Reprinted from the New York Review of Science Fiction Issue #87, November 1995
by Marc Laidlaw
I would like to raise my voice in defense of John Norman, but I'm not sure where to begin.
I read (and stopped reading) the Gor books long before I became aware of any kind of public or private debate over whether they were politically correct or dehumanizing or sexually warped or, in particular, suitable for children. Long before there was a debate.
I found the first book on the shelves of my junior high scool, it having been recommended to me by my best friend, who had already devoured what was available of the series. (Seven books or nine? I can't clearly remember.) I enjoyed the books as science fantasy adventure, utterly oblivious to the fact that the male-master/woman-slave content might be considered anything but an aspect of the far-fetched Gorean society. It didn't seem any stranger to me, nor any more believable, than the portrayals of Old Martian cultures or the weird habits of far future Terrans which filled the other sf novels I was reading at the time. I didn't get off on the slave scenes; they didn't excite any secret wishes to dominate women, nor in fact did they give rise to any fantasies at all outside the confines of the novels themselves. (I had plenty of sexual hang-ups, but I can't trace any of them to the tarn-loving slavers of Gor.) What I recall about the books still, with pleasure, is a sense of places and people; of landscapes and eccentric, memorable characters; of fearful beasts and aliens ... the sleen, the kur ... Priest-Kings of Gor was a favorite, because of its bizarre and ultimately sympathetic alien overlords, especially one named Misk.
Norman created a vivid series in the tradition of Edgar Rice Burroughs, and then he subverted that tradition in what strikes me still as one of the most brilliant narrative maneuvers I have ever encountered. This maneuver has always seemed to me to undermine his PC critics ... not that most of them, probably, made it to the seventh book. (At least, I think Raiders of Gor was the seventh – I no longer have them to refer to.)
For six books, Norman lets his readers swagger about vicariously in the form of the macho narrator Tarl Cabot without much thought about the slave based culture that supports him. Then suddenly, and without warning, Cabot is faced with a situation where he must either renounce his freedom, cast off his heroic stature, or die. These are the only alternatives. Not Liberty or Death, but Slavery or Death. How many times have we seen Our Hero make the noble choice in such a novel? How many times does he proclaim that he cares nothing for life on such terms, only to be saved at the last minute by some unlikely coincidence that seems to offer moral confirmation of his decision.
And yet Cabot, the hero for six or seven books, in so many ways an analog of every other traditional fantasy adventure hero ... wimps out! He falls down on his knees, in tears, begging to be spared. He would rather live as a slave than die as a man. And we already know how slaves are treated in Gor. It is unthinkable. The humiliation! When it comes down to it, Cabot is a coward. Our hero! Jesus!
It was nauseating! It was like a punch in the guts! It was brilliant!
It tore the bedrock from unde every assumption of the heroic fantasy genre that Norman had been so diligently following up to that point. Everything was turned upside down. I felt sick – disgusted – I couldn't believe what he had done. And I have admired that move ever since.
Cabot became, for the first time in the series, a complex character. He had always been the least interesting of the oddballs to populate Gor. Watching him struggle with his preconceptions, now that he had surrendered his ideals, was fascinating. Watching him find a new place in Gorean society kept my interest in the series alive whe, for other reasons, it was flagging.
Those who say Norman has no style are apparently not aware that plot and narrative strategy are style at the deepest level. The decision to invert Cabot's heroic character was a stylistic one. But it was Norman's other stylistic decisions that caused me ultimately to stop reading the books.
It seemed to me that over time Norman made a conscious decision to pare down the language of the stories, to simplify his style, in order to make things easier on readers, perhaps to expand his audience. Writers without style, or at least an understanding of style, do not make these decision; their "style" does not change so dramatically. But Norman's style began to change radically.
Sentences grew shorter.
Paragraphs, too.
A conversation might go on for pages, with lots of blank space all around.
The master said something.
The slave replied.
The master said the same thing again, in slightly different language.
The slave agreed by repeating what the master had said, in slightly different terms.
Things got more redundant.
In this manner, the books began to expand. The began to feel ... padded. Drafty. The sense of adventure, even of character, began to grow diffuse. The last book I read or tried to read was Slave Girl of Gor, which was very windy indeed.
When Norman began to cater too closely to his audience of millions, that was when he lost me. Whe he began to speak as if to an audience of idiots, I had to get out. I might have hung around to listen to his ideas if I hadn't gelt he was condescending. He went too far along the boredom axis; and that's when I got off the train.
His early books had moved in a rush. The later ones seemed like mobiles made of danglig sentences; the only thing that moved them, or moved in them, was Norman's breath.
I wish, reading his NYRSF essay, that he had made a different stylistic decision. I wonder if his move to simplify was partly cynical. (I base this on having heard other sf writers voice the same intention – and always with contempt for the genre readers. No big words. No long sentences.)
So while Norman mistrusts and redicules a complicated, eloquent, ironic style as appealing only to critics, he ultimately adopts it himself in self defense. And how well he does it! I think that if I'd seen more of this wit early on, around volume eleven or twelve, I would have continued to pick up a Gor book every now and then, even in the face of the liberal attacks.
Unfortunately, it just hasn't seemed worth the trouble until now. John Norman showed so few signs of life under all that padding! He sounded like a broken record.
So, Mr. Norman, I am not an editor or publisher who made some political decision to boycott your books. I am simply a reader who stopped reading them because ... they got boring.
It's a pity. But be heartened. If you ever get around to writing anything else with the verve and wordplay and roundabout concision so apparent in your "Open Letter" – which finally reopens the long-shut rooms of your Gorean philosophy to let some fresh air in – then you will have won back at least one erstwhile reader. I devoured your letter more eagerly than anything of yours since Raiders.
Unfortunately, in adopting a more interesting style, you might gain yourself a whole new set of problems with genre publishers. One you might not have run into yet...