Finding Gor

It’s the weekend and I thought it might be interesting to write a short piece on how I first came across the Gor books, and what my impressions were of the various ones published between the 1960s to the tail end of the 1980s. 

So…

I first came across John Norman’s Counter Earth in the cardboard boxes of pulp paperbacks piled high in the local second hand book stores that were a common feature of most towns and cities in my late teenage years when I was heading off to university. Back then they were heaped high – a treasure trove of ephemera from years gone by. I didn’t have a lot of money when I was young and it was natural then that second hand shops were where I turned to for clothes, records and books. I’d like to spend whole afternoons in places like Brighton in particular, in the Lanes area, whenever I could get over there, checking out skirts and dresses in the vintage markets and second hand ‘alternative’ boutiques - part of the fun being you’d never know what you were going to find there. And I’d sift through vast book cases and heaps of boxes of well-thumbed second hand SF and fantasy paperbacks with garish covers; all meticulous works of art of course, with exploitation style illustrations. I couldn’t afford new paperbacks so I tended to buy cheap old ones, which is why I have a reasonably good knowledge of SF and fantasy that was published well before my formative years.

And in amongst the heaps of books were these big thick bricks of books with lurid Conan style art of muscular heroes astride giant birds of war, and helpless heroines, almost naked, and often chained. 

The Gor books.

I think it was the Chris Achilleos covers that really stood out. Being big books they tended to cost in the region of £1.95 each, second hand, whereas a Conan or a Moorcock might be £1.25. I think it was when I spotted a spine creased copy of ‘Slave Girl of Gor’ that my heart skipped a beat. Slave Girl… of Gor? That was a rather more suggestive title than what was usually hinted at in fantasy books. And it had a very sexy cover. I remember flicking through it at random, my shoulder bag (with a lovely vintage ethnic, strappy, fringed dress – sort of what a sexy Indian squaw might wear - I’d bought it for £5, and it remains a staple of my summer wardrobe to this day – funny how you sometimes remember unimportant/irrelevant details clearly) lying on the floor with other customers almost stepping on it, and as I scanned the pages it rapidly became clear that this was a sexy book. Very sexy indeed if some of the passages were anything to go by. Were they all like this? I picked up a few more and found they tended to, *ahem*, fall open at certain places and those places had more sexy bits, if you know what I mean. I remember feeling rather  turned on as I knelt on the floor by the boxes (much of the overflow of lurid SF and Fantasy was piled under trestle tables in big boxes) and feeling like the store owner would spy me and somehow know just what I was reading. 

I wanted ‘Slave Girl of Gor’, but… I remember I was actually a bit too embarrassed to go up to the counter and actually buy a book with a title like ‘Slave Girl of Gor’. Aw, bless. I was sooo shy back then! A blushing little virgin. But then I spied another one called ‘Captive of Gor’, and that seemed to be just like Slave Girl, but without such an obvious give away title, even though the Achilleos cover with the naked blond girl being startled by a giant stoat, was definitely erotic in tone. Even with that I chickened out a little bit and picked up a couple of traditional looking SF books to buy alongside it, as if it was just a casual purchase and I had no idea what it might be about.

That night, back at home, I waited until evening and then I cracked open the pages of ‘Captive of Gor’ to read. By the time Eleanor Brinton found herself lying on her belly on the grass lands of Gor, having spent multiple chapters earlier on being hunted and pursued and played with, by mysterious slavers on Earth, I think I’d already moved over to my bed and stimulated myself to a rather lovely orgasm. I couldn’t believe what I was reading. I devoured the rest of the book rapidly over several days, rationing it I suppose, and savouring the really juicy bits. I felt like I was there with Eleanor, the uptight, rude, arrogant, naïve trust fund brat, and I suppose I kind of wished I was her as well, going through what she was feeling. Well, not the really horrible bits, but you know, the submissive erotic bits. 

