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In this second volume of the Gorean Series, Tarl Cabot finds himself transported back to Counter-Earth from the sedate life he has known as a history professor on Earth. He is glad to be back in his role as a dominant warrior and back in the arms of his true love. Yet, Tarl finds that his name on Gor has been tainted, his city defiled, and all those he loves have been made into outcasts. He is no longer in the position of a proud warrior, but an outlaw for whom the simplest answers must come show more at a high price. He wonders why the Priest Kings have called him back to Gor, and whether it is only to render him powerless. show lessTags
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You know, I keep expecting to *not* like these books. In point of fact, I generally hit points that put me on the edge of setting aside the series entirely. Sometimes that's long winded passages about how Goreans measure time, sometimes that's the pretty objectionable endorsement of extreme misogyny and slavery. But then you hit parts like 'We are of one chain', and I can't help but love what John Norman is writing. Its like the old saying goes, people are more than one thing, and contain multitudes. In the case of creatives, sometimes that's reflected in the work they generate. I would say, so far at least, this series is worth sticking with and sticking through the parts that you may find more objectionable parts for some of the show more brilliant gems you're going to come across. show less
If I had written this book, I would have titled it 'Terb Versus the Blood Lesbians', which has the combined benefits of precisely outlining the plot and sparking the audience's collective imagination. However, if I had written this book, I would be a damaged man trying to outweigh his insecurities with a chivalry fetish.
Now, kicking John Norman for being kinky is a tired game, especially since he's no more sexually confused than Stephanie Meyer. Both idealize the phrase 'love conquers all' until it supersedes pain, self-interest, or plot.
Norman doesn't bathe his books in this sort of rhetoric, indeed, he can run on for chapters of nobility and excitement with only hints of the queasiness he is capable of evoking. He also often show more contradicts and questions his own persistent themes. This is because he is not merely a fetishist or a chauvinist, but a man who has combined romanticism, nobility, and idealism to create a far-reaching rhetoric of female slavery.
His is not a slavery to injure women or to lay them low, but a slavery to elevate them, to make them better than they ever could have been alone. Likewise, his grandiose philosophy states that men are just as useless without women as their subjects. Nor is it enough for Norman's protagonist to simply capture or enslave a woman.
Norman places a high importance on freeing a woman entirely, so that they can choose their subservience out of a true and abiding love. I am reminded of the passage from Angela Carter's 'The Sadean Woman' where she mentions that the 'earth mother goddess' of New Age religion is just another social slavery women subject themselves to.
Likewise, Norman is not happy unless the 'weaker sex' realizes just how helpless it is, how it is only half of a whole, and cannot survive alone. Anyone who buys into such rhetoric only does so because they have been made to feel less than whole.
Since Norman had already written a book where a man travels through a world filled with luscious lady slaves and frees them so that they can truly devote themselves to him, he felt he had to up the ante with the sequel.
Now, Terb, son of Terb, Terb rider must travel to the far-off city of Therb where he meets the Terbtrix, its alluring and mysterious queen. He sees that it is up to him, and him alone alone, to take down this one-of-a-kind matriarchy in a world where women are normally slaves or unseen. This isn't because he wants it to be like the other, patriarchal cities, but rather because the women have made a royal mess of everything, and can't be trusted to rule over men.
Indeed, the Blood Lesbians practice extensive slavery, consider the men of their city to be little more than animals, and love nothing more than pitting men against one another in brutal bloodsports. Of course, if everyone around me was bent on enslaving, branding, and raping me due to my chromosomes, I might go a little nuts, too.
Since Norman has trouble making plot conflicts, Terb swims through his minor 'difficulties' freeing the slaves along the way. Everyone he befriends or acts kindly to returns later at a crucial moment to save Terb's life, meaning he's very lucky none of them got sick or failed to travel a thousand miles to the same city he traveled to at just the right time.
All these 'name' characters also survive, and most of them hook up with one another, though none realize that the other knows Terb until he shows up and everyone gets to act all surprised. Norman can't seem to bring himself to cause any hardship, let alone death, except to henchmen and major villains. Many books (and children's movies) share this problem, and so we go through bloody war after bloody war and no one important ever dies.
