Witness of Gor — John Norman
Hello, my lovelies. I apologize for my enforced hiatus from book blogging – I just moved, and haven’t had reliable internet access for the last few weeks. But don’t worry. My lack of posting does not mean I haven’t been reading, so look forward to seeing a bunch of critiques coming up soon.
Now, on to the review.
The last time I was on the intarwebs, there was a big to-do going on in regards to the re-release of the Gor series, and the publication of a new Gor novel. For those of you not in the know, Gor is a series by John Norman. It’s the name of his counter-Earth, a planet whose orbit mirrors ours exactly, so the two planets are always on opposite sides of the sun. We don’t know about them, and the average Gorean doesn’t know about us. The only contact we Earthlings have with Gor is when one of ours is brought over by mysterious forces.
Sometimes, these mysterious forces aren’t so mysterious. Women on Gor are slaves. Sure, there are “free women” – but, as you’re reminded over and over again throughout the course of the series, a free woman is just a slave without a collar. And they love it. Only in slavery and in submission do women (both Earth and Gorean) realize their true femininity. Men are real men – they’re beasts, brutes, and warriors, chockfull of honor and honest-to-goodness manhood, not the tepid stuff men from our world try to play off as masculinity. So sometimes? Those mysterious forces have a not-so-mysterious motivation: profit. Gorean slavers often raid Earth in order to kidnap its women, who are known for their “hot bellies” (ease of arousal) and overall craving for REAL MEN.
Already, it’s a mixture for problematically awesome times. There’s the many proud, bratty women (all women in this series are proud and bratty, until forcibly reminded to be otherwise) who realize they in fact love being topped and collared. There’s the men who are eager to top and collar them. There’s the static gender roles. There’s the constant denigration of the feminist movement, the insistence that equal rights squashes women’s sexuality, the idea that lesbian/assertive women just haven’t met the right man, and on and on. Underlying all this is the insistence that these sexualized gender roles are a biological necessity.
This book exhausted me. It truly did. Especially since I used to like Gor. To be honest with you, I read Tarnsmen, Outlaw, Raiders, and Magicians when I was a wee Pommy. This is not my first introduction to the series. This is not my first introduction to intrinsic gender roles, to slavery in fantasy fiction, to male fantasies of what real women are like. I liked Gor. I thought it was good fun. I thought John Norman and I were having a romp through the tropes – he was writing a slightly explicit sword-and-sorcery and I was just along for the ride. I thought he was writing self-reflexively, that it was “just fiction.”
Witness of Gor changed that for me. Maybe it’s because this is the first Gorean novel I remember reading from a female perspective (I think I picked up Kajira of Gor at one point, but didn’t finish it). Maybe it’s because I really like who I am. I don’t think I need to be collared or flogged or whatever to realize my truest self. Maybe it’s because Norman’s narrator really clearly shut down any progressive possibilities within the text. The misogyny is just that thick. Our girl Janice can’t even envision being friends with other women. After being kidnapped and subjugated on Gor, and realizing she loves it there, she thinks, ‘Would they [her Earth friends] be able to grasp now that she must obey, that she must please and serve?…What would it be like, I suddenly wondered, to compete with them?… Would we not, suddenly, find ourselves divided against one another?’ (WoG 119).
Honestly? At this point, I think I died a little inside. It’s rare that women’s relationships with one another gets treated well in SF/F. Not only are women biologically designed to be submissive, constantly antagonistic when not properly owned, and only happy in servitude, but they can’t actually have friends. All the other women are competition and all the men are their masters.
What a lonely, lonely existence.
Sigh. I read all 720 pages. I felt dirty when I was done. I felt especially dirty when I got to John Norman’s letter to fans. At the end of it, he asks, ‘How many honest books have you read lately?’ Plenty, really – too bad that number didn’t include this book.
Bleh.
ETA:
here are some John Norman/Gor links:
http://www.pantheus.com/TGV/archive92002/TGV/biblio.shtml
http://www.gor.net/things/challeng.html
Get the 
20 comments
Any chance you could reprint Norman’s letter in full? A lot of the fans who troll anti-Gor posts make the argument that it’s just “fiction”, so it would be really great to have some evidence of Norman himself saying that he thinks what he says about women and men is true.
:blush!: i was one of those fans maybe 5 or 6 years ago. but what i’ll do is, scan the pages/type them out before returning it to the library.
Even with the trolling?
It’s one thing to use the line as a defense when someone’s talking about the book, but the ones I’m talking about will find anything anti-Gor and go type out novel length diatribes about why the person posting is a hypocrite and evil and Norman was just writing fiction and whatever.
I would really really appreciate it! It’s hard finding good evidence on the net. I’ve had part of a post in the works on Gor (focusing on the lifestyle, but I want textual evidence to support my arguments) for over a year. There used to be a news article about a Gorean lifestyler who basically enacted the kidnapping and systematic breaking of a woman, but it’s no longer available and I couldn’t find it on The Wayback Machine
oh, no. i never trolled anti-gor sites. but, if you’d asked me about it, i would’ve said it was just fiction.
i remember that news article. it’s odd that it’s not online anymore. hrrm.
do you mean this one?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4996410.stm
WORLD OF GOR
http://www.worldofgor.com
John Norman’s official website for Gor
“A good maxim to keep in mind is that if it is not beautiful it is not Gorean.”
