The GOR series
Sean MIlls
Have just finished reading the first GOR novel (The Tarnsmen of GOR).
It was quit entertaining but at the same time a little bit basic. Now
i know there are about 10?? books in the series. My question is do
they get any better and do you recommend them.
Your thoughs would be appricaited.
Thanks
Sean
Dorothy J Heydt
Sean MIlls <mills...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>Hello All
>
>Have just finished reading the first GOR novel (The Tarnsmen of GOR).
>It was quit entertaining but at the same time a little bit basic. Now
>i know there are about 10?? books in the series. My question is do
>they get any better and do you recommend them.
No. They don't get better; they get, if anything, worse. (That
is, they get worse in the opinions of those who don't already
think them so bad they cannot possibly get worse.)
The initial popularity of the Gor series arose because in the
seventies, when they first appeared, teenagers could not get
soft-core porn anywhere except in the kind of stores their
mommies wouldn't let them go into--and in the local bookstore
disguised as science fiction.
Nowadays, porn of every degree of hardness can be found anywhere
you like, and the popularity of Gor has fallen off. Not because
of censorship on the part of the publishers, as Norman suggest--
just from competition from a superior (if you care for that kind
of thing) product.
Dorothy J. Heydt
Albany, California
djh...@kithrup.com
http://www.kithrup.com/~djheydt
Karl Elvis MacRae
Well, my first thought is, I suspect you're a troll.
But giving you the benefit of the doubt...
The first four are the best of the bunch, with the fourth, "nomads of gor"
being the best.
The writing gets a *little* better after the first one, but not that much.
After the first four, Norman's obsessions start to take over and the
plots get thinner and more repetitive, while the ranting takes over
more and more of each book.
Norman is, frankly, a nutter.
But the first few *are* fun, with some interesting world-building and
some good action. If you liked the first, proceed through #4, and
then go with caution after that. They started to completely suck
after about the seventh book, and I think I gave up after about the 10th;
I think he wrote about 15 of them though.
-Karl
--
Karl Elvis MacRae VLSI CAD Apple Computer km...@apple.com
Mike Schilling
"Sean MIlls" <mills...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:87529ebe.03021...@posting.google.com...
> Hello All
>
> Have just finished reading the first GOR novel (The Tarnsmen of GOR).
> It was quit entertaining but at the same time a little bit basic. Now
> i know there are about 10?? books in the series.
Are there really over a thousand? Perhaps you mean "10?".
Peter Meilinger
>No. They don't get better; they get, if anything, worse. (That
>is, they get worse in the opinions of those who don't already
>think them so bad they cannot possibly get worse.)
>The initial popularity of the Gor series arose because in the
>seventies, when they first appeared, teenagers could not get
>soft-core porn anywhere except in the kind of stores their
>mommies wouldn't let them go into--and in the local bookstore
>disguised as science fiction.
To be fair, the weird-ass porn stuff doesn't really come into
it until the fourth book. The first three were not too shabby
pulp adventures. The fourth and fifth were pretty good pulp,
too, but there was way too much "women are natural-born slaves"
crap mixed in. It's pretty easy to ignore, though, if you just
want to skip it and get to the actual storylines, which are
worth reading if you enjoyed the first three books.
After the fifth book, it's all downhill.
Pete
Jeff Stehman
mills...@hotmail.com says...
>
> Have just finished reading the first GOR novel (The Tarnsmen of GOR).
> It was quit entertaining but at the same time a little bit basic. Now
> i know there are about 10?? books in the series. My question is do
> they get any better and do you recommend them.
There are at least 26 books. I never finished the first one; however, a
friend told me about meeting John Norton many years ago. He said that,
upon telling Norton how much he enjoyed the Gor series, the author gave
him a rather concerned look. "But then, I've only read the first three."
"Ah, well that's okay then."
I don't know how honest my friend was being, but you might not want to
get your hopes up. :-)
--Jeff Stehman
Dr. Fidelius
>It was quit entertaining but at the same time a little bit basic. Now
>i know there are about 10?? books in the series.
Number 26, _Witness of Gor_ is now available from Amazon.
As a stubborn example of arrested development, I read through _Players of Gor_
(number 17, I believe), skipping _Slave Girl of Gor_(#11) and _Kajira of
Gor_(#16), but purchasing them anyway to keep the collection complete. As
"Kajira" is the Gorean word for "slave girl", I believe that those two would
have been redundant.
I should be ashamed to admit knowing this, and the collection is long gone so I
cannot immediately check the series numbers.
Read the first six or so (the ones reissued with the Boris covers). They are
amusing in a sub-Barsoomian way.
---
Dr. Fidelius, Charlatan
Curator of Anomalous Paleontology, Miskatonic University
You cannot reason a man out of a position he did not reach through reason.
---
quand vous retournez, apportez la tarte
David Friedman
mills...@hotmail.com (Sean MIlls) wrote:
I think John Norman was a talented story teller and world builder and
knew and used a lot of history. The early books are interesting.
The impression I get is that once he became successful, he used his
writings to push his ideological views--roughly speaking, anti-feminism,
along with other things possibly lifted from classical antiquity.
Arguing for unfashionable views is fine and can be interesting, but he
let the argument, along with the associated sex, overpower the
story--perhaps because he felt as though everyone else was preaching an
orthodoxy that he considered absurd and he was the only voice in the
wilderness. It ends up feeling obsessive and destroying the later
books--although there are still scraps of good storytelling in them.
