A Crazy Little World Called Gor
John Norman's Gor is a delicate subject to approach critically. We have always advocated reading fringe stuff that pushes the envelope of concept and good taste, feeling the the Edge of Town is where a lot of the really good stories get told. And political correctness is a concept we abhor. Arbiters of literature have no place in the democracy of Ideas.
But Gor is problematical. What began in the first three books of the series was the sword 'n sorcery world of the Counter Earth, the shaggy dog planet directly on the other side of the Sun from Earth, and thus invisible. Run by mysterious and powerful Beings, Gor is something like an individualist Dark Ages, a Roman pastiche where only primitive technology is used, and is yet capable of reaching out across the Solar System and snatching unwary Earthlings to its land of Adventure. After the third book, though, Norman began centering the books on a sociologically dubious treatment of female slavery. The rather straight and sometimes stuffy swordstuff tends to orbit around uncomfortably nasty sexual humiliation of women. Sure, this has been an (often implied) element of most weird heroics, from Conan on, but Norman goes over the line that many readers would find acceptable. Elaborate set pieces of sexual torture and slavery are the essential core of the stories; they are not plot devices insomuch as they become the plot. Sadism, rape, and violence are repeated ad nauseum, pushing the storytelling narrative into a place at the back of the whole enterprise.
A very disturbing aspect of all this is the clearly personal wish fulfillment that Norman's writing is rooted in. In real life a teacher at a small-time college, Norman has created a fiction that has a certain pathology that the thoughtful reader must connect to him in an almost therapeutic way. His hero Tarl Cabot is an unhappy, unfulfilled teacher in a small-time college, who is whisked off by a powerful and wise Father on a hidden Planet of Adventure, trained in the manly arts, and sent off to do good. There is no quibble on a function of fiction being a Stage to work out a writer's demons. Norman goes off the Edge when he starts waxing rhapsodic about women discovering the true meaning of femininity in slavery to men. In his Slave Girl of Gor he does this in the feminine voice, having the gall to do a woman's point of view. The rhapsody cannot hide the moldering, decay-like smell of pathology, as Norman describes certain "types" of women who sound like the gals who turned him down in college, and their subsequent rape, branding, and humiliation. And then he has them find true happiness as slaves, and slavery as the natural order of things.
The creepy thing is that Norman has touched quite a chord out there. The books are tremendously successful, and not just among men. A bookseller who hazarded some statistics had at least half of his sales being made to women. Perhaps there is some interest in the alternative sexual community, as many of the shennanigans have a ritual setup and execution that reads like an S&M text. And most certainly the Gor books do have an ideology, contrary as it is to straight sensibilities. It is well to be remembered that modern fiction was born from the pen of de Sade, who in writing about vile perversion opened the literary door for anyone to write about anything. The problem with Norman is that he is no de Sade. After the first three books, his stories are virtually unreadable. Long, run-on expositive dialogue, redundant iteration of his point (which, after all, is just the One), and the prose stuffiness of the volume-oriented pornographer make the Gor books a trial for the thinking reader looking for something other than a non-stop exposition of the author's twisted fantasy life and sexually frustrated psychology. If you don't care for the ideological mysogeny, there is not a whole lot more than the terrible writing.
What does it all mean? Who knows, other than that this is a really wrong society we have when it comes to the man-woman thing, and that we have a long way to go before something like the Gor books exert such a pull with genre literature fans. The low quality of the work is frankly surprising given the books' popularity; it is amazing that the fans are able to slog through them to get to the Good Parts. That they are is testimony to the power of Norman's ideas, no matter how repugnant to so many readers. The Gor books are no more a benchmark in the fall of Western values than the prevelance of pornography and violent imagery in the arts; these things have always existed and always will. It is also allright to be disturbed by these books and their popularity, as they do nothing to encourage a better world. Perhaps if they were Art, they might have a niche in culture, but these books have a poorly executed craft that leaves them to subsist on their ideas. Their ideas just aren't enough.
