You have to admit this about Robert A. Heinlein: He provokes strong reactions. Whether or not he is still the most popular and influential living author of science fiction, as he has probably been for four decades, Mr. Heinlein remains the most controversial, with hordes of fans and foes. "Friday" will convert few from one camp to the other.

One of Mr. Heinlein's self-images is that of a lone genius in the role of a carnival showman, providing fun for the masses, money for himself and deep truths for the select few who penetrate his disguise. So "Friday" is meant to have something for everyone: laughs and tears, thrilling adventures, titillating sex, delicious fantasies of power, and profound messages.

Like most of Mr. Heinlein's heroes, Friday is a superbeing. Engineered from the finest genes, and trained to be a secret courier in a future world of chaotic ferocity and intrigue, she can think better, fight better and make love better than any of the normal people around her. The Earth she inhabits has become a nightmare in which some 400 "territorial states," including the tyrannical Chicago Imperium, the madcap California Confederacy and the Mexican Revolutionary Kingdom, endlessly struggle for the power actually held by the "corporate states," gigantic multi-national conglomerates that are all secretly controlled by one interlocking interstellar cartel, originally founded by "the most American of myth-heroes," a "basement inventor." The best values the world has ever known—being, of course, the values of Midwestern farming communities at the time of Mr. Heinlein's childhood in the early 20th century—have been overwhelmed by the evils already dominant in the late 20th century: too much government and too many people, bureaucracy, alienation, welfare, cities, religious cults, socialism, monopoly cpaitalism and, worst of all, mediocrity and incompetence. As usual, the highest virtue is supreme competence….

The bulk of the novel describes Friday's amours. Unfortunately, Mr. Heinlein has a knack for the difficult task of making sex boring. Neither Friday's sexual partners (as in effective romance) nor the details of her sex life (as in effective pornography) are of interest. Her numerous partners, male and female, are all interchangeable, and the details are coyly vague, unlike the precise descriptions of her sexy clothes, elegant meals and artful fighting techniques. Some readers may decide to skip the sex to get to the good parts.

But the espionage plot is also disappointing, being a mere contrivance to get Friday from one liaison to another as she moves toward her ultimate goal. This goal, as always in recent Heinlein, is escape from the world of the future or developing present to the world of the middle-American mythic past—pioneering, rural or small-town. For Friday, this means abandoning her supposedly exciting job and the adventure plot, along with the Earth. She finally finds happiness as a "colonial housewife" in a group marriage on a faraway planet, where she can have her fill of sex while writing a cookbook and working in the local town council, girl-scout troop and P.T.A.

Mr. Heinlein's latest apocalypse goes beyond all those practical best sellers telling us how to survive and prosper amid the developing doom. For him, the only place to hide is in a fantasy of the mythic past on a faraway planet. His increasingly monotonic message is: Stop the world, I want to get off.