I should add that I probably haven't read the last five or ten, so am
going by the ones prior to that.
Part of what is interesting in the first few books is the tension
between the protagonist's reasonably conventional moral views and the
very different views of the society around him. But after a few books
the author makes it clear that he is on the side of the society, and
shortly thereafter the protagonist comes around.
how...@brazee.net
On 13-Feb-2003, mills...@hotmail.com (Sean MIlls) wrote:
> Have just finished reading the first GOR novel (The Tarnsmen of GOR).
> It was quit entertaining but at the same time a little bit basic. Now
> i know there are about 10?? books in the series. My question is do
> they get any better and do you recommend them.
They turn into porn about violence against women.
Callisto
I think that the best GOR book would be one that C.S. Friedman would
write, based that both Erna and Gor have three moons, is that Gor is
an Erna in which Callesta won and reduced humanity to specialized
cattle to feed him.
Doom & Gloom Dave
"Dr. Fidelius" <drfid...@aol.commoriom> wrote in message
news:20030213211638...@mb-mn.aol.com...
> >Have just finished reading the first GOR novel (The Tarnsmen of GOR).
> >It was quit entertaining but at the same time a little bit basic. Now
> >i know there are about 10?? books in the series.
>
> Number 26, _Witness of Gor_ is now available from Amazon.
>
Your translation by the way was correct, Kajira = slave girl thus the
books are redundant, plus two more captured earth female books, Captive &
Dancer making 4 of the same novel.
David Cowie
>
> Part of what is interesting in the first few books is the tension
> between the protagonist's reasonably conventional moral views and the
> very different views of the society around him. But after a few books
> the author makes it clear that he is on the side of the society, and
> shortly thereafter the protagonist comes around.
I read _Priest-Kings of Gor_ (number 3, I believe) and the protagonist
seemed to be very much in tune with Gorean mores in that one.
--
David Cowie david_cowie at lineone dot net
Terrell Miller
news:HA9z2...@kithrup.com...
> No. They don't get better; they get, if anything, worse. (That
> is, they get worse in the opinions of those who don't already
> think them so bad they cannot possibly get worse.)
No, they get worse regardless of what you think of the first few.
I hung in there through the first 13, after that they're mainly awful.
> The initial popularity of the Gor series arose because in the
> seventies, when they first appeared,
Tarnsman was published in 1966, and Norman had written five Gor novels and
one standalone novel (Ghost Dance) by 1970...
> teenagers could not get
> soft-core porn anywhere except in the kind of stores their
> mommies wouldn't let them go into--and in the local bookstore
> disguised as science fiction.
hadn't thought of that before, good point
> Nowadays, porn of every degree of hardness can be found anywhere
> you like, and the popularity of Gor has fallen off.
except on the Internet. The *availability* of Gor books has fallen off,
because nobody will carry them.
> Not because
> of censorship on the part of the publishers, as Norman suggest--
> just from competition from a superior (if you care for that kind
> of thing) product.
totally false.
The last mass-market Gor book (the 25th in the series) was published in
1987. Sales had climbed steadily, and the best-seller was IIRC the 22nd,
which appeared in 1985.
Then Donald Wollheim died, his daughter took over DAW, and blacklisted
Norman. Again: he was selling more copies than he ever had when all of a
sudden he couldn't get published. You saw them in Kroger and all the big
chain bookstores, then all of a sudden you didn't see them anymore. Nothing
happened overnight to somehow make Gor books obsolete.
So I'm afraid your theory is just so much retconning, sorry. Norman was a
wildly popular author who outsold his sf peers by a factor of ten. Then he
got shafted by one woman with a grudge.
--
Terrell Miller
mill...@bellsouth.net
"Not making fuck-ups on the ground, is not an option. Humans fuck up,
period. Human institutions fuck up. Human processes intended to prevent
fuck-ups, fuck up. This cannot be avoided no matter how much time and
resources you expend in the effort, though NASA and the rest of the space
industry certainly try."
-John Schilling
Timothy McDaniel
Jon Meltzer <jmel...@pobox.com> wrote:
>Is "Free Amazons of Gor" available online?
Jim Detry, I think it was, did a nice little cover for _Podkayne of
Gor_. It showed a perky little smiling redhead in a cheerleader
outfit and a bubble space helmet, holding the dripping head of some
loathsome beast.
The same artist did the cover of _Dragoncrap_ ("Don't look up when the
dragons fly by!"). It had a woman with a big shovel ...
At several con art shows, I saw the cover of _Wage Slaves of Gor_.
It had a group of people dressed in business suits and skirts storming
up the steps of a Boris temple.
--
Tim McDaniel, tm...@panix.com; tm...@us.ibm.com is my work address
David Dyer-Bennet
Interesting theory. But I refuse to believe that no other publisher
was interested in picking them up, if they actually sold that well.
I'm pretty sure they didn't sell all that well, and their sales were
slumping when DAW cut him off. That, at least, seems to be what
bookstore owners told me at the time.
They're now in print (or some subset of them are) from a small-press
publisher, but don't seem to be selling very well that I can see.
<http://www.newworldpublishers.com/> And a new book seems to be out.
--
David Dyer-Bennet, dd...@dd-b.net / http://www.dd-b.net/dd-b/
John Dyer-Bennet 1915-2002 Memorial Site http://john.dyer-bennet.net
Dragaera mailing lists, see http://dragaera.info
Klyfix
writes:
>
>At several con art shows, I saw the cover of _Wage Slaves of Gor_.
