A Curious Convergence
My next entry in the Slashers of Gor fanart genre, "Privacy", is up at slashersofgor - it's NSFW, with "artistic nudity" as they say, and explicit eroticism. Everything the same as for "Reunion" with the addition of Aiko 3 for Talena.
In the course of trying to research the meta for these books - difficult, there's not much in the way of in-genre gossip about them and less that isn't just people spouting off their uninformed hypothesis - I did find a couple interesting things.
I dug up one person claiming to have made Donald Wollheim squirm by asking him in person what was up with the Norman books. I note that he claims to remember with a mix of "fondness and embarrassment" the novel Time Slave - which, according to the fan reviews I can find, is about a scientist who decides that modern society is weak and decadent and sends his lab assistant back in time to rectify the lack of vigor which keeps us from the stars. How is she supposed to do this? Well, if you can't guess from the title, a reader describes it for us on Amazon:
As a devotee of John Norman' Gor series, I found Time Slave, a non-Gor story refreshing. Not only does the last available story of Gor, Magicians of Gor, become pretty slow, one wonders how much more the central character, Tarl Cabot, can do in this land, with the fall of glorious Ar and the untimely death of its Ubar. Moreover, the massive and extensive detours into discussions of male dominance and female submission have grown ever more cumbersome. In fact, one has already internalized these values if one has gotten this far in the series, and so these are now really unnecessary. The committed reader of Gor understands this philosophic context.
Against this backdrop, Time Slave offers a fresh, new venue for Norman to present the degradation of human dignity in the grey web of modern, sterile Western civilization, where men are emasculated and women have lost their femininity. In Time Slave, the brilliant and driven Danish scientist, Herjellsen, lures his colleague, the beautiful mathematician, Dr. Hamilton from Cal Tech, to work on a project in Africa. This project is the construction of a time machine, and Herjellsen's secret purpose is to send someone back in time to "rectify a mistake" in man's genetic heritage. This person, it turns out, is Dr. Hamilton. There, stripped and kept in a cell in the bush, tormented and threatened with sexual assault by Gunther, Herjellsen's German assistant, she is finally sent back to the Cro-Magnon period without any real knowledge of her goal.
There she is captured by a tall hunter from a Tribe called simply "the Men", who are a hunter-gatherer group competing with (and struggling against) other groups such as primitive herdsmen, and the contemptible "weasel people". Hamilton's adjustment to life in the camp, and the shock of her lowly status, take a toll on her modern pretensions. Nonetheless, Tree, the hunter who captured her in the first place, works to make Hamilton into a real woman, in touch with her senses, and alive to the strong sensuality that flows within her being. Indeed, it is through her subjugation to the men of the Tribe, and especially through the efforts of her lover, Tree, that Hamilton recovers her true sense of womanhood, and becomes a full-fledged woman of "the Men" and a member of the Tribe.
Tree, however, is only able to accomplish the breaking of Hamilton's civilized rigidity with the advice of the tribal matriarch, Old Woman, who is in charge of the fire and the women's chores in the camp, and who acts as a repository for tribal wisdom. Thus, she tells Tree, who is puzzled over Hamilton's inability to have an orgasm, "Every woman can be made to kick".
The child eventually born to this love union, true to the state of nature, is to be the one who redresses the false genetic turn humanity allegedly took so long ago. Frankly, I think the logic of the story would be better reversed, with humanity being renewed by going back to get Cro-Magnon stock to re-strengthen the degraded modern gene pool, rather than a renewal through the injection of the genes of a modern woman into that world 50 thousand years ago.
Despite what I thus perceive as a flaw in logic, Time Slave forces the reader to think about what has become of the strong genes of hunter-gatherer groups that survived and even prospered to propagate the race in that world of pre-civilization. Moreover, this new setting gives Norman a chance to raise the issue of a "natural philosophy" afresh, and with new elements. For instance, Time Slave has as a major undercurrent, man's need to explore, to transcend his current reality, and ultimately to reach to the stars.*
It wasn't environmentalism which killed the space shuttle, it was feminism!
