The Barnes & Noble Review
Glory Road -- Robert A. Heinlein's classic 1963 heroic fantasy about a Vietnam vet who, after answering a personal ad in a newspaper, is promptly whisked away on the intergalactic adventure of a lifetime -- has been called his grandest adventure ever.
E. C. "Scar" Gordon is recovering from a tour of combat in Southeast Asia on the Isle du Levant, an idyllic island off the French Riviera, where money and clothing are barely necessary. While hanging out on one of the beaches, Gordon lays eyes on the most breathtakingly beautiful woman he has ever met. And then, just as quickly, she is gone. Fate intervenes soon thereafter. As Gordon is reading a local newspaper, he sees an ad for a "Brave Man": "permanent employment, very high pay, glorious adventure, great danger." While applying for the job, Gordon is reunited with his goddess of the flesh. Star (one of her many names) hires Gordon as her champion to lead her on a quest for an invaluable artifact that will span many universes and will most likely end in death.
Samuel R. Delany writes in the afterword that Glory Road "has probably received less attention than any other Heinlein work of comparable size and ambition. This is even stranger when one considers that it is one of Heinlein's most formally satisfactory novels." Fans of Heinlein's more acclaimed works, like the Hugo Awardwinning novels Stranger in a Strange Land and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, should definitely give Heinlein's homage to the fantasy quest a try. It's escapist literature at its very best! Paul Goat Allen