>It had a group of people dressed in business suits and skirts storming
>up the steps of a Boris temple.
>
Now that has a certain appeal about it, yupper.
V. S. Greene : kly...@aol.com : Boston, near Arkham...
Eckzylon: http://m1.aol.com/klyfix/eckzylon.html
A rodent with mad skillz, uh, no.
Dr. Fidelius
>At several con art shows, I saw the cover of _Wage Slaves of Gor_.
>It had a group of people dressed in business suits and skirts storming
>up the steps of a Boris temple.
I once was the proud owner of a poster of "Smurfs of Gor," with one of the
little blue demihumans wielding a whip on a typical Boris slave girl.
"Smurf her again, Sleazy!"
Andrew Wheeler
>
> "Terrell Miller" <mill...@bellsouth.net> writes:
>
> > "Dorothy J Heydt" <djh...@kithrup.com> wrote in message
> > news:HA9z2...@kithrup.com...
> >
> > > No. They don't get better; they get, if anything, worse. (That
> > > is, they get worse in the opinions of those who don't already
> > > think them so bad they cannot possibly get worse.)
> >
> > No, they get worse regardless of what you think of the first few.
> >
> > I hung in there through the first 13, after that they're mainly awful.
> >
> > > The initial popularity of the Gor series arose because in the
> > > seventies, when they first appeared,
> >
> > Tarnsman was published in 1966, and Norman had written five Gor novels
> > and one standalone novel (Ghost Dance) by 1970...
> >
> > > teenagers could not get
> > > soft-core porn anywhere except in the kind of stores their
> > > mommies wouldn't let them go into--and in the local bookstore
> > > disguised as science fiction.
> >
> > hadn't thought of that before, good point
> >
> > > Nowadays, porn of every degree of hardness can be found anywhere
> > > you like, and the popularity of Gor has fallen off.
> >
> > except on the Internet. The *availability* of Gor books has fallen
> > off, because nobody will carry them.
Actually, they're in print now (Amazon brought up 38 items from the
search "john norman gor"). They just don't sell a whole lot of copies.
(Though they seem to be selling nicely enough for the small press that's
been doing them -- it's all a question of scale and expectations.)
> > > Not because of censorship on the part of the publishers, as Norman
> > > suggest-- just from competition from a superior (if you care for
> > > that kind of thing) product.
> >
> > totally false.
> >
> > The last mass-market Gor book (the 25th in the series) was published
> > in 1987. Sales had climbed steadily, and the best-seller was IIRC the
> > 22nd, which appeared in 1985.
> >
> > Then Donald Wollheim died, his daughter took over DAW, and blacklisted
> > Norman. Again: he was selling more copies than he ever had when all of
> > a sudden he couldn't get published. You saw them in Kroger and all the
> > big chain bookstores, then all of a sudden you didn't see them
> > anymore. Nothing happened overnight to somehow make Gor books
> > obsolete.
Donald Wollheim died in 1990. The last DAW Gor book, _Magicians of Gor_
was published in 1988. (He did step back a bit from day-to-day control
of the line in 1985, but there were two Gor books after that.)
Warner Questar published _The Chieftain_, first in a new "Telnarian
Histories" series, in 1991, which means it was certainly sold *before*
Wollheim's death. I believe they did one or two more books in this
series, and then stopped. Norman apparently ended the Gor series and
jumped publishers before Wollheim died.
And editors don't control what chain bookstores and Kroger (whatever
that is) carry -- though sometimes they wish they could. So either the
*buyers* of all of those outlets simultaneously decided Norman was evil
and anathema, or they just dropped his books (or reduced their orders)
due to declining sales. (And buyers are not known for caring deeply
about the specifics of the books they carry, as long as those books sell.)
> > So I'm afraid your theory is just so much retconning, sorry. Norman
> > was a wildly popular author who outsold his sf peers by a factor of
> > ten. Then he got shafted by one woman with a grudge.
I'm afraid your theory doesn't fit the facts.
> Interesting theory. But I refuse to believe that no other publisher
> was interested in picking them up, if they actually sold that well.
> I'm pretty sure they didn't sell all that well, and their sales were
> slumping when DAW cut him off. That, at least, seems to be what
> bookstore owners told me at the time.
>
> They're now in print (or some subset of them are) from a small-press
> publisher, but don't seem to be selling very well that I can see.
> <http://www.newworldpublishers.com/> And a new book seems to be out.
As I mentioned above, Norman *was* published by another house --
Warner's Questar imprint (of faded memory now) picked him up. The new
series doesn't seem to have sold much of anything, despite being (by the
accounts I heard) Gor in new clothing.
So either his audience would only buy books with the word "Gor" in the
title (and everyone failed to realize this, and/or decided not to test
it) or his sales weren't actually that good at that point. (Or, I have
to add to be honest, that Questar was a bottom-of-the-line operation
that didn't do a lot of promotion and was run on a shoestring, so
nothing *could* be much of a success there.)
And it is, frankly, impossible for me to imagine that there is
*anything* that Jim Baen, Tom Doherty, Betsy Wollheim and the various
Del Rey, Eos, Aspect and Roc folks would all agree not to publish even
though it would "outsell his sf peers by a factor of ten." (I will
refrain from mentioning some books and authors that *do* get published
to make my point.)
