B.W.'s Book Report: Glory Road

Sometimes the only way to clear your sinuses is to dive into a Robert A. Heinlein book.

You get a bellyful of smoking bans, gay marriage bans, First Amendment bans, gun registrations, people registrations, take a number pleases, what's your phone numbers, what's your Social Security numbers, pee in this jars, pee in that jars, blow in the straws, fill out this forms, where is that forms ... after a while you can either go postal or dive into a Robert A. Heinlein book.

All is right with the world in a Robert A. Heinlein book. In a Heinlein book, everyone knows governments and bureaucracies are counter to everything human. In a Heinlein book, that government governs best that governs least.

"I asked him how advanced societies ran things.

"His brow wrinkled. 'Mostly they don't.'"

Ah! Sweet release.

E.C. Gordon has a mysterious conversation with the most beautiful woman he will ever meet. He neglects to get her name and number and curses his stupidity. Then he answers a personal ad seeking an adventurer and promising "permanent employment, very high pay, glorious adventure, great danger," and finds himself falling into her arms.

I hate to say more because this is one of those books where the less you know ahead of time, the more fun you'll have. I've never seen Glory Road listed next to the immortal Heinlein books like The Moon is a Harsh Mistress or Stranger in a Strange Land - never heard of it, in fact, until I blundered into it one day and was attracted by the long-haired blonde with the big - err, by the heroic Robin Hood figure confronting a big dinosaur on the cover. And no, this book is not as wildly memorable as the most well-known Heinlein books, but it is wildly memorable, and it contains a healthy dose of Heinlein's famous cheerfully anarcho-libertarian attitude. He wrote it in 1963, and many of the political and sexual themes he would be tackling with legendary skill by the end of that decade were well in evidence already.

There's nothing like a Heinlein book to put yourself in the proper frame of mind for a Monday morning at the wage-slave job - that is to say, to get you dreaming about the day you free yourself.

Because that's the whole point. "A wage slave, even in brackets where Uncle Sugar takes more than half, is still a slave." Even Heinlein's lesser triumphs are full of gems like that. Beautiful!