[.ca] Tarnsman Of Gor (ISBN 0809556154)

Something Awful:
The whole "World of Gor" thing began in 1967 when John Norman, a distinguished filthy old man who purchased a mail-order Ph. D. in the respectable field of Philosophy from Columbia University on Mars, wrote the groundbreaking novel "The Tarnsman of Gor," which was groundbreaking in the fact that it contained 1,452 pages and weighed nearly 700 pounds, buckling concrete and requiring a government permit to legally own. "The Tarnsman of Gor" was a revolutionary book at the time, encouraging men to break free from the shackles of society and its rigid "rules" that suggested males should not use women as large paperweights and jacks to hoist up their monster truck when changing tires. The universe of Gor is a place where men are men, boys are smaller men, and women serve the same function as Christmas tree decorations except the neighbors won't give you weird looks when you f#ck them repeatedly.

Read only if you have Aspirin:
First off, let me start by saying that I am a fantasy story/ sci fi fan. The ideas and plot in this story I found okay but a tad formulaic. But the thing that really bothers me is the way John Norman writes. Good Gods, it's horrible! The paragraphs are broken, choppy lacking any sense of proper gramatical structure and is MASSIVELY repetitive. To say that he repeats words cannot fully explain his "style". He has an annoying habit of writing things like....I, too, understood this.....they, too, saw this.......we, too, fought..... And descriptions? Boring, drab and again, repetitive. This man would benefit greatly from the use of a thesaurus! He takes 2 pages to say what could be said descriptively and thoroughly in a paragraph. Another annoying habit that he has used on some occassions is creating words. Louis Carrol did this, as did some other authors too, but they had and have a command of the English language. Norman shouldn't be allowed to make up words from joining two or more every day words together. He is teetering on not being allowed to write at all...not even his name. It saddens me to learn that John Norman is a college professor. It's no wonder that he teaches philosophy. Half the time you have to ponder hard trying to figure out how he is describing things such as big rocks. I have read several of Norman's books. Each time I got a massive headache from reading it and had to quit or have my girlfriend translate the story from Norman-ese to English. Even then, we are wondering if that has anything to do with my girlfriend's sudden resurgence of migraines. In short, Norman's stories are okay, by no means great, but his writing should make us all sorrowfull knowing that these were supposedly written by an educated man. After reading how he writes his work, I wonder where the publisher's editors were. If anyone handed in a story like this to an English teacher or creative writing teacher, they would surely return it with an F emblazoned on the front. Gor is a book series that people should read if there are no other books in existance and they really are in DESPERATE need bathroom material.

Great Start:
This slightly shorter work sets the stage well for the world of Gor. It doesn't have the detail/philosophy of some of the later books but enough to give you a sense of a fascinating barbaric world. The action is fast, the slave girls are few, notably this is perhaps one of the few books with a strong female character. And the thought of Talena follows us and Tarl Cabot himself throughout the books. It is a pity they do not meet again within the first twenty books. In this book, as in the first 5, Tarl, though probably the mightiest and bravest swordsman on the planet, is still deep down an earth man, which makes the first person writing more palatable. In the later books he is much harsher- ie. a true Gorean male, though his cleverness and exploits are no less brave and amazing.

THE HIDDEN WORLD:
Earth could never know of Gor, the world always on the opposite side of the sun. But Gor somehow knew about Earth, as Tarl Cabot soon discovered. Taken by force to that savage world, Cabot was forced to become a tarnsman--a warrior who could control the great warbirds of Ko-ro-ba. Gor was a world of slaves and beautiful women, of human domination by the alien, secret Priest-Kings. And it was also the world of Talena, tempestuous daughter of the greatest warlord of Gor. She waited for the man who could subdue her--the man who could be her master. But was Tarl Cabot that man?

Decent Adolescent Read become Bondage Bible:
In the 1970's I was a teenager and read a few of the Gor books along with every other sci-fi and fantasy book I could get my hands on. Mostly I remember they were enjoyable adventures -- I liked the characters riding on big birds (a 'tarn'). Imagine my surprise that these books are now popular as sedo-masocism guidebooks, marketed as such (check out some of the covers.), and scorned by feminists everywhere. I feel so used.