Myself, I like Dorothy's pseudo-porn theory. It fits the known facts,
allows for the fact that the Gor books *were* big sellers in the '70s,
and gives a good reason for them to fade in the '80s. (That their
readership also may have gotten too old, fat and kid-encumbered for
silly bondage games may also have played a part.)
--
Andrew Wheeler
--
"It's a sad day for American capitalism when a man can't fly a midget on
a kite over Central Park." -Jim Moran
James Nicoll
Andrew Wheeler <acwh...@optonline.com> wrote:
>
>Myself, I like Dorothy's pseudo-porn theory. It fits the known facts,
>allows for the fact that the Gor books *were* big sellers in the '70s,
>and gives a good reason for them to fade in the '80s. (That their
>readership also may have gotten too old, fat and kid-encumbered for
>silly bondage games may also have played a part.)
If the TV show _Kink_ is any guide, the first two are
not an impediment. Speaking as someone who is despite all efforts
getting neither younger nor thinner I must say it's heartening to
see age and weight are not the barrier to non-sedentary activities
they might be.
BTW, I am having a horrible _Family Guy_ flashback, to the
scene where the parents discuss some parental issue while donning
bondage gear. Thanks ever so much.
James Nicoll
--
"Repress the urge to sprout wings or self-ignite!...This man's an
Episcopalian!...They have definite views."
Pibgorn Oct 31/02
Ian Montgomerie
wrote:
> BTW, I am having a horrible _Family Guy_ flashback, to the
>scene where the parents discuss some parental issue while donning
>bondage gear. Thanks ever so much.
There's nothing horrible about Family Guy flashbacks, philistine.
Jorj Strumolo
> The initial popularity of the Gor series arose because in the
> seventies, when they first appeared, teenagers could not get
> soft-core porn anywhere except in the kind of stores their
> mommies wouldn't let them go into--and in the local bookstore
> disguised as science fiction.
Which reminds me of something I read in seventh or eight grade
(1975 or so). All I remember is that it had a miniature man
with a spear doing something inside a body, a very low-tech
Fantastic Voyage. Fighting cancer, I think, though I won't
swear to it. The only reason I (vaguely) recall it is that
there was sex in it. There was a seamy feel to it. Anyone
hazard a guess based on these near-zero facts?
David Friedman
David Dyer-Bennet <dd...@dd-b.net> wrote:
> They're now in print (or some subset of them are) from a small-press
> publisher, but don't seem to be selling very well that I can see.
Checking Amazon.com, _Witness of Gor_, which appears to be quite recent,
ranks 1,500. In hardcover. My guess is that the number of sf authors who
routinely rank that high in hardcover is pretty small.
Amazon rankings aren't a perfect measure of how well a book sells, of
course, but if a book does very well on Amazon and isn't available in
bookstores, that suggests that its not being available doesn't reflect a
lack of demand.
For comparison, _Diplomatic Immunity_ by Bujold, published at about the
same time and also in hardcover, ranks 12,122.
Brian Henderson
wrote:
>Have just finished reading the first GOR novel (The Tarnsmen of GOR).
>It was quit entertaining but at the same time a little bit basic. Now
>i know there are about 10?? books in the series. My question is do
>they get any better and do you recommend them.
No, the entire Gor series is just a fantasy for pathetic teenage boys
and men who live in their mother's basements. It's for people who
don't quite comprehend how to get a girlfriend.
Chuck Bridgeland
Protagonist takes a mind-altering drug, goes and fights his own personal
cancer, then can't get out of his illusion?
Was it in _Again, Dangerous Visions_?
--
"And you get the Noisy Cricket."
Chuck Bridgeland, chuckbri at computerdyn dot com
http://www.essex1.com/people/chuckbri
David Cowie
> On Sat, 15 Feb 2003 05:33:00 GMT, Jorj Strumolo
> <buirlv...@spammotel.com> wrote:
>>
>> Which reminds me of something I read in seventh or eight grade (1975
>> or so). All I remember is that it had a miniature man with a spear
>> doing something inside a body, a very low-tech Fantastic Voyage.
>> Fighting cancer, I think, though I won't swear to it. The only
>> reason I (vaguely) recall it is that there was sex in it. There was
>> a seamy feel to it. Anyone hazard a guess based on these near-zero
>> facts?
>
> Protagonist takes a mind-altering drug, goes and fights his own
> personal cancer, then can't get out of his illusion?
>
> Was it in _Again, Dangerous Visions_?
That would be "Carcinoma Angels" by Norman Spinrad, which may have been
in _Dangerous Visions_, but does not sound like the story the OP was
looking for. I'm pretty sure there's no sex in it.
Robert A. Woodward
Chuck Bridgeland <chuc...@computerdyn.com> wrote:
> On Sat, 15 Feb 2003 05:33:00 GMT, Jorj Strumolo <buirlv...@spammotel.com>
> wrote:
> > Dorothy J Heydt <djh...@kithrup.com> wrote:
> >> The initial popularity of the Gor series arose because in the
> >> seventies, when they first appeared, teenagers could not get
> >> soft-core porn anywhere except in the kind of stores their
> >> mommies wouldn't let them go into--and in the local bookstore
> >> disguised as science fiction.
> >
> > Which reminds me of something I read in seventh or eight grade
> > (1975 or so). All I remember is that it had a miniature man
> > with a spear doing something inside a body, a very low-tech
> > Fantastic Voyage. Fighting cancer, I think, though I won't
> > swear to it. The only reason I (vaguely) recall it is that
> > there was sex in it. There was a seamy feel to it. Anyone
> > hazard a guess based on these near-zero facts?
