The GOR novels of John Norman: Better or Worse than Terry Goodkind?

Turns out I had to rewrite this entry significantly -- one of the perils, alas, of doing additional research. (There must be a moral in that somewhere.)

Anyway, I originally wanted to read the GOR novels of John Norman cuz everyone in SFF scholarship knows the common narrative behind them: Norman's the genre's resident evil, the pinnacle of misogynistic assholery, one of the eventual reasons sword-and-sorcery (S&S) died a rapid death in the 1980s. However, since I'm an instinctive iconoclast who always distrusts received opinion, I had to see for myself. So I finally took the plunge into Gor and selected a novel at random from my local Bookman's.

This turned out to be Priest-Kings of Gor (Ballantine, 1968), and the sheer strength of its writing quality surprised me deeply. I'm not going to make any two bones about it ... this is a good novel of its kind. So you can only imagine how a-quiver with zeal my grubby little paws were to rant against Received Opinion and how critics can misread an author's achievement by disliking their politics. After all, the GOR novels sold between 6 and 12 million copies. There has to be something to them, right? RIGHT?

Well ... both yes and no. 

With Norman, I particularly wanted to see two things:

1. How bad Norman's power-based sex kink (S&M) actually was, and 
2. Why the hell these books sold so many copies?

I'll return to the first question later. For now, let's tackle the reason behind Norman's popularity. I do think authorial skill is a legitimate factor.

For example, S&S and planetary romances don't have reputations for handling dialogue well, but Norman's got the whole she-bang down cold. The occasional back-and-forths are engaging, and the plot also moves along at a brisk but appropriate pace. The main hero dude, Tarl Cabot, heads off to Sardar because he want to destroy the Priest-Kings. (Apparently, they destroyed his home city, Ko-ro-ba, in a previous book.) Problem is, nobody's ever seen a Priest-King. They're entirely mysterious. The first entity Cabot encounters is a human named Parp, who claims to be a Priest-King, but we're not sure. There's a genuine element of surreal creepiness about this whole affair that, in narrative terms, gets the goosebumps bumping.

When we finally do get to the real Priest-Kings, they're even creepier. Turns out they're a hyper-sentient cross between ants and praying mantises. Eventually we get to know Misk, a "good" Priest-King, and he enlists Cabot's aid in an intra-species conflict within "the Nest." What follows next is your normal, exciting planetary-romance adventure story.

Guess what else Norman does well? Style.

Yep. Over and over again, I found myself impressed by how literary his style was. Honestly, in terms of finely crafted prose, he might give Fritz Leiber a run for his money. Here's a sampling -- ignore the content:

Vika was a bandit princess, accustomed to be clad in silk and jewels from a thousand looted caravans, to sleep on the richest furs and sup on the most delicate viands, all purloined from galleys, beached and burnt, from the ravished storerooms of outlying, smoking cylinders, from the tables and treasure chests of homes whose men were slain, whose daughters wore the chains of slave girls, only now she herself, Vika, this bandit princess, proud Vika, a woman of lofty, opulent Treve, had fallen spoils herself in the harsh games of Gor, and felt on her own throat the same encircling band of steel with which the men of her city had so often graced the throats of their fair, weeping captives.

       Vika was now property now.

       My property.

       Her eyes regarded me with fury.

That first paragraph is one long, complex sentence, with masterful pacing (notice the switch in rhythm during the bolded parts), followed by three single-sentence paragraphs in rapid succession. By prose style alone, Norman never loses control of his material, and he guides readers into exactly the emotional reaction he's hoping to achieve. Several other passages of similar outstanding quality appear in Priest-Kings of Gor.

Which is why, soon after finishing the novel, it felt so jarring to read critic Peter Fitting's off-hand reference to "the feeble quality of his [Norman's] writing" (234-35). But there's nothing "feeble" about Priest-Kings of Gor, as I said. Such allegations always trigger my spidey-sense; they don't match what I'm seeing when I read.

Now enter that stupid additional research I mentioned.

Fitting's article mentions Jessica Amanda Salmonson, the World-Fantasy-Award-winning anthologist, so I looked up her New York Review of Science Fiction editorial on Gor. One highly interesting (if unconfirmed) remark offered was this: 

“It is my understanding Betty Ballantine line-edited them [the Gor novels] to a very high degree, and that’s why they seem almost well-written. But Don Wollheim agreed not to edit the damned things, and that’s when they became decreasingly imaginative, more about fringe-politics than about adventure (sexual or otherwise), and extremely badly written” (22).

Norman's switch from Ballantine to DAW occurred after his seventh Gor novel. Although I wish there was a confirmed source for Salmonson's remark, which she herself is obviously getting second-hand, I still suspect this allegation is true. Betty Ballantine did do such heavy editing for certain authors -- Katherine Kurtz comes to mind. It's entirely possible that, by his eight book, Norman felt so successful that when he made the switch to DAW, he could demand complete freedom from editorial intervention.

