An alien, a punk, a nerd, and a valley girl team up to save the universe by keeping an Empathic Weapon out of the hands of evil aliens. Along the way, they meet strange new lifeforms. And Neanderthals.
Not to be confused with another science fiction novel, Robert A. Heinlein's Glory Road.
This novel provides examples of:
- Always a Bigger Fish: The species we meet talk about the Isotat as if they are gods. We meet them, and another species at their level shows up to fight them. Then an even more powerful and enlightened species shows up. Turns out the MacGuffin outshines them all!
- AcCENT upon the Wrong SylLABle: An alien in disguise on Earth is described as talking like this, stressing the wrong syllables and words, due to having learned English from a cheap crash course.
- Born Lucky: Miranda is right up there with Teela Brown in never getting a hair out of place.
- Dumb Blonde: Again, Miranda (well, blonde with black stripes. Or maybe black with blonde stripes). Averted, because it turns out she has...
- Hidden Depths: while Miranda has Valley girl tendencies, and seems like The Ditz, she can also spout theories about quantum physics and math.
- Like a Duck Takes to Water: Seeth fits in much better in space than he ever did on Earth.
- MacGuffin Blindness: The protagonists' adorable shape-shifting Companion Cube turns out to be the item everyone else in the entire book is looking for, and no one realizes it till the end.
- The Nicknamer: Seeth gives everyone nicknames based on their appearance. Mostly aimed at Miranda.
- Pretender Diss: Punk rock guy Seeth points out you can always tell the posers by their nice shoes.
- The Reveal: Foster does quite a good job of concealing through most of the book that the punk and nerd are brothers.
- Valley Girl: Miranda (although she's actually from Texas).
- Zipperiffic: Seeth is described as wearing a jacket 'dripping with zippers'.