>
> Protagonist takes a mind-altering drug, goes and fights his own personal
> cancer, then can't get out of his illusion?
>
> Was it in _Again, Dangerous Visions_?
That story is "Carcinoma Angels" by Norman Spinrad and it's in the
original _Dangerous Visions_.
--
Robert Woodward <robe...@drizzle.com>
<http://www.drizzle.com/~robertaw
William Newman
If I didn't get out much, I might confidently think that too. But of
the two people in real life in the last year who wanted to tell me
about their inspired-by-Gor lifestyle, both were female. Furthermore,
both were sufficiently outgoing (e.g. IIRC both introducing themselves
to me, not the other way 'round) and enthusiastic about it that it
seemed like a very safe bet that their unusual choices were made
actively, not as a passive default to desperately accommodate the only
men they could find. So for all I know your common sense judgement may
still be largely correct, and the entire Gor series might be
*primarily* a fantasy for pathetic boys and men -- but "just" doesn't
seem to be strictly correct.
Theory and common sense are powerful tools for understanding human
behavior. But even if you don't meet many unconventional people in
real life, it should be pretty clear just from your Internet access
that trying to guess what's so weird that nobody would want it in bed,
or want it from someone he/she sleeps with, is harder in practice than
in theory.
"The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger
than we can imagine." -- J. B. S. Haldane
"All languages tie you up and beat you. However, if an environment
suits your particular kink, then it feels good to you. You may not
even notice that there's anything kinky going on. It's only someone
else's kinky languages that makes you say 'do what?'"
-- Wayne Conrad, <http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?BondageAndDisciplineLanguages>
Wesley Struebing
<robe...@drizzle.com> wrote:
>In article <slrnb4sk8k....@lennier.chuckbri.org>,
> Chuck Bridgeland <chuc...@computerdyn.com> wrote:
><snip>
>> >
>> > Which reminds me of something I read in seventh or eight grade
>> > (1975 or so). All I remember is that it had a miniature man
>> > with a spear doing something inside a body, a very low-tech
>> > Fantastic Voyage. Fighting cancer, I think, though I won't
>> > swear to it. The only reason I (vaguely) recall it is that
>> > there was sex in it. There was a seamy feel to it. Anyone
>> > hazard a guess based on these near-zero facts?
>>
>> Protagonist takes a mind-altering drug, goes and fights his own personal
>> cancer, then can't get out of his illusion?
>>
>> Was it in _Again, Dangerous Visions_?
>
>
>That story is "Carcinoma Angels" by Norman Spinrad and it's in the
>original _Dangerous Visions_.
Yup. And no sex...
--
Carpe Dementem! (grab the wacko)
Wes Struebing
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
strueb@<nonono>carpedementem.org
home page: www.carpedementem.org
Sean O'Hara
> Timothy McDaniel wrote, amongst other things:
>
> >At several con art shows, I saw the cover of _Wage Slaves of Gor_.
> >It had a group of people dressed in business suits and skirts storming
> >up the steps of a Boris temple.
>
> I once was the proud owner of a poster of "Smurfs of Gor," with one of the
> little blue demihumans wielding a whip on a typical Boris slave girl.
>
> "Smurf her again, Sleazy!"
>
Smurfs are asexual They don't even have reproductive organs under
those little white pants. That's what's so illogical about being a
Smurf. What's the point of living if you don't have a dick?"
-Donnie Darko
--
Sean O'Hara
William December Starr
djh...@kithrup.com (Dorothy J Heydt) said:
> No. They don't get better; they get, if anything, worse. (That
> is, they get worse in the opinions of those who don't already think
> them so bad they cannot possibly get worse.)
You never know -- they may have gotten worse in the opinions of those
who _did_ think they couldn't possibly get worse too.
-- William December Starr <wds...@panix.com>
William December Starr
acwh...@optonline.com said:
> Warner Questar published _The Chieftain_, first in a new
> "Telnarian Histories" series, in 1991, which means it was
> certainly sold *before* Wollheim's death. I believe they did
> one or two more books in this series, and then stopped. Norman
> apparently ended the Gor series and jumped publishers before
> Wollheim died.
There were three Telnarian books in all: _The Chieftain_, _The
Captain_ and _The King_, one a year from 1991 through 1993.
I never read any of them, having finally stopped being a horny
fifteen-year-old some time earlier, so I don't know whether they
concluded or, as you say, merely stopped. (Assuming that they
chronicled some guy's progressive rise in fortunes, where do you
go after "king?")
David Bilek
>Brian Henderson <ceph...@aol.com> wrote in message news:<7qnq4vs1bbbpahn2m...@4ax.com>...
>> On 13 Feb 2003 17:04:08 -0800, mills...@hotmail.com (Sean MIlls)
>> wrote:
>>
>> >Have just finished reading the first GOR novel (The Tarnsmen of GOR).
>> >It was quit entertaining but at the same time a little bit basic. Now
>> >i know there are about 10?? books in the series. My question is do
>> >they get any better and do you recommend them.
>>
>> No, the entire Gor series is just a fantasy for pathetic teenage boys
>> and men who live in their mother's basements. It's for people who
>> don't quite comprehend how to get a girlfriend.
>
>If I didn't get out much, I might confidently think that too. But of
>the two people in real life in the last year who wanted to tell me
>about their inspired-by-Gor lifestyle, both were female.
