Fans of Science Fiction - good science fiction - know about the planet Gor, and what they know about it is that it's a planet they never want to visit - not even in the comfort of their own homes. I've got a lot of explaining to do for these folks, and I will. And if you aren't aware of what I'm talking about - well, then let me fill you in.
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.
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