Eventually, we get to Norman's piece de resistance, where we learn that the Queen of the Blood Lesbians only hates Terb because she secretly loves him and has always literally dreamed of becoming nothing more than a slave and a man's play toy. Terb has a moment's pang of remorse over his 'one, true love' but seems to quickly forget it in time for the suggestive fadeout.
Norman is not content with a physical dominance over women, indeed, nothing less than complete emotional and psychological slavery will do. It's almost as if Norman is so insecure about his own worth as a person that he can only love a woman who is entirely devoted, body and soul, to his every whim. But of course, that would be silly; and really sad.
In addition, women who are already suggestible are 'no fun'. Terb's aforementioned 'true love' was one ornery, cutthroat bitch, so Norman felt he had to ratchet it up and create a literal Queen of all Bitches for his hero to dominate with his impassable exterior and self-sacrificing kindness.
We all know a guy who complains about being 'too nice'. He listens to women complain about their boyfriends and is often heard to quip how they should love him instead, since they always say he's so nice. If these men had their way, our world would look like Gor. Any man who was simply 'nice' would have the most powerful and self-willed women of the world actually eating from his hand.
Of course, what his friends should tell him is that, while he is 'nice' and certainly 'not a jerk', he probably has no other redeeming qualities. That is to say, he is much like our dithering and inscrutable Terb: with little personality to speak of, and not being a hero, with even less opportunity to show off how really self-sacrificing he can be.
It's one thing when you are a world-shaking man with the ability to defeat an army single-handedly. It's less engaging when you sit in your den writing novels about interesting things happening to your author surrogate. I'd suggest Norman needed to get out more, but he wasn't going to be developing any healthy relationships, anyway. Better to stick with the pretend women in his books.
One question remains: why do I keep reading these books? The sad thing is, despite the fact that they are somewhat unsettling, the pacing and writing are still better than most of what I have the chance to pick up.
Cormac McCarthy won the Pulitzer and he can't even punctuate a sentence. When a zany, insecure chauvanist can outwrite the 'great literary minds' of the day, maybe its time to get into nonfiction. Then again, it worked for Hemingway.
Hell, Frank Miller's still riding the 'exciting chauvinist' train. show less
Now, kicking John Norman for being kinky is a tired game, especially since he's no more sexually confused than Stephanie Meyer. Both idealize the phrase 'love conquers all' until it supersedes pain, self-interest, or plot.
Norman doesn't bathe his books in this sort of rhetoric, indeed, he can run on for chapters of nobility and excitement with only hints of the queasiness he is capable of evoking. He also often show more contradicts and questions his own persistent themes. This is because he is not merely a fetishist or a chauvinist, but a man who has combined romanticism, nobility, and idealism to create a far-reaching rhetoric of female slavery.
His is not a slavery to injure women or to lay them low, but a slavery to elevate them, to make them better than they ever could have been alone. Likewise, his grandiose philosophy states that men are just as useless without women as their subjects. Nor is it enough for Norman's protagonist to simply capture or enslave a woman.
Norman places a high importance on freeing a woman entirely, so that they can choose their subservience out of a true and abiding love. I am reminded of the passage from Angela Carter's 'The Sadean Woman' where she mentions that the 'earth mother goddess' of New Age religion is just another social slavery women subject themselves to.
Likewise, Norman is not happy unless the 'weaker sex' realizes just how helpless it is, how it is only half of a whole, and cannot survive alone. Anyone who buys into such rhetoric only does so because they have been made to feel less than whole.
Since Norman had already written a book where a man travels through a world filled with luscious lady slaves and frees them so that they can truly devote themselves to him, he felt he had to up the ante with the sequel.
Now, Terb, son of Terb, Terb rider must travel to the far-off city of Therb where he meets the Terbtrix, its alluring and mysterious queen. He sees that it is up to him, and him alone alone, to take down this one-of-a-kind matriarchy in a world where women are normally slaves or unseen. This isn't because he wants it to be like the other, patriarchal cities, but rather because the women have made a royal mess of everything, and can't be trusted to rule over men.