(snippage)
Yep. It was pointed out to me in the not-too-distant past that the
primary audience of the Gor novels is in fact female, not male. So
Brian was definitely out to lunch.
I can't stand the Gor books, myself.
-David
David Cowie
> concluded or, as you say, merely stopped. (Assuming that they
> chronicled some guy's progressive rise in fortunes, where do you
> go after "king?")
>
King of somewhere bigger
Emperor
God-Emperor
Ed H.
> >the two people in real life in the last year who wanted to tell me
> >about their inspired-by-Gor lifestyle, both were female.
> (snippage)
> Yep. It was pointed out to me in the not-too-distant past that the
> primary audience of the Gor novels is in fact female, not male. So
> Brian was definitely out to lunch.
> I can't stand the Gor books, myself.
> -David
Same here. I stopped reading them after about #3 or #4, I think.
Got any documentations about the primary audience being female?
That's interesting as a sub-topic on this chain.
Ed Howdershelt - Abintra Press
Science Fiction and Semi-Fiction
http://abintrapress.tripod.com
David Bilek
>> >If I didn't get out much, I might confidently think that too. But of
>> >the two people in real life in the last year who wanted to tell me
>> >about their inspired-by-Gor lifestyle, both were female.
>> (snippage)
>> Yep. It was pointed out to me in the not-too-distant past that the
>> primary audience of the Gor novels is in fact female, not male. So
>> Brian was definitely out to lunch.
>> I can't stand the Gor books, myself.
>
>Same here. I stopped reading them after about #3 or #4, I think.
>Got any documentations about the primary audience being female?
>That's interesting as a sub-topic on this chain.
Documentation? Not on paper, if that's what you mean.
But according to Michael Kube-McDowell, Donald Wollheim said more than
once that the typical Gor buyer is female. Donald Wollheim was about
as authorative a source as you could get.
(Wollheim=DAW books for the two of you who didn't know. Until he,
unfortunately, died of cancer.)
-David
Richard Kennaway
> There were three Telnarian books in all: _The Chieftain_, _The
> Captain_ and _The King_, one a year from 1991 through 1993.
>
> I never read any of them, having finally stopped being a horny
> fifteen-year-old some time earlier, so I don't know whether they
> concluded or, as you say, merely stopped. (Assuming that they
> chronicled some guy's progressive rise in fortunes, where do you
> go after "king?")
Off planet. AFAIR from having read just one of them, and I can't even
remember which one, there is an SF-ish background -- there's a galactic
(or some fraction thereof) civilisation of which his planet is a
comparatively minor and backward one.
Alternatively, Norman could do the rags-to-riches-to-rags thing and have
the King lose to an enemy (through the treachery of one of his own
people, of course -- a real man would never be beaten in a fair fight),
be sentenced to the galleys, and fight his way up the ladder again.
Subsequent volumes might be "The Galley Slave", "The Pirate Chief", and
then, having learnt from his past errors, he goes legit in "The
Merchant", followed by "The Banker" and "The Tax Collector".
-- Richard Kennway
Joseph Michael Bay
>On Sat, 15 Feb 2003 15:23:08 -0500, William December Starr wrote:
>> concluded or, as you say, merely stopped. (Assuming that they
>> chronicled some guy's progressive rise in fortunes, where do you
>> go after "king?")
>>
>King of somewhere bigger
>Emperor
>God-Emperor
Chapterhouse: Gor
--
Joseph M. Bay Lamont Sanford Junior University
www.stanford.edu/~jmbay/ DO NOT PRESS
When encryption is outlawed, om;u h$g9!ap k#-j tv*d$]p.
Chris Kuan
> > On Sat, 15 Feb 2003 05:33:00 GMT, Jorj Strumolo
> > <buirlv...@spammotel.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> Which reminds me of something I read in seventh or eight grade (1975
> >> or so). All I remember is that it had a miniature man with a spear
> >> doing something inside a body, a very low-tech Fantastic Voyage.
> >> Fighting cancer, I think, though I won't swear to it. The only
> >> reason I (vaguely) recall it is that there was sex in it. There was
> >> a seamy feel to it. Anyone hazard a guess based on these near-zero
> >> facts?
> That would be "Carcinoma Angels" by Norman Spinrad, which may have been
> in _Dangerous Visions_, but does not sound like the story the OP was
> looking for. I'm pretty sure there's no sex in it.
Interestingly, Spinrad revisited the theme in about 1988 with "Journal
Of The Plague Years" in which a scientist attempts to develop a
self-modifying anti-AIDS biological agent. And there was lots of sex
in *that*, although not as explicit as some others.
--
Chris
Terrell Miller
news:3E4DA163...@optonline.com...
> > > except on the Internet. The *availability* of Gor books has fallen
> > > off, because nobody will carry them.
>
> Actually, they're in print now (Amazon brought up 38 items from the
> search "john norman gor").
Take a little more time to look at the results. Lots of those are business
manuals and the like by different "Normans". And most of the hits you got on
his books are for used copies, not new ones.
The only Norman books currently in print are the first four, plus the new
26th one. All the rest are OOP.
> They just don't sell a whole lot of copies.
> (Though they seem to be selling nicely enough for the small press that's
> been doing them -- it's all a question of scale and expectations.)
Bingo. Masquerade reprinted the first dozen or so in the late '90s, and you
used to find those in the chain bookstores.
