Read-Along-A-Gor: Fighting Slave of Gor, chapter Six

 

Chapter Six: The Lady Tima

 

(In which we read, Fighting Slave of Gor)

 

It is now apparent that the House of Andronicus acts as something of a wholesaler to other slaver houses. Raw slaves are presumably acquired cheaply, then trained, and then sold on to auction houses who will market the stock. And when it comes to the sale of male silk slaves, it does seem that the business model is mostly run by women. Jason and his fellow silk slaves are lined up in display for a group of female slavers to inspect. Right from the first paragraph we see how cowed Jason is before these women, and how easy it is for them to stimulate the responses they require. Just the caress of the whip seems to arouse Jason.

Read-Along-A-Gor: Fighting Slave of Gor, chapter Five

 

Chapter Five: I am taught to pour wine; I am punished; I hear of the Market of Tima

 

(In which we read, Fighting Slave of Gor)

 

 

Sometime has gone by and Jason is well into his training now. His hair has grown longer and he is being groomed to be ‘pretty’ as far as women are concerned:

 

"You look nice this evening, Jason," said the Lady Gina. 

 

"Thank you, Mistress," I said. I now wore a short, silk tunic, white, trimmed with red. My hair, longer now, though I had worn it long before, was combed back and tied behind my head with a white ribbon.

Read-Along-A-Gor: Fighting Slave of Gor, chapter Four

 

Chapter Four: Lola and Tela

 

(In which we read, Fighting Slave of Gor)

 

Lady Gina of course has no intention of involving herself in the minutia of training Jason personally. She’s undoubtedly a busy woman with managerial responsibilities at a reasonably high level. She simply doesn’t have the time to micro manage the progress of every silk slave.

 

We see that the daily grind of training a kajirus is delegated to slave girls, and this is a common theme in Mr Norman’s books that male slaves are usually under the domination of their kajirae sisters. As if being enslaved isn’t bad enough for a Gorean man, he is further humiliated by being forced to obey a girl who is a mere five feet three inches tall, weighing one hundred and eighteen pounds.  

Read-Along-A-Gor: Fighting Slave of Gor, chapter Three

 

Chapter Three: The Lady Gina

 

(In which we read, Fighting Slave of Gor)

 

We bid farewell (for now) to Miss Beverly Henderson, and are left to only imagine the trials and tribulations she goes through, parallel to Jason’s own ordeal that the book squarely focuses on from this point forward. The lovely Miss Henderson will re-appear briefly in a later chapter of course.

 

In her place we are now introduced to our first sight of a dominant Gorean free woman: the Lady Gina. She is Jason’s first sight as he is rudely awakened (in chains) by the vicious strokes of her whip.

Read-Along-A-Gor: Fighting Slave of Gor, chapter Two

 

Chapter Two: Syringes

 

(In which we read, Fighting Slave of Gor)

 

Oh, no, our hapless hero and heroine awaken in a cement floored garage with lightbulbs swinging from cables! What is going to happen to them! I think we can guess… Both Jason And the lovely Miss Henderson are in a state of compete denial as they wake from the gas to find burly men with weapons preparing to process Miss Henderson for shipment to Gor.

 

Not that either of them yet believes that Gor exists. 

Read-Along-A-Gor: Fighting Slave of Gor, chapter One

 

Chapter One: The Restaurant; The Cab

 

(In which we read, Fighting Slave of Gor)

"May I speak to you intimately, Jason?" she asked.

 

It’s 1980 in New York, and university students, 22 year old Miss Beverly Henderson, and 25 (going on 45, by the style of his dialogue) year old Jason Marshall are meeting for dinner in a stylish restaurant of the kind that no students I ever knew could afford to frequent. 

 

Come to think of it, they don’t even sound like students. Jason is prone to being very serious and says things like ‘a useful instrumentality’. Miss Beverly Henderson says things like ‘some unimportant, minor differences in anatomical details are all that divide us,” when talking about gender.

Read-Along-A-Gor: ‘Fighting Slave of Gor’ by John Norman

 

 

So, what’s this, you say, with the probing insight I have long come to expect from my lovely readers? Well, it’s a sort of book club, or ‘read-along-a-Gor’ in which I, your humble narrator, re-read, chapter by chapter, one of the earliest Gor novels I bought as a precocious teenager, and discuss the stylistic flourishes, tropes and things that make the book work (or not). Along the way I’ll point out what Mr Norman does that is good, and what he does that isn’t necessarily so good, and you’ll get an idea how I craft my style into a sort of pastiche of his works, but also how I subvert some of the central concepts.