History Literature / Friday

* RaceLift: The [[CoversAlwaysLie novel cover]] paints Friday as Caucasian when her actual coloration is more American Indian.
** At least one version of the cover painting makes a much better attempt to get the colouring right. http://www.stevenhwilson.com/review-friday-by-robert-a-heinlein/, last picture.

* TortureAlwaysWorks: DiscussedTrope. Friday's organization works on the rule of "If they grab you, sing!" Because the supposition is that with enough time, torture will break anyone, so information is carefully compartmentalized so that someone who's likely to be captured (like Friday) doesn't know anything worth telling. Thus, Friday lays out everything she knows about her organization before they can torture her (but after they gangrape her as a warm-up), to prevent being tortured and thus preserve her physical and mental health. The torturers' boss doesn't believe her and has her tortured anyway -- and so Friday writes him off as an amateur.

* PowerSource: The Shipstones are a humdinger of one; where most sci-fi of the time was obsessed with [[ILoveNuclearPower anything "atomic"]], Heinlein proposed super-''batteries''.

* CoversAlwaysLie: On the paperback cover, Friday looks practically Aryan -- blond hair, fair skin -- but the text describes her as being much darker skinned.

''Friday'' is a novel by Creator/RobertAHeinlein about an artificial human called Friday "Jones", a.k.a. "Marjorie Baldwin". When the novel starts, she is working as a spy/courier for a mysterious organization based in a nation-state centered around Chicago. It gets messy; she reflexively kills someone who ''might'' have been a tail and evades other pursuit that involves blowing up an entire hotel she just left. She finally reaches her home base -- and immediately gets captured by enemy agents and tortured for the information she was carrying, which is not in her head. After finally being freed from that escapade, it is near time for her to consider retiring.

* DeliberateValuesDissonance: Friday's reaction to being gang-raped as an interrogation technique is simple annoyance at the idea that she could be traumatized. As an artificial human she's been raised not to have any sexual hang-ups, and has even been [[LooksLikeSheIsEnjoyingIt trained to pretend to enjoy it]] in order to [[LimaSyndrome manipulate her captors]].

* LooksLikeSheIsEnjoyingIt: Friday's method of dealing with torture-by-rape is to pretend that she "just can't help herself", in order to frustrate and confuse her assailants.

[[quoteright:289:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/Friday_9709.jpg]]
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* TortureAlwaysWorks: DiscussedTrope. Friday tells everything when she's tortured, both to preserve her sanity and because she doesn't know what they want to know. The torturers' boss doesn't believe her and escalates the torture anyway -- and so Friday writes him off as an amateur.

* BiTheWay: Friday, while enthusiastically heterosexual, falls in LoveAtFirstSight with Janet when she meets Ian Tormey's family. This causes her a great deal of confusion because she hasn't ever been attracted to a woman before and rejects (frequent) propositions from them. When she quizzes her Boss about it, he replies that "all humans have soi-disant mixed-up genes; there are two kinds of people: those who know this, and those who don't." Friday later has no qualms about shacking up with Goldie and Tilly/Shizuko.

* ApocalypseHow: Friday's Boss asks her to predict the next coming of the Black Plague. Much to her chagrin, he takes that prediction seriously, [[spoiler:and the epilogue reveals that it does, in fact, happen]].

* MultipleIdentityIDs: In the beginning, Friday kills a man who was following her, then finds several identity documents and credit cards with four names on them: "Adolf Belsen", "Albert Beaumont", "Arthur Bookman" and "Archibald Buchanan".

* TruthSerum: When Friday is captured by Boss' enemies, they use a truth drug on her to make her spill the beans about her mission. This annoys her because she's already told them everything she knows.

** HumanSubspecies: Living Artifacts are artificial organisms that are obviously non-human in form. None play a visible role in the story, but they are frequently discussed and mentioned: for example, Ian mentions the dwarven "kobold" artifacts displacing miners while talking about his pilot's union's negotiations.

* WhoShotJFK: A DiscussedTrope - ''anyone'' who looks at it knows something is up, but it's academic because there's no way to confirm any of it;

Not to be confused with [[Main/{{Friday}} other things called "Friday"]].

!!Provides Examples Of:

In the CanonWelding, this would come sometime after ''Literature/TheMoonIsAHarshMistress'' in that book's timeline, but the connection is not necessary. It is a sequel to an earlier book, ''Literature/{{Gulf}}''

** When Janet takes Friday on a tour of her PanicRoom on Red Thursday, she makes a point of showing her where the back door is -- and that there are {{Death Trap}}s waiting for anyone who discovers the passage and can't find the off switch. Much later, Friday's life depends on figuring out where they would have placed the switch when she returns to. (There's also a long, narrow, underwater tunnel leading from the house to the shelter.)

* BabiesEverAfter: Although Friday's left on a colony world without the technology to make her fertile, [[spoiler:she bears the designer royal baby she was hired to deliver and raises it as her own child alongside the other members of her group marriage.]]

* SecretPassage: When Friday's "farm" comes under attack early in the novel, the personnel escape through underground tunnels; they also use the tunnels to stage her rescue.

-->'''Friday''': ''Killed in front of hundreds of witnesses and every aspect, before, during, and after, heavily documented. All that mountain of evidence adds up to is this: Nobody knows who shot him, how many shot him, how many times he was shot, who did it, why it was done, and who was involved in the conspiracy if there was a conspiracy. It isn't even possible to say whether the murder plot was foreign or domestic. Boss, if it is impossible to untangle one that recent and that thoroughly investigated, what chance is there of figuring out the details of the conspiracy that did in Creator/GaiusJuliusCaesar? Or Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot? All that can truthfully be said is that the people who come out on top write the official versions found in the history books, history that is no more honest than is autobiography.''

In the CanonWelding, this would come sometime after ''Literature/TheMoonIsAHarshMistress'' in that book's timeline, but the connection is not necessary. It is a sequel to an earlier book, ''{{Literature/Gulf}}''

** At least one version of the cover painting makes a much better attempt to get the colouring right. http://www.stevenhwilson.com/review-friday-by-robert-a-heinlein/, second picture.