New World has reprinted the first four in the last couple of years,
apparently with more to come, plus the new one (that was actually written in
1988 when Norman got blacklisted).
> Donald Wollheim died in 1990. The last DAW Gor book, _Magicians of Gor_
> was published in 1988. (He did step back a bit from day-to-day control
> of the line in 1985, but there were two Gor books after that.)
I forgot the date of his death, but as you say, Katie was starting to take
over when DAW dropped Norman.
> Warner Questar published _The Chieftain_, first in a new "Telnarian
> Histories" series, in 1991, which means it was certainly sold *before*
> Wollheim's death.
but not before he got dumped by DAW, and not before he couldn't find a buyer
for his 26th Gor book.
> I believe they did one or two more books in this
> series, and then stopped.
correct
> Norman apparently ended the Gor series and
> jumped publishers before Wollheim died.
No, he didn't end it. He'd already written Witness, which is the one that
New World just published last year. He just couldn't find a buyer in 1988.
From time to time Norman would write self-contained novels that had nothing
to do with Gor. DAW would release a Gor book every March, plus these "bonus"
novels (including a couple of Gor novels that were basically the second half
"sequels" of the spring books) for the Christmas season. I'd imagine that
the first Telnarian book started that way as well, though it's also possible
that he had to come up with another universe to get Questar to carry him.
> And editors don't control what chain bookstores and Kroger (whatever that
is)
Huge supermarket chain, like Safeway or Publix or Carl's. Maybe they aren't
in your area, but they're all over the place.
> carry -- though sometimes they wish they could. So either the
> *buyers* of all of those outlets simultaneously decided Norman was evil
> and anathema, or they just dropped his books (or reduced their orders)
> due to declining sales. (And buyers are not known for caring deeply
> about the specifics of the books they carry, as long as those books sell.)
But buyers can't drop books that publishers aren't selling, which is the
point you seem to be missing...
> > > So I'm afraid your theory is just so much retconning, sorry. Norman
> > > was a wildly popular author who outsold his sf peers by a factor of
> > > ten. Then he got shafted by one woman with a grudge.
>
> I'm afraid your theory doesn't fit the facts.
yes, it does.
> > Interesting theory. But I refuse to believe that no other publisher
> > was interested in picking them up, if they actually sold that well.
> > I'm pretty sure they didn't sell all that well, and their sales were
> > slumping when DAW cut him off. That, at least, seems to be what
> > bookstore owners told me at the time.
> >
> > They're now in print (or some subset of them are) from a small-press
> > publisher, but don't seem to be selling very well that I can see.
> > <http://www.newworldpublishers.com/> And a new book seems to be out.
>
> As I mentioned above, Norman *was* published by another house --
> Warner's Questar imprint (of faded memory now) picked him up. The new
> series doesn't seem to have sold much of anything, despite being (by the
> accounts I heard) Gor in new clothing.
haven't heard numbers, but all the Questar books were carried in
supermarkets and drug stores, at least in the Atlanta area. Also the chain
bookstores. So I'd imagine they sold fairly well.
BTW - your description of them is spot on: swords and spacecraft. Yuck.
> So either his audience would only buy books with the word "Gor" in the
> title (and everyone failed to realize this, and/or decided not to test
> it) or his sales weren't actually that good at that point. (Or, I have
> to add to be honest, that Questar was a bottom-of-the-line operation
> that didn't do a lot of promotion and was run on a shoestring, so
> nothing *could* be much of a success there.)
Sounds right. His non-Gor stuff was usually carried in B. Dalton and
Waldenbooks, but I'd imagine they didn't sell as well as the Gor novels.
> Myself, I like Dorothy's pseudo-porn theory. It fits the known facts,
> allows for the fact that the Gor books *were* big sellers in the '70s,
> and gives a good reason for them to fade in the '80s.
Thing about this theory is that it doesn't work. Dancer was his best selling
title. It came out for the Christmas '85 season, and his sales had been
steadily ramping before that. So what you're saying is that between then and
June '88 (when the last DAW book was published), all of a sudden Norman went
from being at the height of his popularity (with both men and women, and
mainly *adults*, not teenagers) to not selling anything at all.
And remember that it was at this same time when they were making movies of
his first two books (don't even get me started on those). So in the mid-80s
he was not only selling books all over the place, but he was going
"Hollywood". Then two years later, you think nobody would carry him because
his sales suddenly went totally flat? That doesn't pass the sniff test,
sorry.
Neither does the "better porn elsewhere" theory: VHS had been around for
years while Norman's sales were going *up*. Odd time for him to have hit a
wall...
> (That their
> readership also may have gotten too old, fat and kid-encumbered for
> silly bondage games may also have played a part.)
To make this argument you'd have to assume that Norman's reader base was
static (i.e. teenagers who started reading him in the '70s), and that they
all got "too old" during the same two year stretch from spring '86 to spring
'88. If that were the case, you'd see his sales steadily dwindling from the
late '70s onwards. But again: his sales were *increasing*, not dropping.
Lots of *new* fans were buying his books in the '80s. And his demographics
were a lot more diverse than most people care to admit (read: lots of women
read Gor books). So this one doesn't pass the sniff test either.
--
Terrell Miller
mill...@bellsouth.net
"Not making fuck-ups on the ground, is not an option. Humans fuck up,
period. Human institutions fuck up. Human processes intended to prevent
fuck-ups, fuck up. This cannot be avoided no matter how much time and
resources you expend in the effort, though NASA and the rest of the space
industry certainly try."
