Authors: Robert A Heinlein

Glory Road (40 page)

BOOK: Glory Road

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And within it all,
Glory Road
maintains a delicacy, a bravura, and a joy that not only are notable, but clearly consign it to his heptology of major SF novels—central, in its time of writing, range of themes, and variety of narrative organization, to the continuing Heinlein enterprise.

—New York, December 1979

1: Later critical assessments by Alexei Panshin (in collaboration with his wife, Cory) are both more insightful and more lively.
Heinlein in Dimension
finally dies the death of plot synopsis after plot synopsis, coupled with a rather undergraduate insistence on explaining exactly what is illogical in the plot of each one. The essays on Heinlein contained in
SF in Dimension
are something quite else; the closing consideration, on (among other occasions) Heinlein’s most recent book,
The Number of the Beast, included in
the Second Revised and Enlarged Edition, is a fine piece of work.
(SF in Dimension
,
Second Edition—Revised and Enlarged,
Chicago: Advent, 1980.) Currently the best full-length critical study of Heinlein, by far, is
Robert A. Heinlein: America as Science Fiction,
by H. Bruce Franklin, New York; Oxford University Press, 1980. It is a sympathetic approach to Heinlein that also manages to be historically sensitive, politically sophisticated, and informed on the subject of science fiction’s distinctive history.