John Norman
“A thousand underground newspapers can thrive; new worlds can be discovered; friends can find one another at last; speech, at least for a time, before the thugs of a tyrant state can bring their bayonets to bear, can sparkle in secret, refreshing places, in little-known channels, outside the guiding cement causeways of a docile, engaged, massive media, subservient to the agendas of their masters, the enemies of freedom, the statists, collectivists and authoritarians. On the Internet, let it be remembered in the future, there was a moment, now, in which the original intent of the First Amendment of a maligned, perverted, treasured document was recollected, recollected before the new falling of the censor’s night, a document drafted by men freshly come out of a bloody war, men who understood the price of freedom, and were only too well aware of the dangers and terrors of the state. How hard it is to recall old lessons, taught on battlefields whose meaning has been forgotten.
So one does not know how long one may speak to one’s friends. The time may not be long, so perhaps this is the moment to break a long silence. There is no thaw in the ice of censorship and blacklisting, of course, but to the side of the titanic glacier which chills an entire intellectual hemisphere a few drops of warm water, nursed by the sun, may trickle toward the sea, until in time an armed winter may be again imposed on even such pitiful drops.
How strange that John Norman has not been forgotten. To be sure, it is hard to forget what one most hates, or most loves. How rare is the truly dissenting voice, and how perilous the consequences of its utterance. Does John Norman not understand this? How amusing that so many style themselves noble and courageous when their claims to bravery consist in mouthing the approved bromides of the establishment. Who would object to them, really? Caligula, Commodus, Torquemada, Calvin, Cromwell? I wonder if they would have spoken so boldly in the days of those fellows, with flames and pikes at their elbow? Today they are threatened by no one who has any power. Rather they are telling those in power what those in power wish to hear. How often pusillanimous sycophants pose as heroes! Lickspittles can carry flags in parades; men carry them in battle.”
? John Norman
John Norman’s Note to his Fans
My dear friends:
You will never know, nor can I adequately express, what you mean to me.
We will, for the most part, never meet, nor see one another, or talk to one another, but we are together, despite all that, and we are friends. That is possible. That is real.
Too, this is not so strange.
Have we not thrilled to the songs of poets who lived while lions bestrode the canopied, stained sands of the Coliseum, who wrote before Leif Ericsson breached his ship on the green shores of Finland, who died before the first cannonade was discharged at Waterloo? Are we not their friends? I should like to think so. To care for someone, to rejoice that they lived – is that not to be their friend?
So one does not have to know one another to be friends. I hope we are friends.
So what is happening here, now, in this obscure corner of history? Something, one supposes – but for a few, for us.
It seems, unaccountably, a book may be published, another song in the Gorean cycle, after long years of slander, calumny, denigration, vituperation, blacklisting, and censorship.
Have you been patient?
I have refused to surrender, to submit, to yield, to compromise the integrity of the Gorean vision. Better it die than be betrayed.
I wonder if our enemies can understand that?
I suspect not.
The hounds of hatred are still afoot.
I find it hard to understand them.
Are we such a reproach to them? Can they not forgive us for refusing to enter and share their small, dark, ugly world?
It seems not.
I worry.
There are more of them than there are of us.
But the herd need not be king.
There is a role, surely, for the hunters, the wanderers, the nomads, the different ones, the lonely ones, the seekers of less trodden paths and greener fields.
They will try to suppress us, to destroy us. For years they have tried. They may yet be successful.
But is they are successful, what would be left? Only the desolate flats, the arid deserts, of conformity. How ashen, narrow, and sterile is the tedious, platitudinous world they would impose on us!
They want us to be free – free to be just like them. But perhaps we would rather be free – to be just like us.
Liberty is not so terrible; it only seems so to those who fear it. The virus of hate is abroad.
Our defenses are several, and formidable, the blasting winds of honor, the distance of disdain, the heights of contempt, the sunlight of truth, the approbative collegiality of nature.
So here is a book.
Words, but swords and flames, and signals, and cries in the darkness, and reminiscences of brighter, better times, of times before the houses of a once-promising genre were turned into ideological brothels, peddling the politics of intellectual incarceration.
It is my hope that you will enjoy the book.
How many honest books have you read lately?
I wish you well,
John Norman
Witness of Gor – 721-724
This message contains information that may be over the heads of the ironically challenged. (Given Norman’s contempt for 50% of the population’s liberty).
heh. keep in mind that norman is referring to biological liberty — the freedom to be the way nature intended, as referred to here:
One of my biggest pet peeves in life is people who know for certain how nature intended us to be. You can’t possibly argue with them in a rational way because if you point out people who don’t conform to their expectations, they just dismiss those people as messed up.
