Tarnsman of Gor by John Norman Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Tarnsman of Gor
Book Review: Delightfully Unpolitically Correct
Summary: 4 Stars
This is the first book in John Norman's Gor Saga. It is about a teacher from Earth named Tarl Cabot who get transported to the planet Gor, which is a hidden world in our solar system. Here he get tossed into a harsh and alien society which is forced to remain primitive by it's rulers the powerful Priest Kings, and he have to navigate it's many dangers with both a sword and his wit and at the same time fight for the woman he loves. In a way the Gor books are very typical 1960's science fiction, it is a swords and planets story, where men are men and women are beautiful and subservient. The book is similar in some ways to Edgar Rice Burroughs Martian series, with one notable exception, i said the women was subservient in this book series, and by that I mean that 90 percent of the female characters in the series are slaves. Women get bought, sold and raped constantly and often the subplots of the various books is that some woman either from Gor or from Earth is captured, enslaved and forced to accept her place. The Gor books have a rather harsh view on women, it speaks of a natural order where men rules and women serves and quite frankly women, even free women have very little rights on Gor. These books are also rather erotic, sexual slavery is a huge part of them, and while the books do not have direct sex scenes there is allot of eroticism. But then if the Gor books had not been delightfully unpolitically correct and outrageous would we still be talking about them today as they are really rather sub par pulp science fiction and little more.
So did I like Tarnsman of Gor, yes I did. The story is okey, thees earliest books are more science fiction and less eroticism so there is more room for the story in here. We also get to discover Gor from the point of view of the man character and the whole thing is quite interesting. Now I have some problems with the book, Norman's prose is very repetitive, a paragraph can go something like this:
She is a slave, that woman is a slave, she is indeed a slave, (a few lines of text where something happening.) I am a slave, yes you are a slave. And so on and so on, at times I just want to shout at the book, yes we get it, the lady is a slave. But all in all Tarnsman of Gor is both interesting and different enough to stand out, so if you like 1960's style science fiction I think you would like this.
One note though is that if you are easily offended then you might want to stay clear. I am a woman and at times, even if I like the fact that this book's characters have another moral system than what you would normally find among science fiction heroes, I have to admit that I felt anger at how women are presented. These books would probably not appeal to some people due to this, in the Gor books women exist to serve men, and if you think that the enslaved women will be saved in the end like in most books for a traditional happy ending, think again, women enslaved, raped and beaten into submission is the happy ending in the Gor books, though like I said these early ones have a little less of it as the main character have not quite accepted the Gorean world view yet, but then it is their wonderful outrageousness which makes thees books so special.
Note also that there is a philosophical element to the Gor books, a longing back to when it was skill and ability which determined a man's worth and where we did not have all this technology to shield us from reality. This aspect of the Gor books are very interesting, but it is not so much of it in Tarnsman, it comes more later. Tarnsman of Gor is more a wonderful romp through a alien world, meeting alien creatures and an alien culture while swinging a sword and saving a damsel in distress type of story, and to sum it up, it is rather good.
Book Review: Fantasy World
Summary: 5 Stars
I found one of these books in a used book store and was absolutely captivated by it. John Norman has to be the ultimate male chauvinist but his tales are woven in such a wonderful web of fantasy that they don't come across as offensive, at least to the male reader. The fact that the series takes place on a sister planet that combines swords and spears and space travel makes it compelling reading. The GOR vocabulary and the creatures that inhabit the planet become part of the reader's own life experiences as you move from story to story. After reading one book, I had to have them all.Book Review: First 3 books in series are NOT like the rest!
Summary: 4 Stars
This series has been, rightly or wrongly [depending on your PC quotient] excoriated, BUT ... the first three books {Tarnsman, Outlaw and Priest-Kings} appear to me to be well-done alternatives of the old "John Carter of Mars" series by Edgar Rice Burroughs. I have no idea why 'John Norman' suddenly changed not only the themes of the books starting at Book 4, as well as his writing style [note how the later books start each chapter with action later in time and then go back to describe how the character got there from the situation at the end of the previous chapter; this is NOT how the earlier books were written - did something change in the author's life??].
