Summer Reading List No. 7-Glory Road by Robert A. Heinlein

Glory Road by Robert A. Heinlein was published in book form and serialized in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, both in the same year, 1963. Although the decade was still young, Glory Road was at least the third of Heinlein's novels to be published since 1960 and one of three published in 1963. Heinlein had already put a lot of magazine writing behind him. One of his last short stories was "All You Zombies . . .", from The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, March 1959. And what a way to go out. He spent most of the rest of his life writing novels. My copy of Glory Road is the Berkeley Medallion edition from 1970 with cover art by Paul Lehr (1930-1998).

I'll start by speculating that Glory Road must have been one of the first science fiction stories (if not the first) to have treated the Vietnam War. Its narrator and protagonist, "Scar" Gordon, is a combat veteran of a war that was not supposed to have been a war when Heinlein wrote. Being a former military man, Heinlein must have been always on the alert for wars and rumors of wars. He must have recognized the expanding war in Vietnam as a jumping-off point for his own explorations, however great or small, of the human condition.

At first you wonder about the setup of Glory Road. Halfway through, you're still wondering: What kind of book is this? And in the end, you still wonder: What has happened here? Has it all been a fantasy, worse yet a delusion? Is the narrator even sane? Or has he been driven into gentle madness by Heinlein's own nostalgia, the sense of the author's loss of the golden age of his own youth and of a better America? Has Scar Gordon suffered a psychotic episode of some kind? And if so, is it because of his war experience? Or is it because of the larger facts of his living in a certain version of twentieth-century America, with all of its isolation and alienation, its mindless conformity and commodification of everything, with the sense that we have all been cut adrift and are now utterly alone?

At first, Heinlein's book seems brash and clever and smart-alecky, a typical Heinlein product. Then you begin to see just how sophisticated and daring it is. Is it all over by the halfway mark? What can be left to tell? But it goes on, and under all of it is a growing and affecting sadness. Much of that sadness seems to be Heinlein's own, but it could be the sadness and nostalgia and loss experienced by any former childhood reader and fan of science fiction and fantasy, for in July 1963, when Glory Road was first in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Robert A. Heinlein turned fifty-six years old.*

* * *

Charles Fort is in Glory Road, though not by name:

     Star went on, "Whatever the truth, there are leakages between worlds. On your own planet disappearances run to hundreds of thousands and not all are absconders or wife-deserters; see any police department's files. One usual place is the battlefield. The strain becomes too great and a man slides through a hole he didn't know was there and winds up 'missing in action.' Sometimes--not often--a man is seen to disappear. One of your American writers, Bierce or Pierce, got interested and collected such cases. He collected so many that he was collected, too. And your Earth experiences reverse leakage, the 'Kaspar Hausers,' persons from nowhere, speaking no known language and never able to account for themselves."

     "Wait a minute? Why just people?"

     "I didn't say 'just people.' Have you never heard of rains of frogs? Of stones? Of blood? Who questions a stray cat's origin? Are all flying saucers optical illusions? I promise you they are not; some are poor lost astronauts trying to find their way home. My people use space travel very little, as faster-than-light is the readiest way to lose yourself among the Universes. We prefer the safer method of metaphysical geometries--or 'magic' in the vulgar speech." (pp. 133-134)

There is more than just Charles Fort in that passage, though. There is also a clue to Scar Gordon's situation: the soldier experiences so great a strain on the battlefield that he "slides through a hole he didn't know was there." Or is it in fact a clue? Maybe instead it's just a red herring. The ending makes you wonder.

Ambrose Bierce is here, but then Bierce had previously been on Fort's mind, too. (Pierce may be a pun--the mysterious Bierce seems to have pierced a barrier between worlds and slid through a hole as well.) Maybe Bierce got into Glory Road by way of Fort, who speculated that someone in the universe is collecting Ambroses.

Kaspar Hauser, also mentioned in the passage above, is in Wild Talents (1932), Fort's final book and a chronicle of people with strange and unexplained powers and abilities (and a possible source for the science-fictional concept of psychic powers and the Superior Man). Rains of frogs, stones, and blood are in Fort, too, as are flying saucers, though not by name. Special, wild talents and visitors from other worlds--these form Science Fiction Plots #1 and #2 summarized in my previous entry in this series.

Like Spider Robinson after him, Heinlein read Charles Fort and inserted him into his book. My question is: Why? If twentieth-century American science fiction existed separate from the concepts of Charles Fort, why did its writers return to him again and again? Why did they draw from him, rely on him, resort to him, like a prop for their three-legged table? I'm not sure. If you have ever read Fort's writing, you know him to have been an eccentric, if not a crank. He wrote like a drunkard. His theorizing is kind of half- or three-quarters-crazy. (If he was a monist, does that mean he is in a category with Hegel and Marx? Now we're talking some crazy.) H.G. Wells referred to him as a damnable bore. (Maybe Wells, sensing a usurper, was jealous.) H.L. Mencken wrote that Fort seems to have been "enormously ignorant of elementary science." He called Fort a quack. And yet one science fiction author after another--authors of weird fiction, too--seem to have read him with relish and to have absorbed his myriad/monadic ideas. I guess in practical terms that makes sense: here was enough material for an endless number of stories, constructed from endless permutations of Fort's "data." So were these authors merely opportunists? Or did they really believe in him? I can't say. In Glory Road, Heinlein, a science-minded man to be sure, seems to have followed the Charles Fort Road as well, making anti-science and science, magic (or metaphysics) and mathematics into one continuous thing: the damned and the not damned walk together down that endless road.

* * *

There is a larger influence in Glory Road. That comes next.

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*In 1963, Heinlein was almost exactly halfway through his career as a published author of science fiction. At the halfway point of Glory Road, the narrator runs into a kind crisis: the fun and adventurous part is over; now something else begins. Could Heinlein have seen himself or recreated himself as his own protagonist? Was the fun part over for him?

To be continued . . .

Above: The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, July and September, 1963. The cover story is a serialization of Robert A. Heinlein's Glory Road. The artist was Emsh (1925-1990).

Original text copyright 2021, 2023 Terence E. Hanley