Another Critique {And I Thought I Was The Only One}
www.strangewords.com/weirdbooks/gor.html
"Adored (is that a manly-man enough word?) by many sword 'n sorcery guys and reviled by most of the critics, John Norman's Gor books are in some ways the most post-mod of all weird heroic stuff. Sexually bent, overtly mysogenistic, they have a braziness of vision that is truly epic, but the squirming Beast at the center of the books puts off many readers and most everybody that have anything to publicly to say about them. Is Norman's love of enslaved Woman hatred, or the manifestation of a dark fantasy? Who's to say"?
Well, either way it certainly shows Gor and the author for what he is.
Yet Another Critique {And I Thought I Was The Only One}
Misogynist and masochistic are just two of the many words I can't spell. Here's one I can - pervert.
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The Gor series Sword and Sorcery Conclusive evidence that perverts do not have much fun.
Re: Yet Another Critique {And I Thought I Was The Only One}
...I had been conned, conned through my own stupidity and gullibility into believing the books were real books. In short these were sad mucky books published as Fantasy allowing sad mucky people to buy such books from recognised bookstores.
slavemasters of gor: fantasy fetish or fetishizing fantasy?
by Nick Mamatas (laddertrick@gvny.com) - January 09, 2001
The Gor books of John Norman (a pseudonym for Professor John Lange) sparked the sexual awakening of many a science fiction fanboy back in the late 1960s and 1970s.
Combining the twin poles of attraction of science fiction (the alienation of the reader to modern society) and fantasy (the desire for mastery), the Gor books presented us with the world of Counter Earth, which can be found on the other side of the sun. Counter Earth is a pastiche of barroom sociology, Robert E. Howard's Conan settings and virulent sexism. On Gor, as its inhabitants call Counter Earth, the majority of women are the sexual slaves to the warrior men who populate the planet.
The draw of this set-up to the heavily alienated adolescent science fiction fans is obvious, and epic fantasy's appeal to desires for mastery is undoubtedly compelling. The first Gor books were published while the sexual revolution was still sticky and covered in afterbirth, so the PG-rated bondage and off-screen rapes helped the Gor books slip past busy high school librarians and worried Stepford moms.
At about the same time, leather culture and Dominance/submission (D/s) started to emerge as a public subculture in the United States. Buoyed by the sexual revolution and the gay liberation struggle, D/s relationships and practices became more popular. While sexual relationships where one or more partner is seemingly inferior to the other smacks of 19th century social mores, D/s was different. D/s relationships were and are built on explicit negotiation of limits and desires, and the power in the relationships is not simply seized or assumed, it is exchanged.
Underlying the praxis of sometimes severe behavior (a Dom or Domme may negotiate to control the sub's clothing, use of furniture, or sexual practices with other people, as well as dole out pain and pleasure), there is an essential recognition of equality between partners. Things only go as far as the sub wishes, and the explicit rules and regulations of D/s can often evolve into a profound implicit understanding of needs, desires and personality. Many sexual subs are dominant in everyday life, while Doms and Dommes are rarely order-barking goose steppers outside of their relationship roles.
The combination of science fiction fandom and D/s necessarily led to the appropriation of "Gorean" sentiment and practice into BDSM.
Goreans are different than your run of the mill BDSM relationship though, in that many of them reject the essential equality of men and women.
D/s opened up a whole new array of choices for people, but Gor shuts them down.
All women are inferior to all men. Dominant women just haven't found the right man yet, and lesbian women haven't found the right penis. Submissive men are freaks of nature, or the end result of too much pampering and cuckolding.
Some members of the real-life Gorean subculture believe that Earth is much like Counter Earth, in spite of the lack of barbarian hordes and giant, superintelligent crickets. And if liberated 1960s gals can be raped into humble submission on Gor, why couldn't it work here? Goreans stop short of calling for mass rapes and duels to the death, as the police and mental health professionals are everywhere, but the Gorean subculture is growing, especially online.
Gorean chatrooms and IRC channels are filled to the brimming with purple prose and asses streaked red from leather straps.
Gor is the fanboy's ghost dance: years ago, before the emergence of Milquetoast liberalism, didn't all women want to be ravished by strong men?
Weren't gays and lesbians "freaks of nature"?
Wasn't wife beating legal?
Through fantasy, brute force assertion, and pseudo-scientific bleating, Goreans hope to drag us all to this vicious fantasy world beyond the sun.
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