If one reads the series for action/content and geography (including the references to the history of AR = its earthly equivalent, Rome) one can wonder when the series will be completed by the return of Marlenius and the unification of Gor's fighters under the aegis of Tarl Cabot, for a final solution to the invasion from the Metal Worlds.
Book Review: Interesting sci-fi, for a little while anyway...
Summary: 3 Stars
I think every other reviewer has already touched on the fact that there is a whole heaping plateful of adolescent wish-fulfillment going on in the great bulk of the series. So, there goes almost half the readership right off the bat. For a woman reader, unless you have a masochistic/submissive streak in you, this series will most likely either offend you, or at best, you will find it ludicrously sophomoric. Which is a shame, because the first six or so books (the original ones with the Boris Vallejo covers) had some excellent sci-fi ideas going on.
The planet Gor is a sister planet to Earth and revolves around the Sun exactly opposite our own planet. Tarl Cabot is transported to Gor via a technology unknown to him. On this planet there is an interesting caste system and there is certainly a lot of potential for adventure novel entertainment with the warrior society and steppe-land type horsemen...the details evoke a sense of being in a world much as being transported to Central Asia during the Golden Horde era, only without the Asians (at least it seemed to me everyone was Caucasian). There's also the mysterious Priest Kings that seem to be running the whole show and work as an interesting adversary in the third book. One gets into the series thinking that they've discovered another Burrough's "John Carter Of Mars" series.
Now this all sounds fine and good, but somewhere along the line things fall apart for the discerning reader. Now, you have to be pretty naive to think that slavery would have been offensive to someone in our own twelfth or thirteenth century so that is not an issue. However, the way it is presented really has no pretense at reality whatsoever in that it is almost entirely women who are slaves and they are always purely for pleasure and not productivity. While the sci-fi seemed the focus of the series in the beginning, as the publishing continued the whole series devolved into long depictions of what goes on when you have your own personal sex slave at your beck and call. The cheese factor in that department will rise to monumental proportions as the series wears on, hence my recomendation to quit after book 6 or so if you are interested in just the sci-fi.
Why I also recommend quitting around this time is my abhorrence of whiny heroes. I don't mind the odd anti-hero, but the series' main character goes into this nauseatingly long crybaby-fest around the sixth or seventh book and it was a chore to dig through as a reader who likes to complete what he starts. From that point onward I think the original Dell publishers tired of the writing as well as Daw had to pick up the series from that time foreward.
So, to encapsulate, you have relatively interesting sci-fi up to a few novels into the series. Women readers may find it interesting up to that point as well as long as they have room to eye-roll during a few male-teenage fantasy sequences involving whips and chains. After the sixth book, everything is simply repetition of women being slapped around and branded and beaten by our hero only to say they are so desperately in love with him because he made them see what it is to be a real woman. Yeah...uhm...yeah... Seriously, if my wife was like that, I would have made her seek psychotherapy for having such low self-esteem.
Somewhere near the twentieth book or so it's like Norman got over his masturbatory vacation and started introducing a plot involving yeti-like aliens. As a teen I was a completionist reader and amazingly forgiving of authors. As an adult and some twenty years removed from reading the original Gor book I would never have made it past the first half-dozen. Maybe I can get a refund from the publisher for wasting the time of a youth with the rest of the series all those years ago.
Book Review: Not all is well for the Gorean Chronicles
Summary: 4 Stars
The first book in the series along with the five after are the only ones necessary to read in the entire collection. They are the true Gor novels. John Norman wrote me several letters concerning his displeasure at the commercial system and their ban on his books. When asked about his initial start at writing them he was glad about the first several attempts. If you like Burroughs novels then you will love the first 6 novels. After that it goes into bondage mode and more than half the novels content dwells on slavery and bondage. The fantasy goes away and never comes back. The first six are the best he has to offer. They are the true Gorean chronicles.