John Norman's Assassin of Gor

Assassin of Gor, published in 1970, is the fifth of John Norman’s Gor novels. The Gor series needs to be read in publication order so I’m going to be very careful not to hint at any spoilers for the earlier books.

Tarl Cabot is from Earth. He ends up on Gor, a hitherto unknown planet in out solar system. Gorean society is quite primitive. The technological level seems to be roughly equivalent to that of the classical world. There are no cars or aircraft or firearms or radio. But it’s actually more complicated than that. There is high technology on Gor. Very advanced technology indeed. But the Goreans do not have access to it

There are competing and often warring city-states. The Goreans are human but the animals are not those of the Earth. The animals include tarns - gigantic carnivorous birds that can be tamed (up to a point) and ridden. They constitute a kind of flying mediaeval heavy cavalry.

Tarl Cabot is in the city of Ar. He has gone there to kill a man, but he has another more important mission. He is accompanied by Elizabeth Caldwell, an Earth girl who appeared in an earlier Gor novel. Tarl and Elizabeth have to infiltrate themselves into the retinue of the current ruler of the city.

The situation in Ar is in reality not quite as it appears to Tarl and Elizabeth. They’re in more danger than they think. And they haven’t been quite as clever as they thought.

There will be lots of betrayals and lots of mayhem including an epic blood-drenched tarn race which is a bit like the chariot races in Ancient Rome but with gigantic flying birds.

John Norman (born John Frederick Lange Jr in 1931) is a philosophy professor. With the Gor novels he created a thrilling world of sword-and-planet adventure owing quite a bit to Edgar Rice Burroughs but he was also sneaking in various philosophical and cultural influences. Norman cited Homer, Freud, and Nietzsche as his major influences.

There’s more to these novels than there appears to be on the surface.

It is also very important not to be tempted into knee-jerk reactions by the controversial elements. It’s also important not to take these books at face value and jump to the conclusion that Norman was advocating the cultural practices he described. If you avoid those knee-jerk reactions it’s obvious that Tarl Cabot is very ambivalent indeed about Gorean culture.

One of the things Norman was trying to do was to create fictional societies that are genuinely alien. In this series there are two - the Goreans (who are human) and the Priest-Kings (who are very very non-human). Both societies are culturally very different from societies on Earth. He was intent on examining Gorean society in a great deal of detail. We get a huge amount of information about the taming of the tarns and their use in both sport and war. And having created culturally different fictional societies he was prepared to explore the ramifications of those cultural differences.

Which brings us to the slavery issue. In Gor female slavery is taken for granted. Of course in most human societies for most of human history slavery was taken for granted but on Gor the female slaves are unequivocally sex slaves. It’s the suggestion that some (not most, but some) are not entirely unhappy about the arrangement that shocks many people. Norman explains the workings of slavery on Gor in enormous detail. In this book Elizabeth has to play the role of Tarl’s slave. And he really does, to an extent, train her as a slave. They both enjoy it, and she certainly enjoys being tied up. But of course they are in fact playing a game.

Norman is exploring some of the sides of both masculinity and femininity that make people today so uncomfortable.

The Gor books are certainly provocative but sometimes we need provocative fiction. Assassin of Gor is highly recommended but you must read the earlier books first.

I’ve reviewed all the earlier books in this series - Tarnsman of Gor, Outlaw of Gor, Priest-Kings of Gor and Nomads of Gor.