Beasts of Gor

Rating:
Summary: Tarl Cabot heads north to battle the Kurii invaders of Gor
Review: I actually figured out early on that the crazy shipbuilder in Port Kar designing a ship with a heavy prow was going to be making an icebreaker, so when "Beasts of Gor" took Tarl Cabot to the polar ice packs I was not surprised (just that the ship was not involved). The "beasts" of the title are first and foremost the Kurii, a.k.a. the Others, who are trying to wrest Gor from the control of the Priest-Kings and who establish a beach head in the north in Volume 12 of the Chronicles of Counter-Earth. However, the term "beasts" also applies to the warriors of Gor who are fighting to defend their world and the slave girls who are used by the Kurii as beasts of burden.

John Norman's story starts in the canals of Port Kar, before taking Tarl Cabot to the taverns of Lydius, the tents of the Sardar Fair, and then north to the land of the red hunters. As I have said before, we are now in the part of the Gor series where each volume seems to come up with another example of a people descended from transplanted earthlings; in this case, Eskimos. I found the 1978 Gor novel to be fairly pedestrian, given the rest of the series. The epic war between the Priest-Kings and the Kurii develops very slowly in the series, and I have to admit that I was always disappointed that we were seeing more and more of the Others without ever getting a return visit from Misk the Priest-King. However, Norman is developing one of the Kurii as a key figure and something of a counterpart to Tarl Cabot, which is not a bad idea. The key thing is that by this time in the Chronicles of Counter-Earth series it is Norman's Gorean philosophy that is becoming more prominent than the action/adventure aspects of the series that got me hooked in the first place.