Glory Road

This article is about the fantasy novel. For the film about the 1966 college basketball champions, see Glory Road (film). For other uses, see Glory Road (disambiguation).

Glory Road
Cover of the first edition of Glory Road.
Author(s)	Robert A. Heinlein
Cover artist	Irving Docktor
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre(s)	Fantasy novel
Publisher	G. P. Putnam's Sons
Publication date	1963
Media type	Print (Hardcover & Paperback)
ISBN	NA

Glory Road is a fantasy novel by Robert A. Heinlein, originally serialized in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (July - September 1963) and published in hardcover later the same year. It was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1964, losing to Way Station.

Plot summary

Evelyn Cyril "E.C." Gordon (also known as "Easy" and "Flash") has been recently discharged from an unnamed war in Southeast Asia. He is pondering what to do with his future and considers spending a year traveling in France. He is presented with a dilemma: follow up on a possible winning entry in the Irish Sweepstakes or respond to a newspaper ad which asks "Are you a coward?". He settles on the latter discovering it has been placed by Star, a stunningly gorgeous woman he had previously met on Île du Levant. Star informs him that he is the one to embark on a perilous quest to retrieve the Egg of the Phoenix. When she asks what to call him, he wants to suggest Scarface, referring to the scar on his face, but she stops him as he is saying "Oh, Scar..." and repeats this as "Oscar", and thus gives him his new name. Along with Rufo, her assistant, who appears to be a man in his fifties, they tread the "Glory Road" in swashbuckling style, slaying minotaurs, dragons, and other creatures.

Shortly before the final quest for the Egg itself, Oscar and Star get married. The team then proceeds to enter the tower in which the Egg has been hidden, navigating a maze of illusions and optical tricks. Oscar scouts ahead and finds himself crossing swords with a fearsome foe who resembles Cyrano de Bergerac. He then defeats the final guardian of the Egg, known only as the "Never-Born", in a mental fight, and the party escapes with the Egg. While they arrive in the universe of Star, Rufo informs Oscar that Star is actually the empress of many worlds—and Rufo's grandmother.

The Egg is a cybernetic device that contains the knowledge and experiences of most of her predecessors. Despite her youthful appearance, she is the mother of dozens of children, and has undergone special medical treatments that extend her life much longer than usual. She has Oscar unknowingly receive the same treatments.

Initially, Oscar enjoys his new-found prestige and luxurious life as the husband of the empress of worlds across the Twenty Universes. However, as time goes on, he grows bored and feels out of place and useless. When he demands Star's professional judgment, she tells him that he must leave; her world has no place or need for a hero of his stature. It will be decades before she can complete the transfer of the knowledge held in the Egg, so he must go alone. He returns to Earth, but has difficulty readjusting to his own world, despite having brought great wealth along with him. He begins to doubt his own sanity and whether the adventure even happened. The story ends as he is contacted by Rufo to set up another trip on the Glory Road, which is, by this point, revealed as an allegory for Life's Adventure.

Genre and setting

Although the majority of Heinlein's work is generally classified as hard science fiction, Glory Road is a combination of fantasy and science fiction elements. The novel contains substantially more humor and whimsy than in Heinlein's other works.^{[citation needed]} These atypical approaches, however, did not prevent Heinlein from infusing his story with the usual level of technical detail. For example, in one chapter the art of fencing is thoroughly described. (Heinlein had been a member of the fencing team at the United States Naval Academy.) The novel is also notable for its detailed characterization and psychological examination unusual for such a lighthearted novel.

Heinlein claimed^{[citation needed]} to be inspired by the King Arthur stories of past generations such as T.H. White's The Once and Future King or Hal Foster's Prince Valiant. While their influences are apparent, many of the book's themes such as amoralistic heroes and focus on immediate action are highly reminiscent of Sword and Sorcery fiction. The novel also shares many similarities with planetary romances of E. R. Eddison.

Heinlein deliberately^{[citation needed]} doesn't name the war Oscar Gordon was in. It is referred to as a war in Southeast Asia, giving some the impression it referred to the Korean War.^{[citation needed]} However, on the first page, Oscar says "a background of beeping sputniks", which means it can only be 1957 or later, too late for the Korean War, which ended in 1953. Since the book was published in 1963, the conflict could be the Vietnam War before it was called that, when it was still sometimes referred to as a "police action", or possibly one of a hypothesized sequence of generic southeast Asian wars. Gordon actually says that they were "military advisers" in his war and that it wasn't even a "police action". Also, Oscar recounts at one point that he was living with his mother — and therefore presumably of high school age or younger — during the Korean War, a point reinforced on the second page when he says "write us all off as juvenile delinquents", a term rampant in the 1950s.^{[citation needed]} On the first page, he says that it was an election year, and he "couldn't figure out which party to vote against", implying that it was a Presidential election year, i.e. 1960 or 1964 or possibly later. His father was in the Korean War.

Reception

Samuel R. Delany called the novel "endlessly fascinating" and said it "maintains a delicacy, a bravura, and a joy."

History

According to the author, the book was completed in several weeks and was fun to write.^{[citation needed]} Some of his other works, such as Stranger in a Strange Land and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, took him several years and were relatively difficult.

Various editions of the novel have been published:

• 1963, G. P. Putnam's Sons, hardcover
• January 1976, Berkley Publishing Group, paperback, ISBN 0-425-02834-8
• January 1976, Berkley Publishing, paperback, ISBN 0-425-03134-9
• November 1977, Berkley Publishing, paperback, ISBN 0-425-03783-5
• October 1979, Berkley Publishing, paperback, ISBN 0-425-04349-5
• April 1982, Berkley Publishing, paperback, ISBN 0-425-04865-9
• May 1983, Berkley Publishing, paperback, ISBN 0-425-06438-7
• February 1984, Berkley Publishing, paperback, ISBN 0-425-07311-4
• December 1984, Berkley Publishing, paperback, ISBN 0-425-08156-7
• August 1985, Berkley Publishing, paperback, ISBN 0-425-08898-7
• August 1986, Berkley Publishing, paperback, ISBN 0-425-09666-1
• August 1, 1991, Ace Books, paperback, ISBN 0-441-29401-4
• May 1, 1993, Baen Books, hardcover, 304 pages, ISBN 0-671-72167-4
• January 1, 1996, Baen, paperback, 304 pages, ISBN 0-671-87704-6
• October 1, 1999, Sagebrush, library binding, ISBN 0-7857-1328-X
• October 1, 2004, Tor Books, hardcover, 320 pages, ISBN 0-7653-1221-2

Star is one of several characters Heinlein included in his 1985 novel The Cat Who Walks Through Walls. Star is also mentioned in The Number of the Beast.

External links

• A Heinlein Concordance: Glory Road from the Heinlein Society
• Glory Road at Worlds Without End