ORIGINALLY POSTED AT Fantasy Literature.I’m not sure why I’m still reading the Gor books. I guess it’s partly because Brilliance Audio has kindly sent them to me (they are nice productions), but it’s also largely because these books have been maligned for years as poorly written sexist-BDSM-erotica, so I can’t help but want to see for myself before dismissing them as such. After finishing book 3, Priest-Kings of Gor, here’s my take so far:They are not poorly written. The quality of the writing is quite good except for the overuse of phrases such as “to my amazement,” “to my surprise,” “I found it strange that,” “I marveled,” “I was astonished,” “I looked at him dumb-founded,” “I was thunder-struck,” etc. This may be more noticeable with the audio version, because the narrator, Ralph Lister, reads vivaciously, so these expressions of enthusiasm seem a little overdone. (But generally I appreciate Lister’s spirit and recommend the audio version if you want to read the Gor books.)The best aspect of the books, “to my surprise,” is the world building. John Norman has created a fully detailed alternate world which is fun to explore. In Priest-Kings of Gor, we finally meet the Priest-Kings who rule the planet, and they are not at all what we were expecting. In fact, they’re a different species altogether and Norman gives a lot of attention to their language, culture, sensory systems, and lifestyle. Personally, I found the Priest-Kings to be somewhat disturbing (I won’t go into details so as not to spoil things), so I didn’t enjoy spending so much time with them, but other readers are likely to feel differently.The Gor books are not, so far, erotic. Yeah, there are beautiful scantily-clad pouty women in chains who are kneeling at Tarl Cabot’s feet and claiming to be his pleasure slaves, but so far that’s all they do. It’s pretty silly, really. Which leads me to my next point:Sexist? Yes — but trying so hard not to be. And, unfortunately, this is where Gor goes wrong. It’s too hard to take it seriously because mostly it just feels like a teenage boy’s wet dream. That’s because Tarl Cabot keeps talking like he’s a feminist and denying that any woman is his slave, yet he keeps getting himself in these situations where he accidentally procures a female slave. These ladies are invariably beautiful and proud and are at first contemptuous, insolent, arrogant, and headstrong. Cabot admires their spirit and refuses to consider these wonderful humans to be slaves, but then two things happen: 1. He suspects them of treachery (while I’m wondering how they can be faithless if they’re not his slaves) and uses this as an excuse to degrade them (“Be silent, slave!”, “Wake up, wench!”), grab them by their hair and throw them around. 2. His refusal to use them as pleasure slaves insults them and makes them pout and demand to know if they’re not pretty enough for him (my goodness, aren’t they silly?).The end result is that each slave girl becomes submissive and is soon begging to please him (“please, master!”) and insisting that she loves him and wanted to wear his collar all along. Tarl, meanwhile, innocently insists that he doesn’t understand.After thinking about it for a while Tarl realizes that “every woman in her heart wants to wear the chains of a man” and that Gor is a man’s world and that women rejoice in this. In Priest-Kings of Gor, he uses natural selection to explain that men have evolved to be courageous and aggressive and that women have evolved to be submissive because they need food and shelter and to be forced to reproduce. If they’re too independent, they’ll die before breeding. Thus, natural selection favors submissive women who want to belong to a man.Those ideas are intriguing and I won’t completely dismiss them out of hand, but then Cabot goes on to suggest that if a woman is grabbed by her hair, thrown down, and raped, she considers this “proof of her mate’s regard” and the “expected culmination of her innate desire to be dominated.” Cabot’s evidence for this is our practice of giving a bride a wedding ring and carrying her over the threshold, which he suggests are analogous to bondage and rape, respectively.I don’t know a lot of women who are going to find these ideas acceptable or stimulating, but some do, and that’s fine with me. The problem with the Gor books, though, is that they try to propound this idea while trying to make Tarl Cabot out to be a humanist (and specifically a feminist) at the same time, and that doesn’t work. It just makes him sound like an idiot.In one scene, a slave girl assigned to take care of him while he’s in a particular room says she’s hungry and Tarl (who has just met her and didn’t know she hadn’t eaten) curses himself for not thinking about the feelings “of a girl who must be protected and cared for.” One minute later, she says something slightly snippy and he disciplines her by not letting her eat dinner. In fact, he’s constantly flipping between spouting humanistic sentiments and announcing that a slave girl (who he says isn’t his slave girl) needs discipline so she’ll learn her place. Um… what place? It’s no wonder he doesn’t understand these women — he can’t even keep his own philosophies straight in his own head.The whole thing would work better if Tarl Cabot found himself on this misogynist planet and, while being shocked at first, admitted and embraced the fact that all his puerile fantasies had come true and just went with it. Stop making excuses, Tarl. Stop accusing women of secretly wanting to be yelled at, bullied, thrown around, and raped. Gor is a man’s world, so just shut up, get out your collars and chains, and have some fun, okay?