I think I had expected the book to end with her getting free, because that was how books tended to end, yes, so it was quite some surprise when by the end of it she remained a slave on Gor and it became clear she never would be free. Wow! 

And there were more of these books?

Were they all like this? I mean, these weren’t on the top shelf or anything, they were freely available in the SF section, just next to all those boring Andre Norton books. 

I don’t think I really learned much about Gor from that first read. I think, from memory, the book assumed you had already read the previous books (and at that time I had no idea that the previous books had all been narrated by Tarl Cabot, so I was blissfully unaware of who he was in the scheme of things when he appeared late in the novel as ‘Bosk’). I don’t think I even fully grasped that this was a counter earth revolving around or sun – it just came across as some alien world that women were being abducted to. 

Aside from some innocent, and mostly implied, titillation in Conan books, this was my first experience of BDSM in any form, and I suddenly realised by the end of ‘Captive of Gor’ that bondage and domination seemed to, well... turn me on.

Wow. Who would have thought! 

A couple of weeks later I picked up some more. The early books were easy to find anywhere I looked. I bought Nomads and Assassin just because there were copies everywhere. With those I began to get a feel for the actual setting and realised the story was a bit more elaborate than just the ‘girl gets dragged to Gor’ plot of Captive. Here the slavery was more in the background, with the adventures forefront, but when it went centre of stage in the plot it was equally as sexy, and I began to appreciate it wasn’t just chapter after chapter of ‘oh no, men are lustful beasts!’ ad nauseum. 

I liked the plucky Vella, who came across in those early books as a sort of Gorean ‘James Bond girl’ back in the days when Tarl Cabot still predominantly thought like a man of Earth. Nomads appealed to me more than Assassin as I’ve always liked barbarian cultures in exotic lands. I identified strongly with Miss Elizabeth Cardwell (‘Vella’) in both of the books and was sorry to see her being written out of the series (for the most part) as the series progressed. She could have been a really good recurring character, but I guess Norman got bored with her. 

I then bought any of the books that had an Achilleos cover, just because the art was so good. Though I didn’t get round to reading ‘Priest Kings of Gor’ until a few years ago, when I decided it was about time to actually see how the Priest Kings operated. Ironically, I avoided buying one of my (now) all-time favourites at first because I hated the cover – Tribesmen of Gor (the UK edition) has a really ugly cover but the book itself is one of the best Norman ever wrote. I loved the period of books that ranged from Captive to Fighting Slave, and that for me is the magic period of Gor. Back when the slavery aspects were now becoming central to the adventures, but the solid adventures were still there and the books hadn’t yet got bogged down by large chunks of cut and paste philosophic meanderings on the nature of slavery. Norman had the balance just about perfect in Tribesmen of Gor. That book, and Players of Gor are the templates I tend to follow as a guide when I write my own stories. 

I loved Hunters – the whole idea of the proud Panther girls living in the forest in their sexy little Panther skins really spoke to me, and when they were gradually picked off one by one and added to Tarl’s steel coffle, I loved each encounter. Marauders I didn’t love quite so much. I do really like the whole northern setting and the overtones of Grendel and all that, but, it didn’t quite click for me the way it should have done. It’s the book where I think I could have written a better tale using Norman’s plot outline. Beasts I liked because it has great set pieces with Tarl and various free women – some of the best enslavement sequences in the  series – and lots of them too. The world building here is very good too. I like the remoteness of the setting.

Explorers was great up until about 2/3 of the way through and then it feels like Norman rushes to finish it. The chapters begin to get very short, almost as if they were fragments he wrote and then didn’t have time to flesh out properly. There are whole rafts of ideas that he introduces and dispenses with in just a few pages (the Talunas and the lost jungle city for example, which normally would fill up many chapters of detailed prose) and I do wonder if that book came up against a deadline or if perhaps he spent so much time on the earlier 2/3 of the book that he just wanted to wrap things up quickly before that book grew to a ridiculous size. The last third just seems to be written very differently to the first two thirds. 