Which brings me to the strange confluence of memes of the post title. Old-timers here remember how one of the things that got me started not just (eventually) blogging but with a series of investigations which ended up becoming "The Matrix" linked over in the sidebar, was a bizarre article that showed up on a whole bunch of websites at once, about how "Environmentalists" were responsible for the Challenger and Columbia tragedies. I started digging into this, because I knew both from my family having subscribed to Air & Space back in the 80s that this was hogwash, and from following the board of investigation reports on NPR and online at the time. It blew my mind that anyone was putting out such blatant lies, and that these were being picked up and swallowed whole and then regurgitated all over Usenet and website and blog without any fact-checking whatsoever. With what little resources were available to me, I was able to verify that the author had exaggerated some of his claimed scientific credentials and that the other ones were, in his case, unable to be validated - whereas I was able to turn up any number of other people who had supposedly worked for NASA at the same time, with online and academic paper trails.
Someone was working very hard to convince a lot of naive, uninformed readers back in early 2002 that the shuttle explosions were the work of shadowy evil saboteurs - aka "environmentalists" - and I wondered who, and what exactly they were trying to accomplish with this propaganda blitz.
This was my first encounter with World Net Daily, better known in Left Blogistan as "Wing Nut Daily," a "news" site that exists solely to push right-wing propaganda, and which has an SFnal connection in that one of its founders was Theodore Beale's dad (who subsequently got arrested for tax evasion, we heard). Beale, the author of some seriously bad angel-and-apocalypse novels (the first of which I picked up because it was blurbed as being "like CS Lewis" and shelved in mainstream SF at Borders, to my subsequent regret) is better known as Vox Day, the batshit blogger with an army of sock-puppets who bit the hand that honored him by trashing Dr. Catherine Asaro and the whole idea of female SF writers, thereby making himself notorious beyond his fondest imaginings. Again, someone who has trouble telling the difference between the world inside their head and the one outside it, which ends up being both laughable and scary.
I turned up a whole lot more examples, and remembered others from my time in the conservative movement, and found lots of squirmy things under the log going in all directions, which you can check out for yourself if you haven't already. But one of those things dredged up from the far past was a bizarre article that ran in the National Catholic Register, a conservative weekly, back in the late '80s or early '90s, in which the author went off on how there was no evidence whatsoever that DDT harmed birds and that by valuing wildlife over people to get DDT banned, environmentalists were guilty of the deaths of our heroic astronauts, and -- well, what do you think should be done with such inhuman, sociopathic wretches?
It was a neat little tangle of rhetoric, and I was a teenager at the time - and I knew it was false on at least one regard, because my family were "Crunchy Cons" back before Dreher finished grade school, let alone coined the term, and so we had not just Rachel Carson books but subscriptions to Geographic and Smithsonian and supported recycling (in a distant, non-activist way) and approved of peregrine and condor programs, we just weren't, you know, like those radical, humanity-hating environmentalists we read about in our conservative 'zines. I knew how DDT broke down the food chain. I wondered, at the time, as a teen, what could have moved NCR to publish such a clearly debunkable article, and also what else was wrong, since one of the big claims was.
In the course of digging for links, I found out why: the original author, back when, was the Olin Chair at his institution. And the Olin Foundation, I found out, was one of the infamous Four Sisters - and was involved in chemical manufacture, and one of their many tentacles was a company that had made a lot of money manufacturing and selling DDT in the US, before it was prohibited for use in this country. Follow the money.
It still didn't explain whether the editors at NCR were ignorant & gullible, or just mendacious, but it doesn't really matter: what matters is the results.
