So, yeah, I decided to pick up a book from the Gor fantasy series today because it was one dollar and, hey, it might be good for a few laughs. It was actually the 18th in the series, maybe there's even more than that, I don't really know, but it probably doesn't matter. Well...uh...WOW. It was far worse than I thought was ever possible. You know, people accuse the Conan stories of being misogynist, and that's not an unfair claim, but this book ratchets that up to truly inconceivable heights.
The bulk of that angle centers around female slavery. Basically, taking women and humiliating them in the worst ways possible before collaring them and making them into sex slaves for men. There's not really anything new about that with the low-rent barbarian fantasy genre, except that it's not the bad guys doing that. It's EVERY man, including the "hero," aka Gor the dude from Earth. The book is in first-person, so obviously the narrator doesn't have any problems with that. He yammers constantly about how cool it is to enslave women. But it gets worse. The few named female characters in this story [there aren't many] all act like becoming a sex slave to a man is the greatest thing that's ever happened to them, including the one woman that was kidnapped from Earth. See, she was a slave back on Earth and didn't know it. Being a REAL slave is so liberating! Also, Gor, the hero, uses a naked woman as bait to try to catch some wild animal at one point in the story. Any slave that doesn't please her master is useless, and worthy only of being left behind to die in the wilderness.
The worst part is that the writing is so painfully bad and the dialogue is stilted, repetitive, and so, so dull. 90% of the story is just people talking on and on [which is mostly comprised of men talking about enslaving women and women talking about how great it is to be a sex slave] and there's much repetition within all that dialogue. Most of the lines of dialogue are just a few words that get repeated over and over, but sometimes there's a big long speech but it's still just the same stuff repeated over and over [again, generally about female slavery]. I tried reading some of it, but, like, nothing actually happened. NOTHING. It was just Gor treating women like dirt for 450 pages. Maybe a monster showed up, but why bother wading through a million pages of slop to find out if one ever does? Even within the realm of low-rent barbarian fantasy, the writing is really low. It makes Robert E. Howard read like Pulitzer Prize-winning fiction.
And it doesn't even have any good sex scenes. The story always cuts away before anything actually happens. Shame on you, John Norman.
