Apologist of Gor
Fans of Science Fiction will probably know exactly what I'm
talking about just by the title, and for you I want to start out
by saying: Hold on - let me explain! And if you aren't aware of
what I'm talking about - I'll explain.
There is a series of science fiction books written by John
Norman (a pseudonym) set on a mythical planet called Gor, also
called Counter Earth because it rotates on exactly the opposite
side of the Sun, which - if you know anything about astronomy -
you know is impossible.
None the less, that's where Gor is located.
Gor is a planet that's kept permanently primitive by a
super-race of hyperintelligent insect overlords named Priest
Kings who are at war with another more brutal species of
bear-like creatures called Kurii. The Kurii want to take over
not only Gor but Earth, too, but it's the only power of the
fabulous Priest Kings who keep them at bay. The Priest Kings
also maintain Gor in that convenient orbit just on the exact
opposite side of the Sun.
And the most important thing you need to know about Gor is that
there are slaves and especially there are slave girls.
Lots and lots of slave girls.
I started reading these books when I was a teen-ager and - in
the first books at least - the slave girl thing wasn't all that
much of a feature of the books. The saga started out with the
protaganist, Tarl Cabot growing to manhood in Bristol England
among female relatives, believing that he had been abandoned by
his father. One day when he was out hiking he was kidnaped by a
Priest King spaceship and taken to Gor where he discovers his
father, now the administrator of a fabled Gorean city Ko-Ro-Ba.
Tarl's father had not abandoned him, but had instead been
kidnaped before his son by another spaceship.
Ko-Ro-Ba is at war with Ar. Tarl becomes a warrior and a rider
of giant hawkish birds called Tarns and then through a series of
adventures he becomes involved with the daughter of the Ubar
(sort of a dictator) of Ar who is Marlenus of Ar. So far so good.
A side note here: Everybody in this story is named 'somebody of
somewhere', so that by this scheme I would be 'Steve of
Minneapolis' and you would be 'you of from where ever you're
from'. It just makes me wonder if every person who grew up and
lives in the same city would have to keep saying that they were
from the exact city they were living in and had lived in all
their lives. It would be pretty silly.
So that's about the story of the first book. As far as slavery -
and especially female slavery - the narrator and hero of this
book, Tarl, thinks it's just wrong. I've got to tell you that
over the course of this long series of books (about twenty plus)
he gradually changes his mind about that - and how! But the
first half dozen or so books, not so much. It's in there, but
it's only a small, small part and not so much.
I took these books as mostly fantasy/adventure of the sort
written by Edgar Rice Burroughs in his Mars series or Robert E.
Howard's Conan series. Women didn't play such a big part in
those books, but they didn't have to. It was the fighting and
stuff that was most important.
In later Gor books the S&M crap just took over the stories so
that I would actually skim past those sections to continue with
the real plot and just ignore those parts. You could usually
figure out which where the places you could skip because John
Norman would have these huge unbroken paragraphs which you
learned to spot. His Bondage and Discipline gradually became
more and more prevalent until - at the end - all of his female
slaves are nothing but orgasm machines climaxing every time one
of the masterful Gorean males so much as raised a whip.
It wasn't erotic. It was just ludicrous.
But I kept reading hoping that somewhere along the line John
Norman would get back to plain old story telling, continuing the
tale of the war between the two alien species. That never
happened and I have a bunch of books I've pretty much never read
because he never got back to it.
At times I thought about who John Norman was. His name I spotted
as a pen name right from the start and I also figured out that
he must be somebody pretty educated because he used a bunch of
history to create his particular world. My guess was that he was
a pretty lonely middle-aged man who was furiously busy
pleasuring himself with one hand while typing with the other. If
he was married, I guessed that he was far from the fictional
masterful men that he wrote about. In fact, I imagined him to be
rather henpecked.
My quick search of the internet showed that he was indeed a
college professor, but not at a very prestigeous school and
there were two pictures of him that I could find. One showed him
with one hand over his mouth, but otherwise he looked slim,
silver haired and possibly handsome. That picture looked like it
might be from the seventies. Another later picture showed a full
on face where he looked considerably older and possibly as if
he'd had a stroke since it looked like half of his face was
drooping.
There are now many fetish communities (possibly all on-line)
modeled after or devoted to the sort of 'philosophy' put out by
these books. To my mind they look particularly icky - but hey,
to each his own! I'm not here to judge and if adults want to
willingly play at this stuff then I'm just fine with that. I do
remember that there was a case in the Midwest where a serial
killer was using one of these on-line communities to attract
victims, but most people, I think, just take it as fun and games.
I took one of my unread Gor books off my shelf just now. opened
it up and realized that the writing actually isn't all that
good. I don't think it was always that way. My memory was that
in the first half a dozen or so books the writing was at the
least competent and those first half dozen (or maybe only first
four or five) books were engrossing enough to read and reread.
They weren't great literature, but they were diverting enough.
For some reason, I never held onto the books in the series that
I liked the best. I don't know why.
If you ever happen to get ahold of any of those initial books:
I'd recommend them, maybe with a few reservations, maybe with a
lot of reservations. But go ahead and read them. They won't kill
you. They're only books.