And oddly enough, one of my search results for "Gor" and "Wollheim" was a recent ObWi post on another resurgence of this meme. You just can't keep a good lie down - not when there are large profits to be made on it, no matter who is hurt by it. (For a good, if depressing, account and explanation of what happens when agricultural pests become resistant to pesticides, see the award-winning book The Beak of the Finch, which I have blogged about before. Bugs outlived the dinosaurs and a whole lot of other lifeforms left behind at the K-T boundary for a reason: they adapt and adapt fast.)
It also turned up another instance of fanboy insistence on the lack of problematic content in the first three books, this time by Gary Farber, who really should know better: "The first three books, actually, were pretty much just conventional knock-offs of Edgar Rice Burroughs, little different from Lin Carter and similar knock-offs. It was only in the fourth that John (Norman) Lange started feeling free to waxing philosophical about women's need to be dominated, and thereafter that that turned into the be-all and end-all of his books."
This statement he also makes on his blog: "And the first 3 Gor books by "John Norman," as published initially by Ballantine Books (and later by DAW, until even they dropped them), were run-of-the-mill Edgar Rice Burroughs knock-offs about an Earthman transferred to another planet, having to make his way in a land of sword-fighting and lords and whatnot."
--Sorry, but I've read ERB and John Norman, sir, is no Edgar Rice Burroughs. (Why do people keep making this claim? Do they assume that none of us objecting to Gor have ever read Tarzan or A Princess of Mars or are capable of doing so?) Sure, there's swordfighting, people running around in loincloths, and monsters in both authors' works - but those are mere superficial points of congruence. There's a reason that there is a "Tarzana" and not a "Tarlsville", USA.
This is an example of privilege in action ("Don't listen to the hysterical women/minorities, they're just overreacting!")in case anyone needed one. I also found a couple others for the record: here on an older thread asking what books people found most offensive, someone named Balrog of Morgoth supplies this concise yet imo accurate description of Gor:
The Gor series of books by John Norman (real name Dr. John Lange). Not only are women to be beaten, tortured, raped and generally used as subserviant sex slaves, but woman supposedly want to be used that way according to this guy. :mad:
And he can't write for crap either.
to which Donald M. responds:
I don't get offended, but those Gor books still sound pretty offensive.
spurring CaptMagellan to pooh-pooh Balrog of Morgoth's objections thusly:
The Gor books are too silly to be offensive. He was a bad sword and sorcery fantasy writer, writing in the 70s. His stuff is still pretty tame compared to some of the stuff written since. Norman has also stayed in print, primarily, due to the S&M community liking his fantasy settings and S&M situations.
Balrog's above description is a bit... overexagerated.
Since you've all now had a chance to read some chunks of Gor for yourselves, you can judge that claim of "overexaggeration" for yourselves, too.
A lengthier and more eloquent dismissal comes from Edward Crabtree in the Leicester Science Fiction Group's zine, but it all comes to the same thing: disinformation, aka lies, designed to serve the interests of the speaker's group and discredit the opposition without ever providing any evidence for their claims.
Fortunately, neither House Scaife nor Olin nor the Bradley Foundation nor any of the other lesser lights of the corporatist Minitrue have any interest in publishing skiffy to support their agendas, at least as far as I know. (They don't need to, really, not with Left Behind out there...)
Oh, and I also found the PR release for the last attempts to jumpstart the Gor series. Count how many "stretchers" you can find in it:
SCIENCE FICTION PIONEER JOHN NORMAN IS BACK
Gor, the most elaborately and richly described alternative world in literature, is back in print. After 14 years and millions of books John Norman's controversial and best selling saga of the planet Gor continues with his 26th book 'Witness of Gor'
Gor, the most elaborately and richly described alternative world in literature, is back in print. After 14 years and millions of books John Norman's controversial and best selling saga of the planet Gor continues with his 26th book 'Witness of Gor'.
The 25th Gor novel, published in June of 1988, was the last of the Gor series by DAW books. DAW picked up Norman's Gor series in 1974 at the company's birth, as one of the first authors of DAW, then a new and promising publishing company. Now in 2002, New World Publishers, a young Minnesota publishing company, is releasing 'Witness of Gor', the 26th novel in the Gor series.
