Download Tribesmen of Gor fb2

A few years ago I decided to revisit the Gorean Saga. I had read a handful of the early Gor books from the sixties and seventies when I was a teenager, starting with book one and reading them in order. After reading many of the reviews online I purchased ten of the Gorean Saga books. I didn’t read them all back to back so it took me a few years to read them all. I mixed them in with other books I wanted to read. I read a wide variety of stuff each year, everything from nonfiction to westerns. About half of what I read is sci-fi and fantasy, averaging 50-60 books a year.

These are the Gor books I read. After each book I’ve included how many stars I gave the story. Notice how the page count increases as the series goes on. This is not a good thing as I explain below.

Book 1 – Tarnsman of Gor (1966) p166 – 4 stars
Book 2 – Outlaw of Gor (1967) p220 – 2 stars
Book 3 – Priest-Kings of Gor (1968) p328 – 4 stars
Book 4 – Nomads of Gor (1969) p372 – 3 stars
Book 5 – Assassin of Gor (1971) p392 – 5 stars
Book 6 – Raiders of Gor (1971) p332 – 4 stars
I skipped Book 7 because the POV character changes from Tarl Cabot to Elinor Brinton.
Book 8 – Hunters of Gor (1974) p372 – 2 stars
Book 9 – Marauders of Gor (1975) p313 – 3 stars
Book 10 – Tribesman of Gor (1976) p449 – 1 stars
Book 33 – Rebels of Gor (2013) p654 – 2 stars

I found some of the stories good. But many of the books are bloated bores, lectures on the wonderments of female slavery instead of adventure stories. I read for adventure, not boring slave lectures. The stories I rated the highest are the ones with a high adventure to lecture ratio. Most of the books could be cut in half without losing any of the story. I’ll use Book 33, Rebels of Gor, as an example. It’s a 200-300 page adventure wrapped up in a long, repetitious, boring, slave lecture. The same information and dialogue are repeated over, and over, and over, and over, and . . . (Get the idea?)

If I revisit the Gorean Saga I’ll probably only read a few of the books that I found interesting this time around. In the meantime I’ll be spending more time with some of my favorite sci-fi and fantasy writers, Douglas Adams, Isaac Asimov, Paolo Bacigalupi, Ray Bradbury, Orson Scott Card, Jack Campbell, Arthur C. Clarke, Earnest Cline, Suzanne Collins, Abe Evergreen, Diana Gabaldon, Joe Haldeman, Robert A. Heinlein, Hugh Howey, George Martin, Larry Niven, Andre Norton, George Orwell, Patrick Rothfuss, Brandon Sanderson, John Scalzi, J.R.R. Tolkien and Andy Weir.

Starship Troopers (1959) (not like the movie) by Robert A. Heinlein is the book that got me started in sci-fi adventures, and has remained one of my top five favorite military science fiction adventure stories for decades. The Forever War (1974) by Joe Haldeman, Armor (1984) by John Steakley, Ender’s Game (1985) by Orson Scott Card and Old Man’s War (2005) by John Scalzi, round out my top five military sci-fi adventure stories.

TRIBESMEN OF GOR is the last Gor novel not overwhelmed with the theme of human bondage. But by this point it is as evident and distracting as Mikhail Gorbachev's birthmark. I love TRIBESMEN, the tenth of the series, and can tolerate the ratio between plot and slavery dogma in this book. The tipping of the narrative scales that's been building for the last three volumes will go overboard from book 11 onward and start to smother the series. TRIBESMEN shines though, and brightly. This is the episode just before the series jumps the shark, a gritty adventure for Tarl Cabot, who endures and conquers much misery throughout; readers will feel his pain.

The conclusion of the steel tower subplot toward the end of the novel and the Klima excursion in TRIBESMEN are among Norman's finest fictional moments, standing alongside the gravitational disruption chapter in PRIEST-KINGS, Cabot's clandestine nocturnal foray into Turia and his ordeal in Saphrar's pool during NOMADS, the tarn race and gladiatorial sequences from ASSASSIN, the first of the two long sea battles in RAIDERS, Vella's scene in the alcove with Cabot in HUNTERS, and the thing fair scenes of MARAUDERS. TRIBESMEN, and the preceding MARAUDERS, are fully-realized masterpieces of the imagination detailing the new Cabot. A naive young warrior is replaced with a world weary, hardened individual.

