Glory Road

Glory Road is a science fantasy novel by the American writer Robert A. Heinlein, serialised in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1963 and published in hardcover the same year. It was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1964.

Evelyn Cyril Gordon, known as Easy and sometimes as Flash, is a veteran with a scar on his face who reads an advertisement in the personals that seems to describe him exactly. It has been placed by Star, a woman he has met before, who tells him that he is the man to fetch the Egg of the Phoenix. Gordon and Rufo, Star's assistant, set out along the Glory Road in the company of an Empress whose life has been extended indefinitely by medical treatment, and the road is furnished with dragons, duels and the guardian of the Egg, who appears in the shape of Cyrano de Bergerac.

The novel mixes the equipment of a science fiction story with the furniture of a sword-and-sorcery quest, and Gordon's competence with weapons, engineering and mathematics is what earns him his place on the expedition.