![\"Book](\"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/bsgfx\/gloryroad.jpg\")
I’ve had this book atop the bookshelves in the hall facing out for a while. Well, I guess we did just move\/reorganize the shelves out there last autumn when we had some work done at Nogglestead, so it might not have been looking down on me every time I passed through the hall since I bought it ten years ago<\/a>. But for some reason, I’ve passed over it time and time again. Except this is the year of Sword and Sorcery at Nogglestead (or a<\/em> year of Sword and Sorcery as the stacks have enough of the genre to support many such years), and the book has a man with a sword talking to an ogre on the cover, so now was the time<\/em>.<\/p>\nThe edition I have is from 1982, so I was going to expound upon the rise of the “normal people from earth go to a fantasy world” subgenre which I would have posited was a mainstay of fantasy in the 1980s, drawing upon my familiarity of Rosenberg’s The Guardians of the Flame<\/a> series and Chalker’s Dancing Gods<\/a> series, but further reflection indicates that the subgenre goes way back to the Chronic<\/a> (what?<\/a>) cles of Narnia<\/a> and the Gor books whose reviews pepper the last 20 years of this blog, so instead of a thesis easily disproven, you get this paragraph. Also, this book was originally published in 1964, but thematically it seems later as we will see.<\/p>\n It starts out in that fantasy genre: An early Vietnam vet musters out and bums around, eventually answering an ad in a European magazine. He finds himself transported to a magical universe with a beautiful woman and a short sidekick. Apparently, he’s the hero that the woman needs to complete a quest which takes them across vast distances and through strange environs so that he can help her recover an artifact she needs as queen of the multiverse.<\/p>\n However, after a couple of set action pieces befitting a fantasy novel, we veer into Heilein polyamory philosophy. And then the quest is completed two-thirds of the way through the book, and after that, it explores a bit of what it’s like to be the queen of the multiverse and to be her consort. So it gets a little blowsy in the last third as not much actually happens besides a little politics, musings on male\/female relationships, and a visit home by the hero who has changed on his journey.<\/p>\n So: A quick read, well-written but not necessarily action-packed. Not remembered as one of Heinlein’s best, and probably a transitional work between the rocket jockey stuff and the adult stuff with the alternative lifestyles. But perhaps that transition preceded Stranger in a Strange Land<\/em> more than I commonly think.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’ve had this book atop the bookshelves in the hall facing out for a while. Well, I guess we did just move\/reorganize the shelves out there last autumn when we had some work done at Nogglestead, so it might not have been looking down on me every time I passed through the hall since I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3334,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33041","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report","category-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33041","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3334"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33041"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33041\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33042,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33041\/revisions\/33042"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33041"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33041"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33041"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}