Indeed, the Blood Lesbians practice extensive slavery, consider the men of their city to be little more than animals, and love nothing more than pitting men against one another in brutal bloodsports. Of course, if everyone around me was bent on enslaving, branding, and raping me due to my chromosomes, I might go a little nuts, too.
Since Norman has trouble making plot conflicts, Terb swims through his minor 'difficulties' freeing the slaves along the way. Everyone he befriends or acts kindly to returns later at a crucial moment to save Terb's life, meaning he's very lucky none of them got sick or failed to travel a thousand miles to the same city he traveled to at just the right time.
All these 'name' characters also survive, and most of them hook up with one another, though none realize that the other knows Terb until he shows up and everyone gets to act all surprised. Norman can't seem to bring himself to cause any hardship, let alone death, except to henchmen and major villains. Many books (and children's movies) share this problem, and so we go through bloody war after bloody war and no one important ever dies.
Eventually, we get to Norman's piece de resistance, where we learn that the Queen of the Blood Lesbians only hates Terb because she secretly loves him and has always literally dreamed of becoming nothing more than a slave and a man's play toy. Terb has a moment's pang of remorse over his 'one, true love' but seems to quickly forget it in time for the suggestive fadeout.
Norman is not content with a physical dominance over women, indeed, nothing less than complete emotional and psychological slavery will do. It's almost as if Norman is so insecure about his own worth as a person that he can only love a woman who is entirely devoted, body and soul, to his every whim. But of course, that would be silly; and really sad.
In addition, women who are already suggestible are 'no fun'. Terb's aforementioned 'true love' was one ornery, cutthroat bitch, so Norman felt he had to ratchet it up and create a literal Queen of all Bitches for his hero to dominate with his impassable exterior and self-sacrificing kindness.
We all know a guy who complains about being 'too nice'. He listens to women complain about their boyfriends and is often heard to quip how they should love him instead, since they always say he's so nice. If these men had their way, our world would look like Gor. Any man who was simply 'nice' would have the most powerful and self-willed women of the world actually eating from his hand.
Of course, what his friends should tell him is that, while he is 'nice' and certainly 'not a jerk', he probably has no other redeeming qualities. That is to say, he is much like our dithering and inscrutable Terb: with little personality to speak of, and not being a hero, with even less opportunity to show off how really self-sacrificing he can be.
It's one thing when you are a world-shaking man with the ability to defeat an army single-handedly. It's less engaging when you sit in your den writing novels about interesting things happening to your author surrogate. I'd suggest Norman needed to get out more, but he wasn't going to be developing any healthy relationships, anyway. Better to stick with the pretend women in his books.
One question remains: why do I keep reading these books? The sad thing is, despite the fact that they are somewhat unsettling, the pacing and writing are still better than most of what I have the chance to pick up.
Cormac McCarthy won the Pulitzer and he can't even punctuate a sentence. When a zany, insecure chauvanist can outwrite the 'great literary minds' of the day, maybe its time to get into nonfiction. Then again, it worked for Hemingway.
Hell, Frank Miller's still riding the 'exciting chauvinist' train. show less
ORIGINALLY POSTED AT Fantasy Literature.
Outlaw of Gor is the second novel in John Norman's cult classic Gorean Saga. After languishing on Earth for seven years, Tarl Cabot is finally returned to the Counter-Earth where he hopes to find his father and the woman he loves. Instead, he finds that things are not at all as he left them. After a bit of roaming, he winds up in a city he's never been to before and gets tangled up in a battle of the sexes.
Tarl Cabot is a bit like Richard Rahl — effortlessly subduing evil, fighting oppression, and spreading nobility wherever he goes. He loves and serves his fellow man ("How could I be free when others are bound?"). He spends a lot of time talking about how he reveres women and hates those Gorean show more cultures which capture women and consider them useful only as pleasure slaves.
