The Scorch Trials sends its runners across a similarly hostile, reshaped landscape, Silo and The Handmaid's Tale confine people inside what's left of a fractured country's control systems, and The Mandalorian rides the same premise of a courier working contract to contract through lawless territory.
Games about an enhanced operative working for a shadowy employer
Friday never learns the full truth of who Boss actually is, only that the job keeps coming and she keeps taking it. Half-Life and Half-Life 2 put you in the same position under the unexplained G-Man, Mass Effect 2 rebuilds Shepard specifically to run missions for the secretive Cerberus, and BioShock Infinite sends Booker after a girl on the orders of a patron he never sees.
Concept albums that build a whole dystopian future
Friday's world is a full future history sketched through one courier's eyes, statelets and border checkpoints and all. Muse's Black Holes and Revelations and Simulation Theory build comparable paranoid, surveilled futures across a full album, Deltron 3030 raps its way through an entire sci-fi war, and Repo! The Genetic Opera stages a corporate biotech future not far from Friday's own genetically engineered underclass.