John Norman, a pioneer in the science fiction genre', began the Gor series in 1967 with 'Tarnsman of Gor', published by Ballantine Books. Norman saw almost immediate success with his first novel and was commonly compared to Edgar Rice Burroughs due to his writing style. In 1974 Norman was picked up by Donald Wollheim at the birth of DAW books. DAW published the Gor series from 1974 to 1987, enjoying amazing success with the series, reporting sales in the millions of copies. The Gor series has been printed in at least eight languages, with some of the books experiencing as many as 20 printings.
John Norman and his Gor series came under fire in the early to mid 80's by certain political groups because of some of the philosophical ideas presented in his writings. The concepts regarding the relationship between men and women on Gor was considered radical for the period. Due to what was suggested to be political pressure, Norman's Gor series was canceled by DAW in 1988, less than two years after Wollheim's death. This marked the beginning of more than a decade of industry blacklisting.
However, with the birth and growth of the Internet came a growth and outcropping of the Gor fan base, unmatched by nearly any other author. Fans worldwide built web pages and web sites dedicated to Norman's writings. The second hand market for these now out of print Gor books became enormous, with certain damaged paperbacks selling for more than $100 at auction. In spite of the out of print status of the Gor series the fan base continued to grow and flourish.
Now, more than 14 years after the release of Norman's last Gor novel, the saga continues with 'Witness of Gor'. In spite of years of blacklisting and the rarity of some of Norman's books the fan base continues to grow. Spanning the globe, this fan base has been buying the re-edited (by John Norman) Gor novels from New World Publishers for over a year. WorldofGor.com, the official website of Gor, has reported books sold to more than 12 countries.
New World Publishers is proud to announce the release of 'Witness of Gor', Norman's first hard cover novel in North America. 'Witness of Gor' promises to be the best selling Gor novel yet. The Gor series will continue after 'Witness of Gor' with the already planned release of 'Prize of Gor', the 27th novel in the series, in 2003.
All ethical factors aside, this is probably the biggest single reason why Dark Horse is stupid for doing this. Ou sont les neiges d'antan, or rather, where's New World Publishers now, and where's their next book? Witness of Gor is way, way down (#76,990) below tammy212's Terrier (#3,527) on Amazon rankings as of this writing, and I never saw Witness of Gor in the bookstores to potentially add lots of off-the-shelf copies to adjust that upwards, either. Even with the significant Amazon discount (list price was $25 plus shipping), it moved like cold molasses there.
The danger with propagandists is that you will start believing your own hype. On small scale or large, it's all part of the same problem. It just does a lot more damage to a lot more people when it's big business, and corporate-leashed government, leaving the reality-based community.
--I should also note that, when these books first came out, Mary Renault had been writing historical novels for years full of violence, nudity, intrigue, exotic environs and kinky sex (along with apparently-supernatural-but-really-natural spookiness and mysterium) of all sorts and levels of consent, that were much more so - as well as being better written - in all respects than the Gor books. It wasn't as if there wasn't more explicit stuff available even in genre at the time. (It just wasn't fanboy crackfic.)
And I probably shouldn't tell y'all this, but there's a place in Tarnsman of Gor where Norman uses - I kid you not - the phrase "milky slit of death"...
* I will refrain, for the moment at least, from trying to figure out the logic [sic] by which ancient agriculture, which gave us cities and all their attendant sorrows - and powers, is to be replaced by hunter-gathering, which has not historically tended to produce either cities, or the sorts of complex technological installations required to support them, and this act of butterfly-squishing is somehow mystically going to give us a superior space program thousands of years later. If Norman/Lange were arguing that we need to go back in time and ensure hunter-gatherer dominance to stop the rising tide of pollution and chronic disease that have come through civilization, he'd have an arguably-more plausible plot, no matter how one felt about the prices of cheap plastic toys and the relative value of going around in circles in our solar system vs. firing massive amounts of resources into the Sea of Stars with no prospect of a return on the voyage. It's sexist crackfic that doesn't even make sense according to its own premises.