Yet, for all of Tarl's assurances that he's a feminist, it's a bit hard to swallow when his only descriptions of the women he meets are their stunning beauty and how he admires their spirit. (Spirit is shown by a woman saying things like "No, never!" to men who want to subdue her.)
And the reader knows it's just a matter of time before one of these beautiful and spirited women, with her dress ripped to shreds, will be on her knees with her arms raised and wrists crossed and begging Tarl to enslave her. Even women who were previously powerful are anxious to know if Tarl finds them beautiful and pleasing and when he insists that he doesn't want to purchase them, they pout. He buys one of them as "an act of sentiment"! (There is no sex of any sort in these books so far, by the way.)
This is all fine for a little bit of fun and fantasy roleplay, but when Tarl suggests that women don't really want freedom, but actually want to be men's full-time pleasure slaves.... that's a little much for me. One ruling woman says that slave girls have it better because their skimpy clothes are easier to walk around in. Okay, I'll give her that point, but when she says that being chained is the only way that many women can learn to love...? And that she really would rather be a slave than to take up her former ruling position?... yeah, right.
Tarl goes on to explain why matriarchies don't work: men lose their self-respect and then the women lose respect for the self-loathing men and "hating their men, they hate themselves." This is a point I'm willing to consider, but he goes too far with his next point: "I have wondered sometimes if a man to be a man must not master a woman. And if a woman, to be a woman, must not know herself mastered." Unfortunately, "mastered" seems to mean that men are free and ruling and women are collared, leashed, scantily clad, and serving and dancing for men. How can Tarl Cabot, the feminist, justify this? Easily: the women say they like it this way.
But for all of this, I must admit that I've got a strange fascination with this series and I plan to read the next book. However I think that it wouldn't work for me if I was reading it in print instead of listening to it on audio. I believe that it's the reader, Ralph Lister, who manages to "fix" what otherwise I'd read as just plain sexist masculine fantasy. Lister gives Tarl a voice that's innocent and enthusiastic enough to deceive me into believing that he's not really as shallow as he demonstrates that he is.
www.fantasyliterature.com show less
Outlaw of Gor is the second novel in John Norman's cult classic Gorean Saga. After languishing on Earth for seven years, Tarl Cabot is finally returned to the Counter-Earth where he hopes to find his father and the woman he loves. Instead, he finds that things are not at all as he left them. After a bit of roaming, he winds up in a city he's never been to before and gets tangled up in a battle of the sexes.
Tarl Cabot is a bit like Richard Rahl — effortlessly subduing evil, fighting oppression, and spreading nobility wherever he goes. He loves and serves his fellow man ("How could I be free when others are bound?"). He spends a lot of time talking about how he reveres women and hates those Gorean show more cultures which capture women and consider them useful only as pleasure slaves.
Yet, for all of Tarl's assurances that he's a feminist, it's a bit hard to swallow when his only descriptions of the women he meets are their stunning beauty and how he admires their spirit. (Spirit is shown by a woman saying things like "No, never!" to men who want to subdue her.)
And the reader knows it's just a matter of time before one of these beautiful and spirited women, with her dress ripped to shreds, will be on her knees with her arms raised and wrists crossed and begging Tarl to enslave her. Even women who were previously powerful are anxious to know if Tarl finds them beautiful and pleasing and when he insists that he doesn't want to purchase them, they pout. He buys one of them as "an act of sentiment"! (There is no sex of any sort in these books so far, by the way.)
This is all fine for a little bit of fun and fantasy roleplay, but when Tarl suggests that women don't really want freedom, but actually want to be men's full-time pleasure slaves.... that's a little much for me. One ruling woman says that slave girls have it better because their skimpy clothes are easier to walk around in. Okay, I'll give her that point, but when she says that being chained is the only way that many women can learn to love...? And that she really would rather be a slave than to take up her former ruling position?... yeah, right.
Tarl goes on to explain why matriarchies don't work: men lose their self-respect and then the women lose respect for the self-loathing men and "hating their men, they hate themselves." This is a point I'm willing to consider, but he goes too far with his next point: "I have wondered sometimes if a man to be a man must not master a woman. And if a woman, to be a woman, must not know herself mastered." Unfortunately, "mastered" seems to mean that men are free and ruling and women are collared, leashed, scantily clad, and serving and dancing for men. How can Tarl Cabot, the feminist, justify this? Easily: the women say they like it this way.
