The Two Worlds of Gor

[hans_the_bold]

Having been the inspiration of sovay's recent post about Assassin of Gor, I feel I should offer a few comments about Gor, so to explain, in part at least, just WHAT THE HELL I WAS THINKING when I loaned her that book.

Okay. Over a curry dinner, I commented that Assassin of Gor resembled the typical James Bond movie plot: undefeatable hero, hot, sexy

Comments

[sovay]

What Norman did was show the sexual side of heroic fantasy that authors like Robert E. Howard had only implied

What's curious is that, as I mentioned earlier today, Tanith Lee's early novels for DAW-science fantasies like The Birthgrave and Don't Bite the Sun or epic-heroic fantasies like The Storm Lord and Anackire-are highly sexual. They are not fevered fantasies in which what happens in bed outweighs whatever happens out of it, but love, sex, and desire are powerful motivations for Lee's characters. Her sex scenes are explicit without anatomy lessons or bad porn euphenisms (Jean Auel, I'm looking at you) and it's all assumed as part of the story.

I know. I know, John Norman at his best was not a sliver of the writer that Tanith Lee, when she's on,* is. But she's proof that one can write sexy heroic fantasy without falling into ineffective porn. So who else does?

*She has her share of novels I dislike: White as Snow (2000) and Vivia (1995) chief among them. But at least when the plots are disastrous, I can like the language. John Norman offers no such fallback.