Gor 11
by John Norman
DAW 1977
First a bit of background on the Gor series. Written by a college professor, this is a series of fantasy novels in which a college professor is transported to a barbarian world and is awesome there. Basically John Carter + bondage. Later novels, evidently beginning with this one, downplay the fantasy adventure elements and focus on bondage and misogyny.
This one unceremoniously begins with Earth college girl Judy Thornton waking up on Gor and having various barbarians fight over. Then we have this exchange:
Judy: I get to choose who I have sex with because I'm pretty and feminism.
Barbarian: This is Barbarian World and I'm going to rape you. Eventually.
This conversation goes on for at least 6% of the book before I tapped out. One can debate the acceptability of BDSM in erotica, but here Norman is more interested in the philosophical side than the sexy one.
Also, I have a hard time framing these books in any other context outside of a college professor publicly fantasizing about raping one of his students. When I read it my interior voice was that of a review board reading it back to him during an investigative hearing.
Yeah, the first few in the series were pretty good. I picked up all but one in the long run, and got to The Slave Girl when I quit reading them. He still shows up at book signings on the East Coast, and has a large fan following. I just can't get into those later stories, but they look nice on my shelf (lol). It could have been a good series.
ReplyDeleteI've read Nomads of Gor, where the Tuchucks feature prominently. There are some interesting tidbits here and there, but this fourth novel does ramp up the sex slavery aspect of the series, with a definite change even from the beginning to the end of the book. I read it to say "Yes, I've read a Gor book, it wasn't very good", but that was the end of it. Definitely not worth one's time.
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