Explorers of Gor

Rating:
Summary: Way to go stirner!!!
Review: As an avid Gor fan I must agree that the Master/Slave relationship is a big part of the Gorean ethos. I feel that John Norman is trying to put over a fundemental point that men and women have stopped talking to each other about what concerns us most the continuation of the human species. Procreation has become a chore and increasingly if you listen you can hear the words "men (or women just don't understand us women (or men)" how can we if we don't or won't or can't talk frankly and openly to each other. The situation he uses may be distasteful to some but it is merely a metaphor for our inability to talk to one another. She is offered the choice "Talk or Die" I know I would rather talk. The book offers marvellous views of life up the amazon (Gorean equivelant) or the nile it is a book of discovery and adventure. the correctness is subjective.

Rating:
Summary: Into darkest Gor
Review: I must disagree with scuba: the slavegirls add _everything_, as any Gorean-aspirant could tell you. Tarl's probing of the blonde slave girl gets to her incandescently-hot Aztec/Mayan fantasy, counterpointing the Search-for-the-source-of-the-Nile adventure Tarl is taking with a black Livinstone expedition. The black masters make good use of the slavegirls, black and white, whilst Tarl confines himself to white slavegirls, tiptoeing safely past the whole race/and/color minefield. Pity: Tarl is at his best when he samples every morsel of wenchflesh in his surroundings, and some of the dark meat looks _really_ tasty!

Rating:
Summary: This time around Tarl Cabot heads off for the rain forests
Review: Little did we know when "Explorers of Gor" came out in 1979 that it would be four years before Tarl Cabot would be the lead character in John Norman's Chronicles of Counter-Earth series, because after this 13th volume came what is now known as the Jason Marshall trilogy. The premise of the novel is that the shield ring of the Kurii of a mysterious explorer deep in the rain forests of Gor and Cabot is after the alien technology in the name of the Priest-Kings. As has been the motif with the most recent Gor novels at this point in the series, Norman provides yet another culture on Gor effectively transplanted from Earth. These novels started off in the tradition of Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter of Mars novels but are now clearly more in the mold of his Tarzan of the Apes novels, where Africa managed to house lost cities of Roman legionnaires, crusaders, and the sort. However, Gor is clearly more populated with such things. Of course, along the way Cabot encounters a new set of slave girls brought from Earth in the service of the Others, which once again provides Norman with ample opportunity to explain (in detail) the natural relationship between men and women as one that is complementary rather than competitive (wow, that might be one of the biggest understatements I have ever written into a review). I readily admit that by this point in the series I was skipping over the sections where Tarl Cabot was introducing some new woman to her slave collar because for me what made the early books in this series so great was the sense of adventure and the detailed characterizations. But by this point in the series it seems clear Norman did not know what he wanted to do with the threat of the Kurii and with Tarl Cabot, which explains why both pretty much disappear for the next few years. "Explorers of Gor" offers nothing overly thrilling or different once you get away from the different locale. Once you get through the first half-dozen books or so in these series you will have to make your own judgment as to how far you want to go.

Rating:
Summary: The worst Gor novel..............by far
Review: Long winded, low on plot, high on pages upon pages of boring description. The only redeming feature of this book was the Chris Achilios cover on the UK edition. If you are a fan of Gor just skip this one, it adds nothing.

Rating:
Summary: Tarl Cabot in Darkest Africa
Review: This 13th Gor novel marks the halfway point in the series thus far. (As I write this the 26th book is being prepared for publication after a 13 year hiatus and a 27th volume has been announced.) In this one Tarl Cabot once more goes on a mission for the Priest-Kings, this time to recover the shield ring of the Kurii (last seen in Volume 10, Tribesmen of Gor). During his wanderings through the African landscape of the unexplored equatorial region of Gor he encounters intrigue, treachery, a hidden empire, crocodilian river tharlarion, cannibals, a boar-like tarsk, pygmies, army ants, amazons, an 8-foot thick rock spider, a lost city, a ring of invisibility, and the Kurii. Sounds pretty exciting, doesn't it? Unfortunately it's not as exciting as it sounds. None of those things show up until you're about 200 pages into the novel! Somehow the villains in this one don't seem as villainous and the dangers don't seem as threatening as they should be. In his better adventures Tarl Cabot usually meets up with a stereotypical rogue who is charming, knowledgeable, a true warrior, and knows how to handle women a la Gor (i.e., terrorize, brutalize, and rape them). In this one the role was divided between 2 characters: Ayare who is the smart charmer and Kisu who is a violent lout (which is good on Gor). It just doesn't work as well. But the real reason this one didn't click is because the flow of the story was continually broken up by interminable discussions of Gorean philosophy. At 464 pages this may very well be the longest of all the Gorean books (some of the later ones have more pages but they also have bigger print). The difference in length is taken up entirely by the theory and practice of the enslavement of females. The author may have invented a few new ways to restrict his slave girls both physically and psychologically but philosophically speaking I don't recall anything in this book that he hasn't already beaten to death in previous volumes. At this point in the series he is just preaching to the converted---if you've bought in to his point of view, it's redundant and if you haven't, further haranguing will not change your mind. I realize that a lot of the people who buy his novels are into bd/sm and therefore expect this but I suspect that there are a lot of readers who are not. It would better serve the stories and all of the readers to confine the bd/sm aspects to example and leave the unnecessary and unrealistic philosophical discussions out.

Rating:
Summary: excellent
Review: This book unfortunately sees Norman's last gasp at the Kurii for about 5 or 6 books. The Guardian series is BS. Explorers has action suspense and is well researched and imagined. Marauders is better, but this book is well done. Skip the slave stuff. It adds nothing