Glory Road

Glory Road is a fantasy novel, not science fiction. Heinlein was generally better at science fiction, I think. I kinda enjoyed the beginning and the end, set in the current day, 1963, wherein Heinlein gets off some curmudgeonly rants about culture, bureaucracy, etc. The fantasy part, the very large middle of the novel, was just dumb. Heinlein's curmudgeonly rant in this part was pretty much continuously about sexual inhibitions. Heinlein includes themes of polyamorism and free love in quite a few of his later novels; he really overdid it in Glory Road, and the story was too second-rate to make up for it.

This audio book was read by Bronson Pinchot, whom I remember only as Cousin Balki on a TV sitcom, years ago. His reading of Glory Road is competent but unremarkable. I was occasionally annoyed by the simpering, whimpering, subservient tone he sometimes gave to Star, the leading lady. In the credits at the end on the audio book, he mentioned the 1979 & 1984 copyrights of an afterword by Samuel R Delany, but Pinchot didn't read the afterword.