In the course of trying to research the meta for these books - difficult, there's not much in the way of in-genre gossip about them and less that isn't just people spouting off their uninformed hypothesis - I did find a couple interesting things.
I dug up one person claiming to have made Donald Wollheim squirm by asking him in person what was up with the Norman books. I note that he claims to remember with a mix of "fondness and embarrassment" the novel Time Slave - which, according to the fan reviews I can find, is about a scientist who decides that modern society is weak and decadent and sends his lab assistant back in time to rectify the lack of vigor which keeps us from the stars. How is she supposed to do this? Well, if you can't guess from the title, a reader describes it for us on Amazon:
As a devotee of John Norman' Gor series, I found Time Slave, a non-Gor story refreshing. Not only does the last available story of Gor, Magicians of Gor, become pretty slow, one wonders how much more the central character, Tarl Cabot, can do in this land, with the fall of glorious Ar and the untimely death of its Ubar. Moreover, the massive and extensive detours into discussions of male dominance and female submission have grown ever more cumbersome. In fact, one has already internalized these values if one has gotten this far in the series, and so these are now really unnecessary. The committed reader of Gor understands this philosophic context.
Against this backdrop, Time Slave offers a fresh, new venue for Norman to present the degradation of human dignity in the grey web of modern, sterile Western civilization, where men are emasculated and women have lost their femininity. In Time Slave, the brilliant and driven Danish scientist, Herjellsen, lures his colleague, the beautiful mathematician, Dr. Hamilton from Cal Tech, to work on a project in Africa. This project is the construction of a time machine, and Herjellsen's secret purpose is to send someone back in time to "rectify a mistake" in man's genetic heritage. This person, it turns out, is Dr. Hamilton. There, stripped and kept in a cell in the bush, tormented and threatened with sexual assault by Gunther, Herjellsen's German assistant, she is finally sent back to the Cro-Magnon period without any real knowledge of her goal.
There she is captured by a tall hunter from a Tribe called simply "the Men", who are a hunter-gatherer group competing with (and struggling against) other groups such as primitive herdsmen, and the contemptible "weasel people". Hamilton's adjustment to life in the camp, and the shock of her lowly status, take a toll on her modern pretensions. Nonetheless, Tree, the hunter who captured her in the first place, works to make Hamilton into a real woman, in touch with her senses, and alive to the strong sensuality that flows within her being. Indeed, it is through her subjugation to the men of the Tribe, and especially through the efforts of her lover, Tree, that Hamilton recovers her true sense of womanhood, and becomes a full-fledged woman of "the Men" and a member of the Tribe.
Tree, however, is only able to accomplish the breaking of Hamilton's civilized rigidity with the advice of the tribal matriarch, Old Woman, who is in charge of the fire and the women's chores in the camp, and who acts as a repository for tribal wisdom. Thus, she tells Tree, who is puzzled over Hamilton's inability to have an orgasm, "Every woman can be made to kick".
The child eventually born to this love union, true to the state of nature, is to be the one who redresses the false genetic turn humanity allegedly took so long ago. Frankly, I think the logic of the story would be better reversed, with humanity being renewed by going back to get Cro-Magnon stock to re-strengthen the degraded modern gene pool, rather than a renewal through the injection of the genes of a modern woman into that world 50 thousand years ago.
Despite what I thus perceive as a flaw in logic, Time Slave forces the reader to think about what has become of the strong genes of hunter-gatherer groups that survived and even prospered to propagate the race in that world of pre-civilization. Moreover, this new setting gives Norman a chance to raise the issue of a "natural philosophy" afresh, and with new elements. For instance, Time Slave has as a major undercurrent, man's need to explore, to transcend his current reality, and ultimately to reach to the stars.*
It wasn't environmentalism which killed the space shuttle, it was feminism!
