hans_the_bold's Journal

The Two Worlds of Gor
Having been the inspiration of

sovay's recent post about Assassin of Gor, I feel I should offer a few comments about Gor, so to explain, in part at least, just WHAT THE HELL I WAS THINKING when I loaned her that book.

Okay. Over a curry dinner, I commented that Assassin of Gor resembled the typical James Bond movie plot: undefeatable hero, hot, sexy female sidekick, wicked megalomaniac villain, cool chase scenes, sex, more sex (but always implied, never graphic), good triumphing over evil despite impossible odds, happy ending. And in this, I have to rate Assassin of Gor as a perfectly acceptable read, not promising more than it delivers.

Had John Norman stopped the series there, Gor would have been remembered as a nice five book series of science fantasy adventures.

But he didn't stop.

Instead, Gor is, for the most part, a running joke among science fiction and fantasy fans, and deservedly so, lending itself to parodies like Houseplants of Gor and Gay, Bejeweled, Nazi Bikers of Gor. The reasons for this are twofold: first, John Norman is a very, very poor writer, and second, his theories about gender relations are so overgeneralized that they come across as ridiculous.

As a result, the Gor books have rarely been given serious treatment as literature, and that's a shame. Because despite the fact that they are often offensive, they are also an important part of the history of science fiction and fantasy. What Norman did was show the sexual side of heroic fantasy that authors like Robert E. Howard had only implied, and as well, the Gor books are an artifact of their times and the culture in which they were created. During the 1970's and 1980's, when most of the Gor books were written, feminism was finding itself, and this included the evolution of a radical feminism of the Andrea Dworkin/Catharine MacKinnon type, which regards sex as a thing to carefully regulate for political ends. For those of us who have read the later Gor books, it is clear that the vilification of feminists becomes a stronger and stronger theme, to the point of pathology. Gor is a reaction to radical feminism.

Assassin of Gor was, in my opinion, the watershed moment in the series. Norman had a formula not dissimilar to the James Bond formula, and this had served him well for five books. But in book six of the series, Raiders of Gor, everything changed. Tarl Cabot (I have a terrible verbal tick in that I want to call him "Carl Cabbage"-- sorry) is sent on yet another mission by the Priest-Kings (them big bugs that run Gor), but he gets himself into a tight spot where his only hope for survival is to become a slave. This he does, but feels such shame over his decision that he abandons his old morality. Gone is his "Honor", his "warrior caste codes" etc. Oddly, Tarl has been a slave before, in Outlaw of Gor, and he simply saw it as a challenge to overcome. So instead of finishing his mission, he becomes the utterly self-serving "Bosk of Port Kar". This book is followed by Captive of Gor, the first book told from the point of view of an Earth woman abducted to Gor to be a slave girl, at which point Norman's publisher changed and he was picked up by Daw Books. The first book published by Daw, Hunters of Gor, is so different from Assassin of Gor that it is hard to believe that they were penned by the same author.

Where in Assassin of Gor, for example, Tarl has a moral code that leads him to free a large number of slaves at the end of the book, an act that the Goreans regard as noble, in Hunters of Gor he actively enslaves every woman he can lay his hands on, to the approval of his Gorean comrades. Where in Assassin of Gor it takes many months of conditioning to turn an Earth woman into a willing slave, in Hunters of Gor it takes only one romp in the sack with Tarl for any woman to "see the light" and welcome a life of abuse. Elizabeth, who in Assassin of Gor was a lively, self-assured character, is ruthlessly betrayed by Tarl, and her appearance in the books that follow is one of the saddest examples of Norman's failure as a writer; at every turn she gets stupider and more docile, becoming just another penis holster for Tarl and his buddies in the end.

Further, Gor loses its alien sense in the books following Assassin of Gor. In the first five books, there are aliens for Tarl to meet; like the imaginary Mars of Edgar Rice Burroughs that stands as the original inspiration of Gor, Norman's imaginary world is rich with surprises and adventure. There are giant, intelligent pacifist spiders, amoeba monsters, big bugs, aliens with nefarious plans who must be defeated, beautiful maidens to be rescued, swordplay against great odds. But following Assassin of Gor, the world Norman paints seems more and more just like Earth; just as the books get longer (and longer, and LONGER), the less interesting the world of Gor itself becomes.

This strange affair is explained by Norman's obvious interest in listening to himself philosophize, as he attempts to justify his growing misogyny (I add here that the misogyny is not because of the sex, or even the sexual dominance and submission theme, but with the ever-present violence committed against female slaves on Gor) with longer and longer diversions away from the story, and his obvious efforts to impress his readers with his anthropological research. Instead of giving us an alien world, his heroes are more and more sent off to deal with human cultures from Earth, transplanted to Gor. This reaches its sad and laughable conclusion in his attempt to recreate the old West on Gor in Savages of Gor and Blood Brothers of Gor, complete with cowboys (the Hobart brothers) and an obvious love of the mythical "noble savage".

I wonder if this deterioration in the quality of the Gor books can be traced to the change from Del Rey to Daw; the later books seem to be less edited than the earlier ones. This is a common failing in science fiction and fantasy, and Norman is hardly the first author in the genre to have seen his later books deteriorate because of his own success; Heinlein's later books fail for the same reason, and what else could explain the travesty that is Niven and Pournelle's Footfall? Since the later Gor books did sell well without editing, it would make sense for Daw to just let Norman run wild, since that freed up editing resources for Daw's other projects, while the commercial success of the Gor books helped keep the company afloat. We can thank Gor, in other words, for a lot of Daw's other, better work.

I return now to Assassin of Gor, and to the fork in the road represented there. There are two Earth women highlighted among the slaves being trained in that book: Virginia and Phyllis. Virginia falls in love with the young guard Relius, and their love story is really quite sweet; as a mere guard, he will never be able to afford an expensive pleasure slave such as Virginia is being trained to be, so there is a sadness to their relationship that Norman handles well. In the end, Relius sides with Tarl against the villain, and as his reward is granted Virginia, whom he frees because he loves her. They get married and happiness ensues. Phyllis, on the other hand, is a feminist, and she falls in love with another guard, Ho-Sorl, whom she claims to hate. In the end, he too sides with Tarl, and is rewarded with Phyllis, whom he keeps as a slave, and who is shown as having decided that slavery and submission are what turns her on after all.

What happened with Gor after Tarl flies off into the sunset at the end of Assassin of Gor is that Norman was faced with a choice: the Virginia model or the Phyllis model. With the Virginia model we have a sexy paradigm in which slavery is an unpleasant reality of the world from which most people want to escape; with the Phyllis model women are sexual toys who desire to submit to men. Norman chose the latter for Gor, and pretty much every woman who appears in the series after this is to some extent a clone of Phyllis. To the best of my knowledge, Virginia and Relius never appear in the series again.

It could have worked, of course. Had Norman realized that the Phyllis model was a perfectly functional paradigm for bondage fetish fiction, he could have really had something, since it is in writing about edgy, uncomfortable topics that great literature is often born. If he had had the talent to present the protagonist of Slave Girl of Gor as a submissive woman seeking sexual and emotional satisfaction, for example, he could have commented on human sexuality in a way that enlightened us. But he didn't. In fact, he didn't even write effective porn, since he refused to actually show any real sex; there's lots of hinting and lots of background, but actual sex is usually described in a single sentence: "I used her" or "he used me". This is boring and disappointing and often broken up by philosophical rants that all say the same thing. Instead of adventure or sex, then, Gor gives us some titillation and the frustration of bigger and bigger books that say less and less.

What a pity.

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