What truly converted me into Received Opinion, though, were Lester del Rey's five reviews of GOR novels. These I only discovered recently. Lester's first review was on Priest-Kings of Gor. Like me, this novel deeply impressed him, and he confesses his excitement over the direction of Norman's future career.

Yet this excitement didn't last long. Reviewing Assassins of Gor (#5), he starts complaining that Norman "seems also to desire desperately to lay waste his talents in pursuit of his dream of bilge messages” (121). After that, the comments get darker and more irritated for books #6 and #7, and finally Lester unleashes his full fury for his review of Hunters of Gor (#8), the first title from DAW. According to him, this "novel isn’t worth bothering with, on any level. A pity DAW picked up where Ballantine Books left off” (143).

What's especially interesting about this condemnation is that I knew something dramatic must have explained Norman's switch from Ballantine to DAW Books in c. 1973. After all, Ballantine had a best-selling series on their hands, and publishers don't just give up a money-maker on a whim. My first hypothesis involved Judy-Lynn del Rey alone, who had come aboard to replace Ian and Betty Ballantine around that time. Although Del Rey Books would continue reprinting their seven Gor novels (it was free money), Judy-Lynn never put her special vortex colophon -- her special seal of approval -- on them. Lester's reviews only reinforces the moral and literary objections they clearly had. As much as people accuse Del Rey Books of rank commercialism, Lester and Judy-Lynn clearly drew a line at inflicting new Gor novels upon the world.

So that's the situation. On the basis of his early work, Norman achieved great popularity and a readership, and that early work was improved by quality editing from Ballantine Books. After Norman's "Men's Lib" rhetoric kept increasing, however, to the detriment of the novels, the newly arrived Judy-Lynn del Rey allowed his contract to lapse. Then Norman, no doubt with a chip on his shoulder, transitioned to DAW Books. There he demanded complete freedom from editorial intervention, which then left his worst instincts to go unchecked. Nothing could stop him from going full Norman at that point, at least until the mid-1980s when the S&S market collapsed and Betsy Wollheim replaced her father as editor of DAW Books.

One more thing of interest. Besides the strong quality of writing in Priest-Kings of Gor, both Lester del Rey and Salmonson provide their own reasons for Norman's popularity. For Lester, who admits the talent, Norman is the first writer since Burroughs to capture what was original and lively about planetary romance and the John-Carter-of-Mars novels. For Salmonson, who refuses to admit the talent, at least not anymore, she explains Gor's female readership (and it did exist) through female-led interests in power-based sex, a subject they could find handled nowhere else in SFF fiction.

For me, both those explanations check out. 

Now ... how about Norman's "ick" factor and the promise of my blog post's title?

In terms of overall grossness, I think he's probably on par with Terry Goodkind, maybe a bit worse ... although in terms of writing quality, like I said, Priest-Kings of Gor ranks up there with Leiber, but Goodkind couldn't write his way out of a paper bag.

Both writers, though, have strong S&M components to their fiction (Goodkind had to be a Norman fan, right?), but if a power-based sex fetish were the only ick thing about Norman, maybe his reputation today would be better.

Unfortunately, what truly makes the skin crawl is his apparently "naturalist" position toward S&M. That is, he believes there are biological differences between the sexes that lead naturally to "male" domination and "female" submissiveness. Although there's plenty of plot in Priest-Kings of Gor independent of this particular belief, even in Priest-Kings (a book whose S&M component is relatively muted), Norman casually inserts several off-hand remarks in support of S&M gender essentialism. I won't quote them here -- even the thought of typing them makes me want to take a shower -- but they're unambiguous. 

So that's my excursion into GOR. I  won't be seeking any more out ... to my own satisfaction, at least, I've accounted for Norman's popularity and his career trajectory. As much as I hate to say it, I have to end up supporting Received Opinion on the Gor novels. Still, I have to wonder ... had authors like Lin Carter or L. Sprague de Camp been in possession of Norman's same basic talent for story-telling, maybe S&S as a subgenre would be held in higher esteem today.

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WORKS CITED

Del Rey, Lester. “Reading Room.” Worlds of If, vol. 20, no. 9, Jan.-Feb. 1971, pp. 119-25.

---. “Reading Room.” Worlds of If, vol. 22, no. 6, July-Aug. 1974, pp. 141-47.

Fitting, Peter. "Violence and Utopia: John Norman and Pat Califia." Utopian Effects, Dystopian Pleasures, edited by Brian Greenspan, Peter Lang, 2021, pp. 231-51.

Salmonson, Jessica Amanda. “Letter.” New York Review of Science Fiction, August 1996, pp. 20-22.