Which brings me to the strange confluence of memes of the post title. Old-timers here remember how one of the things that got me started not just (eventually) blogging but with a series of investigations which ended up becoming "The Matrix" linked over in the sidebar, was a bizarre article that showed up on a whole bunch of websites at once, about how "Environmentalists" were responsible for the Challenger and Columbia tragedies. I started digging into this, because I knew both from my family having subscribed to Air & Space back in the 80s that this was hogwash, and from following the board of investigation reports on NPR and online at the time. It blew my mind that anyone was putting out such blatant lies, and that these were being picked up and swallowed whole and then regurgitated all over Usenet and website and blog without any fact-checking whatsoever. With what little resources were available to me, I was able to verify that the author had exaggerated some of his claimed scientific credentials and that the other ones were, in his case, unable to be validated - whereas I was able to turn up any number of other people who had supposedly worked for NASA at the same time, with online and academic paper trails.
Someone was working very hard to convince a lot of naive, uninformed readers back in early 2002 that the shuttle explosions were the work of shadowy evil saboteurs - aka "environmentalists" - and I wondered who, and what exactly they were trying to accomplish with this propaganda blitz.
This was my first encounter with World Net Daily, better known in Left Blogistan as "Wing Nut Daily," a "news" site that exists solely to push right-wing propaganda, and which has an SFnal connection in that one of its founders was Theodore Beale's dad (who subsequently got arrested for tax evasion, we heard). Beale, the author of some seriously bad angel-and-apocalypse novels (the first of which I picked up because it was blurbed as being "like CS Lewis" and shelved in mainstream SF at Borders, to my subsequent regret) is better known as Vox Day, the batshit blogger with an army of sock-puppets who bit the hand that honored him by trashing Dr. Catherine Asaro and the whole idea of female SF writers, thereby making himself notorious beyond his fondest imaginings. Again, someone who has trouble telling the difference between the world inside their head and the one outside it, which ends up being both laughable and scary.
I turned up a whole lot more examples, and remembered others from my time in the conservative movement, and found lots of squirmy things under the log going in all directions, which you can check out for yourself if you haven't already. But one of those things dredged up from the far past was a bizarre article that ran in the National Catholic Register, a conservative weekly, back in the late '80s or early '90s, in which the author went off on how there was no evidence whatsoever that DDT harmed birds and that by valuing wildlife over people to get DDT banned, environmentalists were guilty of the deaths of our heroic astronauts, and -- well, what do you think should be done with such inhuman, sociopathic wretches?
It was a neat little tangle of rhetoric, and I was a teenager at the time - and I knew it was false on at least one regard, because my family were "Crunchy Cons" back before Dreher finished grade school, let alone coined the term, and so we had not just Rachel Carson books but subscriptions to Geographic and Smithsonian and supported recycling (in a distant, non-activist way) and approved of peregrine and condor programs, we just weren't, you know, like those radical, humanity-hating environmentalists we read about in our conservative 'zines. I knew how DDT broke down the food chain. I wondered, at the time, as a teen, what could have moved NCR to publish such a clearly debunkable article, and also what else was wrong, since one of the big claims was.
In the course of digging for links, I found out why: the original author, back when, was the Olin Chair at his institution. And the Olin Foundation, I found out, was one of the infamous Four Sisters - and was involved in chemical manufacture, and one of their many tentacles was a company that had made a lot of money manufacturing and selling DDT in the US, before it was prohibited for use in this country. Follow the money.
It still didn't explain whether the editors at NCR were ignorant & gullible, or just mendacious, but it doesn't really matter: what matters is the results.
And oddly enough, one of my search results for "Gor" and "Wollheim" was a recent ObWi post on another resurgence of this meme. You just can't keep a good lie down - not when there are large profits to be made on it, no matter who is hurt by it. (For a good, if depressing, account and explanation of what happens when agricultural pests become resistant to pesticides, see the award-winning book The Beak of the Finch, which I have blogged about before. Bugs outlived the dinosaurs and a whole lot of other lifeforms left behind at the K-T boundary for a reason: they adapt and adapt fast.)
