49 of 50 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A different sort of Heinlein book, June 4, 2006
After reading many of the reviews here, I note that opinion seems divided on whether it's truly a good Heinlein book or not. Most still consider it a pretty fair Heinlein yarn, and yet all the reviews I read missed one of the main points of the novel--which is the main reason why it's so interesting--whether it's a great Heinlein novel or not.
Many have already commented on the various themes of the book, most of which will already be familiar to Heinlein fans. The one that was new was the bigotry against the main character, an artificial and genetically enhanced human. It seems most readers found this reaction unlikely, although this theme pervades the entire work. One reviewer asserts that it's even the primary idea of the whole book.
Another important theme is the revolt against authority which many Heinlein readers will certainly know from his other books such as The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Double Star, Citizen of the Galaxy, Stranger in a Strange Land, Sixth Column, Revolt in 2100, and others.
The theme of the competent man also takes center stage in this book, another famous and familiar Heinlein theme, although in this book it's a competent, genetically enhanced female.
However, all these interpretations, although true, miss one very important point. In Heinlein's novels, the world is often a very unstable and even dangerous place--but there is always hope, and optimism that conditions will be better in the future. Often the main characters in Heinlein's books are intimately involved in the struggle to overthrow oppressive governments--and usually succeeding--and thereby creating a better life for themselves.
So no matter how precarious and dark life in the present might be, Heinlein always had hope for the future and seemed confident that humans would throw off the yoke of oppression, establish a better society, and basically good would win out over evil. But in this novel, he appears to have at least partly, and perhaps substantially, abandoned that hope in favor of a much darker and more dismal future for humanity, at least on earth. Better prospects can be found off-planet on several newly colonized worlds.
The evidence for this isn't hard to find, but is scattered throughout the book in various narratives, and in conversations between Friday and her boss, Dr. Baldwin. By the way, Kettle Belly Baldwin has not appeared, to my knowledge, in another Heinlein book since Gulf, published in 1949. However, all of the other characters are new. So one of the charms of the book is that one gets to meet a lot of new characters, making this book different from almost all of Heinlein's later output, and an old but memorable character is brought back to life in a new context.
But getting back to my point, Heinlein makes it clear the earth is economically and politically deteriorating, with most of the world now completely Balkanized into hundreds of small, petty states, each with its own unpleasant idiosyncrasies. Heinlein says most of these small states are faceless ciphers, with a few larger, powerful states remaining.
The U.S. is no different, being divided into several smaller sovereign states, along with Canada. But these smaller states are often co-belligerants or are at war with each other. It's said that peace rarely lasts more than a month. In one coup that occurs in the Chicago Imperium by militant Republicans, Democrats are rounded up and executed--including their children down to the age of 14.
Another alarming idea is that the large international corporations, such as IBM or the Shipstone Corp., are also participants and instigators of these wars, and sometimes wipe out entire cities, such as Acapulco. These corporations are hard to fight, since they have no single geographical location, and in the book, the internationals seem to be winning over the real or geographically "localized" countries. These super corporations are completely ruthless and immoral and killing for hire and mass murder by them are common.
Heinlein holds out little hope the situation will ever improve; he sees elected officials as venal and corrupt parasites feeding at the public trough and mouthing fatuous platitudes for consumption by an impotent and perhaps naive public, a much darker and more cynical interpretation of politics than that depicted in Starship Troopers, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, or Double Star, in which, if I remember correctly, one character remarks that politics is the only game a mature man can take any pleasure in.
Even con artists and grifters Heinlein sees as more noble--at least they're hardworking independents who aren't on the dole and are trying to earn an "honest" living. :-) Government and personal corruption are also ubiquitous. The police are not to be trusted in the book, and disposing of them if possible is considered a good idea--as long as one can get away with it, of course. For a client who is powerful and wealthy enough, even physicians can be made to arrange for a certain patient to "die" on the operating table. In fact, almost no one in any position of authority--except Friday's boss, Baldwin--seems to be trustworthy.
In conversations with her boss, Dr. Baldwin, he tells Friday she needs to get off planet because of what's happening on earth and asks her how one can tell if a society is truly sick--that being when normal conventions of politeness and manners have deteriorated into rudeness--which the people now take as a sign of strength. In the book, the good people always seem to be on the run and are persecuted, while the evil flourish unhindered. An epidemic of cholera or bubonic plague that could kill millions is predicted, possibly because of a conspiracy. But Baldwin sees this as a social good since cities are so overpopulated and dysfunctional already that thinning out the population--however it is achieved--is a worthwhile goal.
So overall, it seems a darker and more pessimistic future than anything Heinlein had ever imagined before. But one of Heinlein's strengths is his ability to create believable alternate realities--which again comes through here--however dark and depressing it might be. Whether it's one of his greatest books or not, I think it counts as an unusual and worthwhile Heinlein book because of that.
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21 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Hang on, Friday -- baby's coming, March 25, 2004
This late-period Heinlein novel is at least better than the one it followed (_The Number of the Beast_). Most of it is fun to reread.
The protagonist here is an Artificial Person (AP) named Friday Jones, who works as a courier for the organization headed up by Hartley 'Kettle Belly' Baldwin (last seen in the 1949 short stort 'Gulf'). Friday's very cool all around but she has a little self-esteem problem owing to the fact that much of the world thinks APs aren't genuinely human.
Well, of _course_ they are; they're genetically engineered to be able to outperform us ordinary mortals in strength, speed, and intelligence, but they're human (genetically and otherwise) all the same. (So you should ignore reviewers' comments describing Friday as a 'cyborg'. She's no such thing.) And that's really the heart of this novel -- Friday's long and sometimes excruciating journey to _belonging_. (In this respect, the novel very nicely _undoes_ all of the Uebermensch crap Heinlein wrote in the 1940s.)
That's the heart, but the novel has a couple of spots on its soul. As other readers have noted, Friday's response to her rape (and her rapist) is more than a little jarring, and I don't think it's possible to explain it away as a result of her upbringing and genetic enhancements. And I could have lived without the several pages of astrogation and starcharts (although I do enjoy Heinlein's little doodle of a centaur).
The sequence of events starts off well enough, but it sort of rambles and meanders. Oh, well; most of it is interesting, anyway, although the secret-agent intrigue peters out partway through. And there are memorable characters -- nothing quite at the level of the Long family, mind you, but still some pretty interesting people.
Plus there's some extremely cool stuff in the background. Heinlein the prognosticator scores especially well here, creating a fictional analogue of the Internet (in 1982) and setting his tale against a backdrop of corporate infighting and political Balkanization that is almost never, but should be, credited in histories of cyberpunk.
I like it -- at least well enough to reread it fairly often. I wouldn't recommend starting with it if you're new to Heinlein, though.
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