Norman, as usual, has done his research, the desert lore in this novel is fascinatingly real, the various treks Cabot makes across the burning sands engrossing. John Norman is very good at evoking a sense of place in his Gor books, but he never did it better than in this novel. Character motivations are subtle and deep, the bitter betrayals and vengeful comeuppances are razor sharp. Reading the previous works in the series enriches the enjoyment of such but is by no means necessary. TRIBESMEN is a standalone story with a defined beginning, middle and end unlike other later storylines that sprawl over the course of several books.

Gor novels are truly outrageous reads. From the beginning creator Norman changed lanes, switched gears, drove on the wrong side of the road and took exits into uncharted territory where there was bound to be trouble. Starting with the second book, character reversals and plot upsets ran amok in some of the best interplanetary romance genre fiction ever published. Norman's Gorean saga never takes the reader where he or she thinks the story will take them. Cabot never really recovers his lost Talena; he finds his city destroyed, to be rebuilt only symbolically; the Priest-Kings and, later, the Kurii, are nothing like one would expect them to be from Norman's clever foreshadowing; 11 of the 22 books after TRIBESMEN replace Cabot as narrator, sometimes he doesn't appear in an entire story, or for several in a row. In book six Tarl Cabot suffers a defeat that will haunt him for the remainder of his days and by TRIBESMEN, the tenth, the series is irreconcilably on a vastly different trajectory with only intermittent flashes of its former glory. They're there, but in such miserly portions one has to scour the pages to locate them.

Although Tarl Cabot accomplishes a few other exciting missions after TRIBESMEN OF GOR, this is where the series peaks. For adventure fans, it's all downhill after this one. The reason why is the balance between the adventure storyline and Norman's fetishistic notions begin an exponential shift in scale. Their proportions in the first six books is a workable, even enjoyable 90% plot, 10% slave girl philosophy (with percentages lessening in the plot department in every succeeding volume). In books seven through ten the scales shifted to 75% plot, 25% philosophy with percentages in the slavery psychobabble consuming more and more pages yet still riding on the back of the plot, and underpinning the story. The dominance & submission lectures in Gor books after TRIBESMEN supersede the plot as Norman clears the decks by consciously switching genres in mid-series, and not bothering to tell anyone! Norman's readership got the idea, of course. Abruptly the novels cease to cater to the fantasy adventure readers and become a feast for the BDSM crowd (whose legions apparently outnumber those of sci-fi/fantasy fans which equates to more books sold and bigger paychecks for the writer who has tapped neatly into two markets now with one of the most deft bait-and-switch ploys in the history of the printed word). As previously stated, there still is some derring-do but it's on the back burner while the 'women are natural slaves' theme not only boils over, but transmogrifies into the raison d'être of the series.

One of the original stories of Gor. During this period John Norman created various cultures on Gor taken from Earth cultures in this case desert nomads as you would find in the Middle East. These stories were written before the internet and Norman does a credible job of incorporating Arab customs into the story line doing his research the old fashioned way. It's a Tarl Cabot book and Vella makes a reappearance. As always Cabot's martial skills and courtly manners make him important friends. He collaborates with a Kur to save the plant. He suffers greatly and only super human endurance sees him through. It's a good yarn among the best of Gor

This is as far as I go with this series. The first few were great with tension between his earth beliefs and Gor culture. The over-arching story between the humans, Priest Kings, and the Kuri are also quite good. When the story started to degrade, I held out hope that it was all a setup for much greater story line. There were parts of 9 and 10 that were good, but I found myself skipping pages and pages with the insanely obsessive and extremely redundant reflection of what women on Gor are supposed to be like. Between the repetitive dialog with women and repetitive thoughts on how men are dominant and women are submissive,I often wondered if either the author was himself so obsessed with these concepts (if so, I feel sorry for his wife) that this is all he thought about when writing these or if he had a word count requirement for the editor and constantly repeated dialog and thoughts just to fill pages. I'm done.