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 Ria. 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
{ 47 comments… read them below or add one }
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I’m guessing the fact people are slagging his work off counts as censorship.
You could argue the threat to boycott Dark Horse if it reprinted the books would count as attempted censorship, but it’d be a difficult argument and let’s be honest, I doubt it would’ve made much of an impact on them (Hellboy II was coming out, Buffy Season 8, etc). So… yeah, we’re censoring him by saying his book’s are shit.
They’re shit, y’know.
I was also amused that parts of his letter read like Simon Furman’s Transformers comics (http://tfwiki.net/wiki/Furmanism#CAN_I_DO_LESS.3F), except it’d probably be funner if Simon Furman was writing them and less sexually dodgy.
Charles RB(Quote) (Reply)
…also:
“Gorean slavers often raid Earth in order to kidnap its women”
I now have mental images of them being fought by the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce from Doctor Who…
Charles RB(Quote) (Reply)
Point of view depends on how you feel about JN’s philosophy … I’m rather glad his books are selling well – shows some people aren’t intimidated by the radical feminists who so despise his works … I just dl’d the new “Prize of Gor” book and will buy many copies when the printed edition arrives … I’ve made lots by buying and selling the older editions and would expect to from this also … there IS a ready market for his works …
Granted the reading is tedious and the story is more in line with what adolescent boys might read but there is much more involved in Gor than the “women as slaves” or apparent anti-feminism that is complained about the most … one needs to concentrate more on the philosophy, read between the lines, get behind more than the Tarl Cabot saga itself … I’ll admit Tarl is pretty much an idiot at first as he sees Gor from the common-era earth-raised p*whipped wimp of a man rather than the man which men are supposed to be, those who are strong-willed and follow the natural order and haven’t been socially-castrated by the “politically correct” society in which we find ourselves …
… “read bits of the Gor books, seen synopses of more, and learnt (sic) their basic ideology” … “read bits” – that’s like reading Cliff ‘s Notes on something and going to the final exam – good luck if you’ve gotten enough knowledge to fill your thimble … unless you READ them ( and that can be tough for those without a good dose of philosophy – reading Nietzsche would help ) you cannot make a rational criticism yourself, just follow the Gor-bashings lemmings to the sea … it’s easy to put down something about which you have no real knowledge, just what you’ve gleaned from a slanted point of view – sort of kin to judging all Southerners from a Yankee anti-slavery antebellum periodical …
John complained about censorship decades ago when it actually happened, when publishers afraid of backlash from politically groups actually decided not to publish his books … whether you agree with him or not this was not good – our society has freedom of speech as one of its basic guarantees and if someone with whom you don’t agree says what you consider objectionable don’t buy into it … I have found the most protest not from those who have actually read the books but from those who haven’t and blindly follow those who are most vehemntly against it …
I wish you well …
Jon(Quote) (Reply)
What’s this “radical feminists”? Taking a dim view on books that say “women naturally want to be subservient and should be as a natural order” is hardly radical feminism, i.e. hardline, aggressive version of feminism. I’d assume it’d be, er, general feminism. _Moderate_ feminism, even.
It should also be noticed that it is the right of the publisher to not publish a book if they think it’s not worth the bother – that’s part of how the free market works.
And from the excerpts, if I read the Gor books I will be _fucking bored stiff_. Because the prose is fucking boring. Also pretentious.
Charles RB(Quote) (Reply)
Hi Jon –
If you’re willing to grant the reading is tedious, the story is trite, then why do you expect people to get behind the philosophy, especially when that philosophy negates the experiences of a large segment of its readers?
I started reading Gor when I was really young. I stopped when I was older and realized how boring they were. The books’re not that serious. I don’t agree with your suggestion that reading Nietzsche would help, since there’s not much you can do to make the priest kings make sense. Plus, really? When you have several thousand pages of text, and the story barely with each new book, you really got to question the role of “plot” and “characterization” in the story. I mean, geez, it’s almost like the stories are a thinly veiled ideologically based erotica or something crazy like that.
The OTHER Maria(Quote) (Reply)
Thanks everybody for the fun discussion of Gor and John Norman, and for the parodies and letters! Thanks especially to Worldwalker, who described Mr. Lange from a personal meeting. I’ve wondered repeatedly, in reading his books, whether he is a Conan-like mountain of a man in reality, with an unquenchable urge to drive women to orgasm after “slave orgasm,” of an intensity they never knew before they met him, or whether in fact he wasn’t really all that hot. So now I have a little bit of a better idea on that subject. By the way, I’ve read 22 of the Gor books and am struggling to get through number 23. Eventually I’m sure I will read them all, since I do manage to read faster than JN writes. I agree with the posts above about feeling a little dirty after reading some of the later books. That said, people should give a try to some of the early ones which are actually pretty reasonable in quality for this sort of thing, such as Nomads of Gor, Assassins of Gor, Raiders of Gor, Marauders of Gor, maybe a couple of others. Personally I’ve got in the habit of Gor, like eating sunflower seeds I guess.
Alessandro(Quote) (Reply)
Best review of Norman I’ve read.