It also turned up another instance of fanboy insistence on the lack of problematic content in the first three books, this time by Gary Farber, who really should know better: "The first three books, actually, were pretty much just conventional knock-offs of Edgar Rice Burroughs, little different from Lin Carter and similar knock-offs. It was only in the fourth that John (Norman) Lange started feeling free to waxing philosophical about women's need to be dominated, and thereafter that that turned into the be-all and end-all of his books."
This statement he also makes on his blog: "And the first 3 Gor books by "John Norman," as published initially by Ballantine Books (and later by DAW, until even they dropped them), were run-of-the-mill Edgar Rice Burroughs knock-offs about an Earthman transferred to another planet, having to make his way in a land of sword-fighting and lords and whatnot."
--Sorry, but I've read ERB and John Norman, sir, is no Edgar Rice Burroughs. (Why do people keep making this claim? Do they assume that none of us objecting to Gor have ever read Tarzan or A Princess of Mars or are capable of doing so?) Sure, there's swordfighting, people running around in loincloths, and monsters in both authors' works - but those are mere superficial points of congruence. There's a reason that there is a "Tarzana" and not a "Tarlsville", USA.
This is an example of privilege in action ("Don't listen to the hysterical women/minorities, they're just overreacting!")in case anyone needed one. I also found a couple others for the record: here on an older thread asking what books people found most offensive, someone named Balrog of Morgoth supplies this concise yet imo accurate description of Gor:
The Gor series of books by John Norman (real name Dr. John Lange). Not only are women to be beaten, tortured, raped and generally used as subserviant sex slaves, but woman supposedly want to be used that way according to this guy. :mad:
And he can't write for crap either.
to which Donald M. responds:
I don't get offended, but those Gor books still sound pretty offensive.
spurring CaptMagellan to pooh-pooh Balrog of Morgoth's objections thusly:
The Gor books are too silly to be offensive. He was a bad sword and sorcery fantasy writer, writing in the 70s. His stuff is still pretty tame compared to some of the stuff written since. Norman has also stayed in print, primarily, due to the S&M community liking his fantasy settings and S&M situations.
Balrog's above description is a bit... overexagerated.
Since you've all now had a chance to read some chunks of Gor for yourselves, you can judge that claim of "overexaggeration" for yourselves, too.
A lengthier and more eloquent dismissal comes from Edward Crabtree in the Leicester Science Fiction Group's zine, but it all comes to the same thing: disinformation, aka lies, designed to serve the interests of the speaker's group and discredit the opposition without ever providing any evidence for their claims.
Fortunately, neither House Scaife nor Olin nor the Bradley Foundation nor any of the other lesser lights of the corporatist Minitrue have any interest in publishing skiffy to support their agendas, at least as far as I know. (They don't need to, really, not with Left Behind out there...)
Oh, and I also found the PR release for the last attempts to jumpstart the Gor series. Count how many "stretchers" you can find in it:
SCIENCE FICTION PIONEER JOHN NORMAN IS BACK
Gor, the most elaborately and richly described alternative world in literature, is back in print. After 14 years and millions of books John Norman's controversial and best selling saga of the planet Gor continues with his 26th book 'Witness of Gor'
Gor, the most elaborately and richly described alternative world in literature, is back in print. After 14 years and millions of books John Norman's controversial and best selling saga of the planet Gor continues with his 26th book 'Witness of Gor'.
The 25th Gor novel, published in June of 1988, was the last of the Gor series by DAW books. DAW picked up Norman's Gor series in 1974 at the company's birth, as one of the first authors of DAW, then a new and promising publishing company. Now in 2002, New World Publishers, a young Minnesota publishing company, is releasing 'Witness of Gor', the 26th novel in the Gor series.