With Slave Girl I was back imagining myself taken to Gor and waking up on that barbaric world, as I had done with Captive. I wanted Judy Thornton to be a bit more like Eleanor though, and was frustrated when she wasn’t such a brat. 

Fighting Slave contains one of my favourite John Norman women – the Lady Florence (along with the Lady Yanina in Players, Boabissa in Mercenaries, and of course Miss Brinton in Captive). The end chapters when Florence finds herself alone and at Jason’s mercy were really hot stuff for me, because this time around I was identifying with a free woman of Gor who seemed to be in a position of power and influence over the male protagonist. Very different from the Earth girls to date.

The other two Jason books I didn’t get to read until much later in my life. I confess I was bored by the third volume of the trilogy. And I have yet to read either of the two Red Indian books (Savages and Blood Brothers) so I can’t comment on them.

Kajira was another of the slave girl books, and it differed from the previous two because the Earth girl was free for the earlier part of the novel. The scene where a curious Tiffany is escorted into the slave pens is a stand out scene for me and one I paid homage to in my own book, ‘Mistress of Gor’. But the second half of the book begins to show signs of Norman doing his cut and paste philosophical musings on the natural order of slavery which was beginning to dominate his writing and grate on my nerves (you’ll notice that’s one aspect of Gor that I don’t mimic in my own pastiches).

‘Players of Gor’ probably ranks as my favourite Gor book. The humour here (which is also present in many of the other books, but which is often overlooked by many fans of the series) is ramped up to ‘eleven’. One of the things I deliberately mimic is the almost Jack Vance style of dialogue that Norman has many of his characters speaking. It’s an elaborate form of semi-courteous and overly elaborate speech that takes multiple sentences to convey a single suggestion, but it gives the books a unique conversational style. Players has my favourite female character – Lady Yanina, and lots of great sexy bits, without compromising the adventure aspects. Sometimes I like ‘Tribesmen of Gor’ more, but more often than not it is Players. I’ve twice written my own Boots Tarsk Bit plays in homage to Players, and the early part of ‘Dunes of Gor’ originally started out life as a third Boots Tarsk bit play, but it got so big I turned it into Dunes instead. 

To date I still haven’t read ‘Dancer of Gor’. 

Mercenaries of Gor had a war torn feel to it, and another good solid adventure. Boabissa works well as a free woman who slowly develops her slave belly during the tale. And the revelation at the end of the book where it turns out Boabissa was a slave baby at birth but didn’t know it, was something I paid homage to in Ubara of Gor. 

Vagabonds and Renegades both had some good set pieces (the arrival of Tarl at the roadside Inn packed with refugees was the inspiration for my ‘Tales of Gor’ RPG module, ‘The Inn on the Borderland’) but I was finding that more and more chapters were being bogged down with cut and paste lectures on how ‘natural’ slavery was. What little story there was seemed to be struggling to be heard above all this repetitive filler material. 

Magicians of Gor famously was never printed in the UK and it wasn’t until about 2009 or so that I got hold of an American copy on ebay. The only thing I really remember from it is the ‘couching law’ of Ar that entraps Talena. 

Of the other original run of books that I haven’t mentioned, I’ve never actually read ‘Tarnsmen of Gor’. ‘Outlaw of Gor’ is very different from what we come to think of as a Gor novel these days as it harks back to when Norman was writing in the Burroughs tradition. ‘Raiders of Gor’, I only read fairly recently when I was making notes for ‘Shadows of Gor’ and wanted to read up on Port Kar. Like Outlaw, it is first and foremost an adventure book, and probably the last of the books where Tarl Cabot thinks of himself as an Earthman.  

So there you have it. Of the later books when Norman began writing again and publishing as E-Reads, I’ve only read a small selection. If this lockdown continues I may get round to doing a bit of a catch up in that regard.

Ta-Sardar-Gor!