I’m sure a bunch of people here are on Second Life Gor… yeah, painful, isn’t it?
Aura(Quote) (Reply)
I read bellatrys’ review of the first two books on her blog, and that’s more than enough for me. (Though I did like Houseplants.)
Personally I’m perfectly happy to see this stuff banned as hate speech. No first amendment up here in Canada to worry about. I first found out about Gor at work, at a summer job as a geology student. The guys wanted to know how I felt about the books (an excuse to tell me about them and get a reaction, of course). We luckily escaped them at home, though someone did mistakenly buy a Sharon Green imitation, which was unreadable, and The Coming of The Horseclans, which was marginally better. Thank goodness there are more titles to choose from these days. Back then we were desperate for good reading material.
Anemone(Quote) (Reply)
I don’t need to be sold on the idea that Dr John is cheerfully nuts and actually believes what he writes. I KNOW he believes it. I also know that Gorean philosophy is mean, illogical, misogynist and just plain wrong. But you can’t ban a book because of that. Come on people. Slippery slope. Come on, lets not be hypocrites. I hate that John Norman can sit there and smugly tell me he knows what women want better then women do. For the same reason Im not going to tell a Gorean(is that a real word?) what is good for THEM! Everyone decides for her, or him, self! Lets let it be.
Martine(Quote) (Reply)
I doubt people would extend the same arguments to a fictional world that glamourized pedophilia instead of *just* rape.
Anemone(Quote) (Reply)
While I am generally opposed to censorship for reasons I won’t go into just now, I think you’ve missed the best part of Anemone’s point, which was about hate speech: Norman’s books are telling the world “women secretly like it when you rape them – they won’t admit it, but they do, trust me!” It IS encouraging rape, and how is that not hate speech? We don’t classify it as such because we accept rape as normal human behavior rather than a gross distortion of twisted psychology.
Web hosts tend to have strict rules about hate speech – you cannot, for example, write fiction or non-fiction about how good it is to harm a particular group of people. But you can talk about harming women quite a bit, because we accept that as *normal* rather than virulent hate.
I see no difference.
Jennifer Kesler(Quote) (Reply)
“But you can’t ban a book because of that”
They haven’t been banned.
Charles RB(Quote) (Reply)
A very frustrating series, because some of the early books show some glimpses of being rather good: particularly Nomads and Assassins. He’s even capable of some wonderful passages in the later books, such as the Kaissa contest between Scormus of Ar and Centius of Cos (in Beasts, or maybe Marauders, not sure), but it’s so weighed down and drowned out by the staggeringly tedious ‘philosophy’ he so relentlessly pursues. I agree with some of the earlier comments: the earlier books were really good fun in a Burroughs kind of way. A shame.
Richard C(Quote) (Reply)
Jon,
I realize I’m coming to this conversation years too late, but I’m doing research for a video blog entry on the Gor novels and I have to point out: censorship is when the government refuses you the right of expression. It IS NOT when private enterprises refuse to publish your writing. It is their right not to publish what they don’t wish to publish. CONGRESS shall make no law abridging the right of the press.
As for standing up to radical feminism, he isn’t. He’s giving in to them. Standing up to radical feminism would be to say that they are wrong about men. Norman is not saying that- he’s saying that their very worst assumptions about men are absolutely correct. He is, in his own twisted way, the ultimate Uncle Tom.
Jordan(Quote) (Reply)
Re-discovering this conversation, and (re)enjoying it again. A pleasant way to pass an hour.
Incidentally, if anyone wants a more realistic version of how Gorean culture would actually work, read C. S. Friedman’s book _In Conquest Born_, and its sequel, _The Wilding_. The Braxin culture can best be described in shorthand as based on Gor, but done as it might actually exist in reality (i.e., the women are allowed to refuse unwanted sex from strange men for only two reasons: when they’re on the clock, and when they’re “owned” by a man). Friedman takes the time to explore how and why this system exists in this form, and what keeps it from being overthrown by a women’s — or anybody’s — revolt.
Good books. I recommend them.
Cloudtigress(Quote) (Reply)
@Cloudtigress
You know, that’s a really good point. I hadn’t thought of those two works in that way, but I wonder if CS Friedman was deliberately poking at that genre of SF/F which treats societies like that as sexy or edgy ideals.
Maria(Quote) (Reply)
Maria,
Could be. My first thought when reading Conquest was that the Braxi culture was based off of Gor, given how the average woman was treated in that empire. My other thought was that Friedman was also playing with the warrior society tropes found in much of SF/F, and seeing how those might actually work in the ‘real world’ by using them with the Braxi. And on the other side, using the rival Azean empire to explore the limits and problems of living by the ‘pure science’ tropes. (Anza being legally treated as a second-class citizen despite being the scion of the oldest and very prestigious bloodline simply because she was not born with gold skin and white hair like the rest of the normal Azeans have.)
This is a very complex world Friedman created, without it turning into an incompressible mess. Next time I find that book, I should do a re-read to see what else might be in there.
Cloudtigress(Quote) (Reply)
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