I recently read my first Robert Heinlein book, Friday. The thing about sci fi classics and me, is that I never read them. Most of my sci fi and fantasy reads have been young adult, and newer. Friday was published in 1982 and Heinlein is a highly respected author in the speculative fiction community. His works are now considered classics. My father was really into all those old sci fi and fantasy books, but I passed them by.
Unfortunately, while I thought I wasn’t judging books by their covers, I see now that I was. Those book covers were very unappealing for me. Knowing what I know about artwork now as an adult, I admire the artists. However, they made me feel like the genre wasn’t written for me. It reinforced a cultural expectation that fantasy and sci fi was for boys, not girls. Now, I don’t know if this was done with intention to sway public opinion in that direction or if it was a subconscious attempt at reinforcing a very well-established cultural norm, but the “woke” side of me believes the former. The optimistic side of me wants so badly to believe it was accidental. Now, I can’t really say what about the covers gave me this feeling; I just know that that’s how I felt. For years, I ran the line “Fantasy just isn’t my thing and sci fi is too…I don’t know, boyish?”
But ya know what? I absolutely love fantasy and sci fi! It takes a lot for me to read anything other than that these days. I see characters like Hermione Granger and Katniss Everdeen and Tris Prior and Rose Hathaway and I see bits of myself in them. It’s through this experience that I understand how important it is for people to have characters like themselves to relate to. The stories about boys who become kings and dragon riders and warriors are great and all, but it doesn’t compare to reading about Lady Altarn not only saving the day in the War Queen by JM Robison, but saving two countries and the life of the warrior everyone expected to do the saving, and doing it with wit, tenacity and dignity.
This 1982 classic was soooo far ahead of its time. Friday, the character for whom the book is named, is tough, tenacious, loyal, clever, and highly skilled. She’s also loving, tender (when life allows for it), and vulnerable. She goes through so much in just a few months, each event alone, enough to break most people, yet she just keeps going. She perseveres and eventually gets what she wants. She is someone for girls and young women to look up to. She’s just responsible enough, but also just rebellious enough. “Well-behaved women seldom make history.”ⁱ
The book itself is wonderfully crafted. Told from a first-person perspective, Friday is surprisingly insightful and relatable for a woman. I didn’t need to be told that she was female; I could tell just from the way Heinlein wrote the character. I could feel it. Heinlein also explores subject matters which made it feel like the book was written within the last few years. He explores different forms of polyamory and alternative relationship builds, a possible outcome of the growth of capitalism showing corporations as whole nations, and the disappointing reality that no matter what, people who are new and/or different will be treated like second class citizens (if treated like citizens at all) unless we do something drastic to change it. Of course, that last one isn’t anything new or recent, but damn this guy was good.
I am most definitely going to check out more of Robert Heinlein’s work and I am anxious to do so. I do believe reading more of his books will help my own writing in terms of inclusivity and a wide imagination. (He had video chatting in his futuristic society. Again, he wrote this in 1982. Do you know how big cell phones were in 1982?!)
ⁱ Quote by Pulitzer Prize winner, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. Culturally, this quote is taken as an affirmation for women to misbehave at least a little bit in order to be memorable. The original author intended it to point out that the contributions of well-behaved women to the world at large are sadly, often overlooked. Here, I chose to use it as it is culturally understood but I wanted to share that bit of information because of the irony of no one knowing her name, despite the nature of her quote and the false attributions to Marilyn Monroe and Eleanor Roosevelt.
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