Friday

I've really started to like Heinlein's writing since I discovered it. It wasn't until a couple years ago that I bought my first Heinlein book, and a little after that I actually got around to reading it. This is partially due to the fact I have at any one time about 75 books in my to-read pile, and I go through them as soon as I can. Friday was the first Heinlein book I actually read, and I wasn't so sure about it when I first picked it up, but I got into it soon thereafter.

One of the things that struck me about the book was the authors style. Not of how he wrote, but how he crafted his fiction. Clarke wrote about the technology. Asimov wrote through conversations. Heinlein was structured around social interaction and the evolution of mores in society. Some of what he writes about would have been called lewd by an earlier society, but it seems to me that his devices are just that, devices used to tell a story. He doesn't include a plural marriage in his story as an act of defiance, but instead as a tool to tell a different story than other people have before him. I almost want to reclassify some of what he wrote as speculative fiction rather than science fiction because it has so little to do with science in some cases. Then he talks about dimensional and time travel and many other things that are classic scifi, but still, I see the seed of speculative fiction being planted here for other authors to grasp onto and a generation later.

As I said earlier, this book left me with a "what's going on" feeling for the first couple of chapters. I couldn't get into the character's persona for quite a while as she was unlike any I had read before. Instead of trying to figure it out, I just let the story progress and I started getting into it. At first I thought this was like any other story I ever read with a strong female lead, but it was different that everything else I ever read. One thing that struck me was that the story seemed to restart every chapter or two, which lead me to believe that Heinlein wrote this story in stages, however I've not been able to verify that.

This story is unlike any I've ever encountered before, though it does bear resemblance to other stories Heinlein has written. It can be said that when writing science fiction, you are only limited by your imagination, and though Heinlein had a prolific wonderful imagination, you can tell that it was a product of his time. I wonder if his stories would be as good if he had been born thirty years later. I doubt it. His style is vintage without being dated and the way his stories unfold are unique.

Followed up Friday with Tunnel in the Sky, The Moon is a Hard Mistress and Stranger in a Strange Land. The Number of the Beast and Time Enough for Love are both sitting in my to-read pile, waiting.