I feel dirty just reading the review, and later in the comments, the author’s letter. Ew.
yeah, john norman is scandelous. i wanna do a longer article on kink in fandom tho — it’s absolutely fascinating the way that sexuality and sexual practices are massive wanktastic symbols right now. and yes, i’m looking at YOU, laurell k. hamilton!
I have actually met John Norman. The (surprising, at the time) impression he made on me was “pathetic little man.” Just as a certain leader (whose name I will not mention for fear of invoking Godwin) was the antithesis of his party’s tall, blond, blue-eyed ideal, likewise John Norman would have no place in his own fantasy world. It’s the ultimate irony.
I criticized him when I met him. Not for the misogyny of Gor, mind you; that has been done far better by others. What I condemned, which led to him looking surprised and (hopefully) a bit hurt, was the way in which he turned what started as a fascinating, interesting world into nothing more than a setting for formulaic, repetitive, third-rate S&M porn.
And Gor was interesting in the beginning, at least to someone like me who grew up reading Burroughs and others of his style. The warrior societies, the tarn-bird riders, the Priest-Kings, the Kurii, they all had so much potential. The first few novels explored some of that potential. Then the author discovered that trashy porn sells, and the brakes were off. That fascinating world was thrown in the dust-bin and painted theater flats of it were used as the backdrop for ever more pointless S&M.
I have nothing against porn, or even against S&M porn. I read it. I’ve even written (though not published) some. But oh my God, his stuff is BAD. His writing style is so stilted it becomes almost a parody of itself (Houseplants of Gor nailed him dead-on). Every single character is a 2D cutout. There is absolutely no variety, no interest, nothing but endless repetition of the same worn-out scenes with the names changed. I want to scream “Yeah, dude, we get the point, men are brutes, women are sluts, now would you please make them do something interesting for a change?” But he never does. His whole philosophy, his whole world-view, can’t seem to get any further than his kink. The old saw about “God gave men two heads, but only enough blood to power one at a time” seems ever so apt when applied to John Norman’s writing. I wonder how many of his male readers have decided “if that’s what Real Men™ are supposed to be, I sure as hell don’t want to be one”? I suspect it’s a non-zero number.
And now he thinks he’s some kind of crusader for liberty. I wonder if he’s reading this? No, Mr. Lange, you’re not a crusader. Not for liberty or anything else. You’re a second-rate writer turning out third-rate porn that appeals to a handful of fetishists and a lot of gynophobic perpetual adolescents who are reading one-handed. Larry Flynt is more of a crusader than you are. You’re just a waste of paper, ink, and air.
That’s really nicely said. I know nothing about this guy but what I’ve read here and on a few other sites. It seems so many people find the stories very intriguing in some way, then very disappointing or disillusioning in some other way.
Allow me to recommend a few parodies:
Houseplants of Gor (as was mentioned above)
Gay, Bejeweled Nazi Bikers of Gor
Poor John Norman. Like so many writers of his era he lost his originality in favour of personal fetish - he is not the only one. But if he returned to writing stories rather than indulge himself he could be great again. Personally, when reading his Gor Novels I skipped ALL the mucky bits, sometimes whole books in the hope that each book would return to the Kurii plot and contain the sort of detail displayed in the earlier novels, weaponry and so forth - fascinating stuff. If only he could display the originality which I feel sure created Gor in the first place and resolve the Priests Kings v Kurii conflict that would indeed be a Gor book worth reading.
I have to admit that I too enjoyed the earlier novels in the Gor series, for the reasons already stated; it really was a clever world, a clever creation, and with just enough of the sort of sex that Robert E. Howard and E.R. Burroughs had hinted at to make it interesting for that reason as well.
But then it all just went wrong. I have no objection to porn, even kinky porn, if it’s well done, but Norman just started repeating his same old tired ideas over and over again. Part of it really was sad, but honestly, I also found a lot of it funny. And that’s why I sat down one evening and almost as a lark, wrote “Gay, Bejeweled Nazi Bikers of Gor”, which was kindly linked to in the post above.
It was one of the hardest things I ever wrote, to be honest. Trying to duplicate Norman’s prose required a suspension of my knowledge of English literary style that is hard to describe.
I read the early books of the Gor series as a teen and enjoyed them as a Barsoom with a bit of added sex appeal and to be honest Ive read raiders and marauders recently and both are decent,but is it me or did he toss in his reputation for cash after like number 12 or so (with a few exceptions)?
I’ve always wondered if there were more Gor novels out there now I can’t wait to get a copy of Witness of Gor. They are great stories of fantasy and fun reading.
I just wanted to let you know that I tried to visit the link at pantheus and this is what I got on the page :
The file or resource you’ve requested could not be found on this server. It may be that you are trying to access a page with an obsolete bookmark. If so, you can try to relocate the page by entering our site with one of these links:
Paradise Web Services
Kaye’s Latch Hook Resources
Pantheus Books - Online Book Store
The Gorean Voice
The Gorean Public Board
Tahari-Oasis
If you have reached this page from a link on another web site, please notify the webmaster of that site that the link is no longer functional and visit one of these links directly to find the information you are looking for, and add a new bookmark.
Hmmm. It’s still working for me…
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