Just how bad is John Norman's Gor Series?

I have to presume somebody is buying these books, or else why would they still be published? If he's still milking it after all these years, the teat has not run dry.

I'm probably missing something. But then, I'm the guy who doesn't understand why the magazines at the supermarket checkout exist. I've never seen anyone buy one. But there they are.
 
I read 'Tarnsman of Gor' (the first in the series) at 12 or 13 years old. I was heavy into my sword & sorcery stage. It sounded like it would be right up my alley. Even as a teenage boy I thought it was ridiculous & that's saying something considering I thought at the time that Tarzan, Conan, & Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser were some of the greatest characters ever written.

Hell, I even finished Lin Carter's 'Thongor of Lemuria' series & John Jakes 'Brak the Barbarian' books so I should have been a soft touch.
 
I read most of them when I was in college (1975-ish...I think). They started out as pretty decent Sword & Sorcery books. But later books deviated into what I can only suspect is the author's fascination the slavery / bondage thing with female characters. By that time they were bordering on light porn and had become increasingly formulaic. I don't think I ever finished entire series.
 
There are, have been, and will continue to be, lots of bad books being published. A large percentage of YA is derivative drivel, and/or hopelessly catering to contemporary socio-cultural mores without any degree of depth or real authenticity. What sets Norman's Gor apart is that it is still being published (I think), 50 years later. Is it any better or worse than a lot of stuff being published today, regardless of what your ideological perspective is? Most of the current YA won't be published in 50 years, but some of it will. And so it goes. Sturgeon had it right: 90% of everything is crap.
 
Bestertester said:
I have to presume somebody is buying these books, or else why would they still be published? If he's still milking it after all these years, the teat has not run dry.
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We have no way of knowing how much they sell of course. Since we are talking about what is now a self-published series, we do not need to assume that they are selling. If you don't hire editors, artists and so on, the cost of self-publishing is so low that you can do it even if you don't sell anything. You only lose the time you spend writing, but for many people that's a hobby. I mean, go to any fanfiction site, plenty of people are writing novel-length stories for free, just because they enjoy it.

One advantage this series has is name recognition. This stuff sold in its time, and a number of people remember it. I have read that the worst enemy of a self-publishing author is obscurity. No one knows you or your book, so no one buys it. The Gor series still has people who remember it, some of them even fondly.

So I would be surprised if this is not selling several hundred of copies per book, but I would also be surprised if it's selling much more than that.

Looking back at this thread, it's surprising that it has a lot of one-post contributors. People who apparently subscribed to the forum only to post their opinion in this thread. When that happens, you usually assume that those are hardcore fans of the series who have found out about this thread and are rushing here to gush about it. However, most of them seem to be rather balanced comments, admitting the rather serious flaws this series has but expressing some fondness for it.

I remember that in my early teens in Spain I found the Spanish edition of these books in the bargain bin after Christmas (that was the time when bargain books were usually liquidated). As a SF&F fan with little purchasing power, that was a highlight of the year for me, and I often found books by authors I loved that way, really cheap. I think about 12 of these Gor books had been published in Spain. So when I saw these books, extremely cheap, I saw that they were heroic fantasy with an erotic component, and I bought several of them. I suppose most users here are old enough to remember when there was no internet but, if anyone younger is here, I can't emphasize it enough: there was no internet. That means that the combination of softcore eroticism with heroic fiction was more attractive for a reader of that age than it would be now. And they had some virtues. I mean, reading JunkMonkey's funny summary of one of them, it still sounds to me like something that could be fun in a trashy way. It's a pity Norman hadn't been a better writer. Not a good writer, mind you, because good writing would be wasted here, but just not so actively bad.

I do wonder, though, how the endless war between the Priest-Kings and the Kurii ended up. Seriously, the worldbuilding and overarching plot was not so bad, as far as thouse sword and planet series went. It's the writing and, particularly, the dialogues that were painful.
 
The Gor novels were put out, like most category SFF novels at the time, in mass market paperback. They were put out first by Ballantine Books, the mmpk arm of BDD at the time, and then by DAW books. They sold well during the late 1960's-1980's period as basically a cult following sort of series. During that period, novels focused on lots of sex and notions of BDSM were incredibly common in all areas of fiction and popular in SFF because of the New Wave SF movement and the reissuing/sequelizing of earlier 20th century "pulp" fiction like Conan. The stereotype of a fantasy or space opera cover with a barely clad woman and a muscled hero with sword or axe came from this time period as it was a popular branch of SFF cover art during that era. (It kind of went with the steroid body building/fitness crazes of the time.)

Even for that era, however, Norman's books were outside most of what was being put out, with raping anti-heroes and weird views of women. Norman's idea of BDSM master-slave sex, (an idea that was incorrect from standard practices,) was considered titillating for the era and his insectoid aliens were pretty standard and liked by readers of heroic fantasy and space opera SF. Various fan/lifestyle sub-cultures (called Gorean) have developed from the series, including role-playing in the online community Second Life. One of those factions got in legal trouble for coercion, others have folded themselves into more mainline BDSM cultures.

In the late 1980's, DAW stopped publishing the series for low sales. The books were out of print, though circulated on the used book circuit, for about a dozen years until Norman started self-publishing new ones electronically. Norman also wrote a different space opera series in the early 1990's that was published by Warner. Norman was never considered particularly a stylist in his writing.
 
farseer2 said:
Looking back at this thread, it's surprising that it has a lot of one-post contributors. People who apparently subscribed to the forum only to post their opinion in this thread. When that happens, you usually assume that those are hardcore fans of the series who have found out about this thread and are rushing here to gush about it. However, most of them seem to be rather balanced comments, admitting the rather serious flaws this series has but expressing some fondness for it.
Click to expand...

Haha a friend of my father's had 'Nomads of Gor' and I recently felt compelled to go back to the series and start from the beginning (I'm in my 40's now) to see what I would make of them as an adult. I remember that in amongst the smut (not as much in Tarnsman of Gor as I remember from the other one, although I'm only one book into the odyssey) there was some GENUINELY fascinating stuff about cryptography, which has been nagging at my consciousness for years.

Re: houseplants of Gor - nearly screamed tears of laughter.
 
This was a LONG time ago. I remember actually liking the first one but they went down hill. I don't recall exactly where I stopped, might have been #4 or #5.
 
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