Priest-Kings at once amused and annoyed me.When the story was actually moving, and Cabot wasn't stopping to describe each and every minute detail of Priest King culture, language, or religion, things could be entertaining. There were a moment or two of genuine laughs in there, hidden among the lectures on how many morphemes the Priest King's have in comparison to the morpheme count for English, German, and French. I do not know whether there are more morphemes in the language of the Priest-Kings or in English, but both are apparently rich languages, and, of course, the strict morpheme count is not necessarily a reliable index of complexity of the lexicon, because of combinations of morphemes to form new words. German, for example, tends to rely somewhat more on morpheme combination than does English or French.Don't get me wrong - the pacing of this installment of the Adventures of Tarl just dragged. So much of the story is bogged down in an infinite info-dump that when things actually do start happening, you're thankful for whatever brief change the book decides to throw at you. I followed him, and the panel closed.The floor seemed to drop beneath me and my hand grasped my sword.The Priest-King looked down at me and the antennae quivered as though in curiosity.I resheathed my sword.I was in an elevator.While this book suffers from All Women Dream of Tarl Syndrome, at least there weren't any surprise appearances by the Ubar of the Tarns, which made the book feel much more original than Outlaw of Gor. The final stretch of the book had some really nice action scenes, as well. Hell, a good portion of the ending is nothing more than a glorified, continuous fight scene. It was a beautiful break from the monotony of listening to Cabot lecture about Priest King anatomy.Things were going well. I was enjoying the story.And then...Cabot spoiled everything.I've been going into these books with the mindset that what happens on Gor stays on Gor - it evolved in different ways from Earth, so I can't expect Gor to share the same values as its sister planet. It takes a bit of a stretch, but so far in the series, I had been able to detach myself and not really be bothered by the whole "all women should at some point be enslaved to a man" thing.It certainly helped that Cabot looked at that cultural aspect of Gor from an outside perspective, and didn't blindly accept that the way women are treated on Gor was the right way of doing things. The Gorean man...cheerfully and dutifully attends to the rescuing of his female in distress, but as a Gorean, a true Gorean, he feels, perhaps justifiably and being somewhat less or more romantic than ourselves, that he should have something more for his pains than her kiss of gratitude and so, in typical Gorean fashion, puts his chain on the wench, claiming both her and her body as his payment.My eye was twitching at that point, but still I was willing to give Cabot the benefit of the doubt. As teeth-grindingly offensive as that was, Cabot was still looking at the issue as an Earth vs Gor comparison. But, he continued. It seemed possible to me that one trait of high survival value might be the desire on the part of the woman to belong - utterly - to a man.It seemed clear that woman would, if the race were to survive, have to be sheltered and defended and fed - and forced to reproduce her kind.If she were too independent she would die in such a world and if she did not mate her race would die....I, like many Gorean masters, provided the girl was not testing or challenging me...preferred as a matter of fact to have my own name on the girl's lips, for I think, with acknowledged vanity, that there are few sounds as pleasurable as the sound of one's own name on the lips of a beautiful woman.At that point, all of Cabot's objectivity died. He was no longer appraising the system as an outsider, but began including himself as a Gorean. I may have thrown my book against the wall at that point in the story.Cabot's sudden need to monologue relentlessly about woman's place in the evolutionary chain of things just killed the book for me. I had actually been enjoying the story, info-dumps and all, up until that point.In the end, this was hard for me to settle on a rating for. I would have given the action sequences alone four stars, yet Cabot's evolutionary lecture was so rage inducing that that one scene should have dropped my rating down to two stars. So, I settled on three stars as a compromise.
What do You think about Priest-Kings Of Gor (1968)?
This, the 3rd in the Chronicles of Gor series, very nearly got 5 stars, and perhaps it should still get those 5 really. One of the main reasons it didn't is because of the sheer alien-ness of the Priest Kings, great insectile creatures that immediately had me attempting to look away even as I continued to read about them. This wasn't at all unexpected since there's a nice colour piccy of one of them right there on the cover. Still, I had a little difficulty empathizing with them to quite the extent I would have liked.The story continues where the last left off with our hero(?) Tarl Cabot venturing into the nest of the Priest Kings in a bid to find his lost love Talena and rescue her. As usual for Tarl, he gets more than a little sidetracked and ends up instigating a civil war within the nest and ultimately destroying it. This however, turns out to have been planned by the Priest Kings all along. He has in fact been used not just by one side but by both in turn, each with their own agenda.Of course, in amongst all this waring and excitement he still manages to both enslave a girl and become enslaved by the very same girl himself. This also turns out to be part of her plan to help him though and as is only appropriate in these circumstances, she falls in love with him and is promptly rejected(albeit nicely) by Tarl because of his enduring love for Talena.So, this, like the first two in the series was both frustrating and enjoyable at the same time. Frustrating because of the way Tarl treats the girl he's enslaved at times(he really is a bit of a sadist when all's said and done, but maybe the nicer kind of sadist if such there is!) and enjoyable because of the sheer pulpiness of the story and it's unfailing ability to make you sit up and gasp at the sheer delightful nonsense of it all.I love these novels. Make of that what you will...
—Shane
I have read the entire series, there simply isn't anything else like it; they are decadent and addictive, completely and wholly something everyone should have on their MUST READ list. Edgar Rice Burroughs BARSOOM series would be a faint comparison, I suppose; but Norman carries his characters to a depth of depravity that is reminiscent of a D/s or BDSM fetish fanatics dream. At the same time, they are not written in a way as to be entirely sexual, he merely casts about components and subtle subtext that one familiar with the lifestyle would of course pick up on, while a "vanilla" person could read right over without ever noticing or being offended.The worst part of this series is it's highly addictive quality. Not long after I read my first book, I found myself at a Second Hand BookStore in Dallas purchasing a paperbag FULL of the entire series. 20 years later and I still have them! And, I always WILL!
—J.L. Day
Giant insects are the ones behind it all? An engaging curve ball that could have been easily expanded on.
—Aclla