But for all of this, I must admit that I've got a strange fascination with this series and I plan to read the next book. However I think that it wouldn't work for me if I was reading it in print instead of listening to it on audio. I believe that it's the reader, Ralph Lister, who manages to "fix" what otherwise I'd read as just plain sexist masculine fantasy. Lister gives Tarl a voice that's innocent and enthusiastic enough to deceive me into believing that he's not really as shallow as he demonstrates that he is.
www.fantasyliterature.com show less
I'm wondering if I might have been a little hasty in questioning this authors writing style last time. It seems to me that there are too few authors that make you want to immediately start the next book and in fact almost instill in you an intense desire to read them all as quickly as possible just so that you can begin again from the start. The funny thing is, it's clearly not just me and neither is it just male readers either. I've read many reviews that close with something along the lines of 'Jesus, WTF? but I'm definitely going to read the next one straight away.', or something to that effect anyway. I'm thinking it may be something to do with the simplistic writing style and that isn't meant as a criticism but rather as a show more compliment. It's extremely effective in drawing you into the story and you find you simply can't put the book down. It's a very deceptive style and one which works almost too well.
Excellent stuff, especially given the fact that it really shouldn't be! show less
Excellent stuff, especially given the fact that it really shouldn't be! show less
Another rollicking sword and lance saga from the mock-Medieval planet, this time with even more fetishism - lots of whipping.
The author waxes lyrical on the delights of male bonding, and pauses at one point for an extend bout of philosophising, explaining how women rally like to be subordinate.
I would have found this deeply offensive had I taken it with any seriousness whatever.
The author waxes lyrical on the delights of male bonding, and pauses at one point for an extend bout of philosophising, explaining how women rally like to be subordinate.
I would have found this deeply offensive had I taken it with any seriousness whatever.
Sword-and-sandal fun in the pulp tradition of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Good worldbuilding. Barely adequate writing. This series is of course (in)famous for the weird BDSM-like slavery, but in these first few books it doesn't play that much of a role.
This second book is of a similar style to the first, so if you didn't like that one you won't like this.
This second book is of a similar style to the first, so if you didn't like that one you won't like this.
It is definitely an amusing book. This one is more geared to adventure, although there are still a few scenes where... you have to wonder if they would have actually survived it.
So long as you are willing to suspend judgement, you'll enjoy the ride.
So long as you are willing to suspend judgement, you'll enjoy the ride.
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Common Knowledge
- Canonical title
- Outlaw of Gor
- Original title
- Outlaw of Gor
- Original publication date
- 1967
- People/Characters
- Tarl Cabot; Lara; Dorna; Andreas; Kron; Zosk (show all 11); Thorn; Ost; Vera; Targo; Linna
- Important places
- Tharna
- Important events
- Tarl Cabot returns to Gor
- Related movies
- Gor II (1988 | IMDb)
- First words
- I first met Tarl Cabot at a small liberal arts college in New Hampshire, where we had both accepted first year teaching appointments.
- Quotations
- There were many things supposedly strange about Tharna, among them that she was reportrdly ruled by a queen, or Tatrix, and, reasonably enough in the circumstances, that the position of women in that city, in constrast with c... (show all)ommon Gorean custom, was one of provilege and opportunity.
I rejoiced that in at least one city on Gor the free women were not expected to wear Robes of Concealment, confine their activities largely to their own quarters, and speak only to their blood relatives and, eventually, the Free Companion.
I thought that much of the barbarity of Gor might perhaps be traced to this foolish suppression of the fair sex, whose gentleness and intelligence might have made such a contribution in softening her harsh ways. - Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)I am satisfied.
- Original language*
- Inglés
*Some information comes from Common Knowledge in other languages. Click "Edit" for more information.
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- Paper, Audiobook, Ebook
- ISBNs
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