John Norman, a pioneer in the science fiction genre', began the Gor series in 1967 with 'Tarnsman of Gor', published by Ballantine Books. Norman saw almost immediate success with his first novel and was commonly compared to Edgar Rice Burroughs due to his writing style. In 1974 Norman was picked up by Donald Wollheim at the birth of DAW books. DAW published the Gor series from 1974 to 1987, enjoying amazing success with the series, reporting sales in the millions of copies. The Gor series has been printed in at least eight languages, with some of the books experiencing as many as 20 printings.
John Norman and his Gor series came under fire in the early to mid 80's by certain political groups because of some of the philosophical ideas presented in his writings. The concepts regarding the relationship between men and women on Gor was considered radical for the period. Due to what was suggested to be political pressure, Norman's Gor series was canceled by DAW in 1988, less than two years after Wollheim's death. This marked the beginning of more than a decade of industry blacklisting.
However, with the birth and growth of the Internet came a growth and outcropping of the Gor fan base, unmatched by nearly any other author. Fans worldwide built web pages and web sites dedicated to Norman's writings. The second hand market for these now out of print Gor books became enormous, with certain damaged paperbacks selling for more than $100 at auction. In spite of the out of print status of the Gor series the fan base continued to grow and flourish.
Now, more than 14 years after the release of Norman's last Gor novel, the saga continues with 'Witness of Gor'. In spite of years of blacklisting and the rarity of some of Norman's books the fan base continues to grow. Spanning the globe, this fan base has been buying the re-edited (by John Norman) Gor novels from New World Publishers for over a year. WorldofGor.com, the official website of Gor, has reported books sold to more than 12 countries.
New World Publishers is proud to announce the release of 'Witness of Gor', Norman's first hard cover novel in North America. 'Witness of Gor' promises to be the best selling Gor novel yet. The Gor series will continue after 'Witness of Gor' with the already planned release of 'Prize of Gor', the 27th novel in the series, in 2003.
All ethical factors aside, this is probably the biggest single reason why Dark Horse is stupid for doing this. Ou sont les neiges d'antan, or rather, where's New World Publishers now, and where's their next book? Witness of Gor is way, way down (#76,990) below tammy212's Terrier (#3,527) on Amazon rankings as of this writing, and I never saw Witness of Gor in the bookstores to potentially add lots of off-the-shelf copies to adjust that upwards, either. Even with the significant Amazon discount (list price was $25 plus shipping), it moved like cold molasses there.
The danger with propagandists is that you will start believing your own hype. On small scale or large, it's all part of the same problem. It just does a lot more damage to a lot more people when it's big business, and corporate-leashed government, leaving the reality-based community.
--I should also note that, when these books first came out, Mary Renault had been writing historical novels for years full of violence, nudity, intrigue, exotic environs and kinky sex (along with apparently-supernatural-but-really-natural spookiness and mysterium) of all sorts and levels of consent, that were much more so - as well as being better written - in all respects than the Gor books. It wasn't as if there wasn't more explicit stuff available even in genre at the time. (It just wasn't fanboy crackfic.)
And I probably shouldn't tell y'all this, but there's a place in Tarnsman of Gor where Norman uses - I kid you not - the phrase "milky slit of death"...
* I will refrain, for the moment at least, from trying to figure out the logic [sic] by which ancient agriculture, which gave us cities and all their attendant sorrows - and powers, is to be replaced by hunter-gathering, which has not historically tended to produce either cities, or the sorts of complex technological installations required to support them, and this act of butterfly-squishing is somehow mystically going to give us a superior space program thousands of years later. If Norman/Lange were arguing that we need to go back in time and ensure hunter-gatherer dominance to stop the rising tide of pollution and chronic disease that have come through civilization, he'd have an arguably-more plausible plot, no matter how one felt about the prices of cheap plastic toys and the relative value of going around in circles in our solar system vs. firing massive amounts of resources into the Sea of Stars with no prospect of a return on the voyage. It's sexist crackfic that doesn't even make sense according to its own premises.