James Nicoll Reviews

1966’s Tarnsman of Gor is the first volume in John Norman’s Gor sword and planet novels.

Mediocre Oxford graduate Tarl Cabot successfully exaggerates his academic prowess to the gullible Americans. Result: a teaching position at a minor liberal college in New Hampshire. As long as Tarl can swot up course material faster than he has to teach it, his position should be secure. The potential for zany academic adventures, perhaps involving lascivious young co-eds, is obvious.

Also, completely irrelevant to the actual plot of this book.

Tarl’s father vanished when Tarl was young. Therefore, he did not expect to receive a letter from his father. Nor, having read the letter, did he expect to be kidnapped by a flying saucer and whisked away to another world. And yet, he was!

Gor orbits on the other side of the Sun, forever hidden from Earth’s direct view¹. Gor is managed by the all-powerful Priest-Kings, about whom very little is known. For reasons known only to the Priest-Kings, they stocked Gor with a variety of humans. Also, for reasons known only to the Priest-Kings, humans are kept technologically backward on pain of swift and painful incineration².

Although city-states are generally speaking independent, there are common elements. Everyone adheres to the same caste system, Slavery is universal. Gender roles are narrowly defined. Autocratic Ubars hold power only for the duration of the crisis that elevated them to power.

The city-state Ar is an exception. Marlenus, Ubar of Ar, did not step down. Nor did his warriors overthrow him, as custom demands. Worse, under Marlenus, Ar has carved out an empire, picking off independent city-states one by one. Or rather, Ar is carving out an empire, with no sign of stopping.

Prudence demands that the free city-states ally to resist Ar. Culture makes that impossible. Indeed, suggesting the alliance nearly triggers a war between the independent city-states. Some other way will have to be found to stop Ar. Tarl’s father has a cunning plan… one in which Tarl will play a crucial role.

Each city-state has a Home Stone, the symbol of sovereignty. If someone were to steal Ur’s Home Stone, Marlenus would be embarrassed. Marlenus’ city-state Ur would be shamed. Marlenus’ warriors would be compelled to overthrow their Ubar.

All Tarl need do is master Gorean weapons and culture, sneak into Ur, steal the Home Stone, elude any pursuers and return to Ko-ro-ba, his father’s city-state. What could possibly go wrong?

Quite a lot, as it turns out, including Tarl’s infatuation with Talena, daughter of Marlenus, who if she is not the most beautiful woman on Gor, is certainly amongst its most unreliable and duplicitous.

~oOo~

A cynic might wonder if Tarl’s dad selected Tarl, the son he abandoned and ignored for years, because he didn’t think the plan was likely to work. Perhaps he didn’t want to risk the life of someone he actually valued. Indeed, Tarl is very nearly killed before being abducted, thanks to the fierceness with which the self-destructing letter Tarl received burns³.

On the matter of slavery on Gor: the text suggests there are those for whom being a slave comes naturally, and those for whom being enslaved is a dreadful calamity. Curiously, the slave girl who provides an example of the first is brown-skinned, while both of the women for whom slavery is a terrible misfortune are blondes⁴.

The Gor series has the reputation of being the sort of sword and planet series someone who fixated on The Way of a Man With a Maid⁵ might write. This may well be true of the later books, which I assure you will not be reviewed without cold, hard cash being exchanged. It is not true of Tarnsman of Gor.

Oh, sure, there are references to slave girls and to what purpose they are put, and Talena is occasionally subjected to light BDSM. It’s all strictly g‑rated, with the steamy eroticism of a damp handshake. But at heart, this is a John Carter of Mars pastiche.

Tarnsman of Gor is to A Princess of Mars as The Sword of Shanarra is to The Lord of the Rings. The novel hews closely enough to the original to make it clear what Norman’s source material is⁶, without being so derivative that the notoriously litigious Burroughs estate had grounds to sue. Presumably, the series was initially aimed at readers looking for meandering, coincidence-filled tales who had already exhausted Burroughs.

The prose is somehow even more dreadful than Burroughs’ prose, which is not a sentence I ever expected to type. It’s not that this is porn (the point there being titillation and not deathless prose). As I said, this volume barely flirts with erotica. It’s just that Norman treats the English language like it backed over his favourite puppy. Astonishingly, scurrilous rumour suggests that when Donald Wollheim tempted Norman away from Ballantine to DAW, one of the enticements was that Norman would no longer be edited. If true, that suggests that Tarnsman was edited, which in turn makes me wonder how awful the original MS was. Did the slush-reader’s reaction inspire that scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark?

The novel and the series of which it is a part do offer entertainment to the discerning reader, who can savor the stark contrast between the classic work of philosophical literature John Norman believes that he wrote and the derivative, potboiler crap he actually delivered. The reader may also choose to explore the detritus that Norman left in his wake. Norman does not handle criticism or rejection well, which results in a delightful stream of irate, paranoid fulminations about the adoring recognition to which he is entitled and who is to blame for the lack of it⁷. Additionally, one may savour the occasional reminiscences of those professionals who have had the pleasure of dealing with Norman.

Tarnsman of Gor is available here (Open Road Media), here (Barnes & Noble), here (Bookshop US), here (Bookshop UK), here (Chapters-Indigo), and here (Words Worth Books).

1: We must assume that the Priest-Kings ensured that Gor’s orbit remained stable and the planet concealed.

2: Checking online sources, the reason seems to be that the Priest-Kings believe humans are chuckleheads who, if armed with advanced technology, will destroy themselves. USA delenda est.

3: The novel does not reveal that Tarl’s father inadvertently incinerated ten or eleven of his Earthly bastards before he got to one who didn’t stuff the letter into his pocket… but it also does not rule that out.

4: Not a huge coincidence, as one blonde was supposed to pose as the other.

5: You’ve only yourself to blame if you google that.

6: It’s possible Gor’s slavery is inspired by John Carter of Mars’ treatment of slavery. Not only is slavery accepted on Barsoom (as Mars is called in ERB’s books), John Carter was a beloved slave owner on Earth. To quote A Princess of Mars’ narrator:

We all loved him, and our slaves fairly worshipped the ground he trod. 

As the narrator is supposed to be ERB himself, born in Illinois, a non-slave state, in 1875, twelve years after the Emancipation proclamation, it says a lot about Carter’s character that he could convince even victims kept in manifestly illegal bondage that he was an admirable fellow.

It would be nice to think what endeared Carter to the slaves was that he freed them from the Burroughs family, but there is no evidence of that.

7: Norman believes that a small cabal of editors agreed to blacklist him because his books are not politically correct. Did this cabal include Jim Baen? Baen never published Gor and yet when one says ​“politically correct”, Jim Baen does not come to mind.

Betsy Wollheim, who was in the room where it happened, seems positively cheerful about her role in ridding DAW of Gor:

I alone killed the Gor books. I am personally responsible for rejecting John Norman. 

Presumably, that statement was accompanied by peals of gleeful laughter not easily translated into text.