SLAVE GIRL OF GOR (TARL CABOT, NO 11) [Anglais] [Poche]

If you ever wondered what a love story set on the planet Gor would be like, here's your answer. If you were expecting hearts and flowers and violin music, you just don't know Gor! Try instead whips, chains, cages, humiliation, degradation, brutality, and rape. Nevertheless, as hard as he tries,... Clitus Vitellius is unable to suppress his tender feelings, so unbecoming to a Master of the Warrior Caste, toward pretty little Judy. This is the second of the Gor novels to be told from the perspective of an abducted Earth girl enslaved on Gor. Judy aka Dina aka Yata is nowhere near the nasty piece of work that Elinor Brinton of Captive of Gor was. Also, she accepts her slavery much more readily than EB so you would think that her experiences on Gor would not be as harsh. Wrong! This book differs from Captive in several other ways. For one thing it actually has a plot. Unbeknownst to Judy she carries an implanted message to a Cosian agent of the Kurii that has bearing on the interplanetary struggle for control of both Gor and Earth. Of course, after an initial taste of this plot it stops for the next 300 pages or so in order to give the reader a look at what life is like for a slave girl on Gor. If your interest is Gorean lifestyle, you'll like this part. Otherwise, it can be slow going. Another difference from Captive is that there is a fair amount of action especially in the last 150 pages when Tarl Cabot again shows up as Bosk of Port Kar. (Rask of Treve briefly shows up again as well.) The revelation of Judy's hidden message sets up the next novel; however, there is nothing here that seems crucial to understanding subsequent volumes in the series. This is clearly a better novel than Captives but not as good as the action-oriented books.

Someday a literary study of sex slave books is going to be written, and this one is going to stand out as a milestone. This is not to say that "Slave Girl of Gor" is great literature, because it isn't. The writing alternates between tight and clumsy, often wandering into misogynist philosophical rants, and some of these can be downright irrational. But it is one of a group of books that have become both a part of the social canon of BDSM and perhaps the most reviled series in the history of science fiction and fantasy fandom. Yes, it's John Norman's "Gor", and "Slave Girl of Gor" might well be its most sexual and most provocative title.

Getting past the rhetoric surrounding the series, this book is actually not that different from a traditional erotic romance novel, except for the more intense bondage elements and the philosophical ramblings that sometimes get in the way of the story. The sex scenes are not extremely explicit but are hot nonetheless: young, beautiful Judy Thorton wakes up one morning to find herself naked and chained on the planet Gor, and she has a variety of erotic and not-so-erotic adventures as she is trained as a pleasure slave and discovers her love for her "true master" and he gets it through his thick skull that he loves her too. It's all rich material for sex slave fantasies, as the widespread internet subculture based on the Gor books testifies. The extent that this series has influenced newer sex slave science fiction books like Susan Wright's "Slave Trade" or Karen Anne Mitchell's "The Usahar" remains to be seen, but it would be hard to imagine that such an influence isn't there, since Gorean words like "kajira" (slave girl) have become normal parts of the fetish community's vocabulary.

But be warned as well: "Slave Girl of Gor" is at times appalling in its misguided assumptions about men, women, and human nature, which it reduces to a simplistic sociobiology that even with (or perhaps especially with) recent advances in the field, is completely untenable. This would be a stronger book without such asides, but Norman must be given some credit for at least tackling a subject that even today makes so many people uncomfortable.

In short, if male dominant/female submissive sexual fantasies are your thing, this is a book to own.

Okay, I think that Slave Girl of Gor is an important book in the history of erotic science fiction and fantasy, and even though it was badly written back in 1977, I was still able to get through it, and there was still some of the exotic world he had created present. And let's face it, back then it was pretty risque stuff, what with abduction and rape and Norman's endless efforts to rationalize his growing misogyny, which had been pretty muted in the earlier Gor books (which is why the first five are pretty fun to read if you want a good adventure story with some sexual naughtiness thrown in).

But then came the internet, and then the fans of the Gor novels got organized, and then Norman decided to go through his books and rework them. Since I remembered Slave Girl of Gor from the old days, I thought I'd have a look at the new version. And I read it, and I cringed, because Norman, no master of prose before, actually managed to make the writing significantly worse with his revisions, which seem to consist mostly of adding the same sort of long philosophical diatribes that doomed the books before. Now maybe I'm foolish, but I would have thought that he might have put in more sex, since the limitations on that sort of thing are much more relaxed these days than they were in the 1970's. And let's face it, if you're going to buy a book titled Slave Girl of... well anything, you're probably expecting sex, right?

To make matters worse, he actually took out some good stuff from the original; in one scene in a paga tavern, our heroine makes mention of another Earth girl who serves as a dancer in that tavern. In the original, this is one of the rare tight passages that says a lot in a short paragraph. In the new version, half of that paragraph has been taken out for no reason (if you're interested, it's on page 297 of the original and page 353 of the new version).

So why two stars? Well, the basic story is the same, even though you'll have to skim through more babble than before, and the basic story is still a decent one. But be forewarned: Norman did his readers no favors when he decided to "improve" his work.