-John Schilling
Moriarty
<snip>
> There were three Telnarian books in all: _The Chieftain_, _The
> Captain_ and _The King_, one a year from 1991 through 1993.
>
> I never read any of them, having finally stopped being a horny
> fifteen-year-old some time earlier, so I don't know whether they
> concluded or, as you say, merely stopped. (Assuming that they
> chronicled some guy's progressive rise in fortunes, where do you
> go after "king?")
Jack Ryan?
-Moriarty
John Schilling
I read the first, well, read part of and skimmed the rest of, on
the hypothesis that since the first three Gor books were decent
bits of fantasy there might be a Piers Anthony "first three books
of any series OK" dynamic going on.
The hypothesis was plausible, but has been disproven.
--
*John Schilling * "Anything worth doing, *
*Member:AIAA,NRA,ACLU,SAS,LP * is worth doing for money" *
*Chief Scientist & General Partner * -13th Rule of Acquisition *
*White Elephant Research, LLC * "There is no substitute *
*schi...@spock.usc.edu * for success" *
*661-951-9107 or 661-275-6795 * -58th Rule of Acquisition *
Andrew Wheeler
>
> "Andrew Wheeler" <acwh...@optonline.com> wrote in message
> news:3E4DA163...@optonline.com...
>
> > > > except on the Internet. The *availability* of Gor books has fallen
> > > > off, because nobody will carry them.
> >
> > Actually, they're in print now (Amazon brought up 38 items from the
> > search "john norman gor").
>
> Take a little more time to look at the results. Lots of those are
> business manuals and the like by different "Normans". And most of the
> hits you got on his books are for used copies, not new ones.
Business manuals with the word "Gor" in the title? We seem to be posting
from different continua.
> The only Norman books currently in print are the first four, plus the
> new 26th one. All the rest are OOP.
But they all seem to have been in print, in mass market, in the late
'90s. One presumes that a series that sells "ten times its sf
competitors" would not drop out of print so quickly.
> > They just don't sell a whole lot of copies.
> > (Though they seem to be selling nicely enough for the small press
> > that's been doing them -- it's all a question of scale and
> > expectations.)
>
> Bingo. Masquerade reprinted the first dozen or so in the late '90s, and
> you used to find those in the chain bookstores.
Yes, and if they sold consistently you would *still* find them. That's
my point, actually.
> New World has reprinted the first four in the last couple of years,
> apparently with more to come, plus the new one (that was actually
> written in 1988 when Norman got blacklisted).
"Blacklisted" is a silly word in this case. If there were any "black
list," I'd certainly know about it. There is no such thing. There may
not be any major SF publisher who wants to publish Gor books at the
moment, but that's not at all the same thing. There's a whole lot of
things not being published at the moment (or only being published by
small presses). Norman seems to be in roughly the same position as
Philip High and Avram Davidson, among many others.
> > Donald Wollheim died in 1990. The last DAW Gor book, _Magicians of
> > Gor_ was published in 1988. (He did step back a bit from day-to-day
> > control of the line in 1985, but there were two Gor books after that.)
>
> I forgot the date of his death, but as you say, Katie was starting to
> take over when DAW dropped Norman.
Katie who? There's no one named Katie associated with DAW. Don's wife
was Elsie, his daughter is Betsy. The other DAW editor is Sheila.
Yet another reason I think you've heard a third-hand and very
exaggerated version of a partially true story.
> > Warner Questar published _The Chieftain_, first in a new "Telnarian
> > Histories" series, in 1991, which means it was certainly sold *before*
> > Wollheim's death.
>
> but not before he got dumped by DAW, and not before he couldn't find a
> buyer for his 26th Gor book.
<shrug> That's quite possible. However, the point remains that he was
*not* blacklisted and *did* continue to publish.
One generally gets dumped by ones publisher for poor sales. And, if the
dumping was due to any other reason, one is picked up immediately by
somebody else. Look, all kinds of absolutely hideous people -- folks no
one wants to ever have to deal with -- sell book after book, as long as
those books sell. (And Norman, from all I've heard and the handful of
times I've seen him at cons, is a gentleman who has never been any
trouble to work with.)
This is a series that was dropped by its publisher, and not picked up by
anybody else. It's been revived twice since then, with only minimal
results. I don't see any of that as evidence of a "blacklist."
And if an author has a successful series and another publisher is
willing to publish him, they generally *want* to continue the successful
series. The fact that he started a different series for Questar tends to
support the "declining sales of Gor" argument; if Gor were strong and
growing, Questar would have wanted Gor books.
> > I believe they did one or two more books in this
> > series, and then stopped.
>
> correct
>
> > Norman apparently ended the Gor series and
> > jumped publishers before Wollheim died.
>
> No, he didn't end it. He'd already written Witness, which is the one
> that New World just published last year. He just couldn't find a buyer
> in 1988.
That may be, but "no one bought book X" does not equal "book x was blacklisted."
> From time to time Norman would write self-contained novels that had
> nothing to do with Gor. DAW would release a Gor book every March, plus
> these "bonus" novels (including a couple of Gor novels that were
> basically the second half "sequels" of the spring books) for the
> Christmas season. I'd imagine that the first Telnarian book started that
> way as well, though it's also possible that he had to come up with
> another universe to get Questar to carry him.
The Clute-Nicholls _Encyclopedia of Science Fiction_ lists exactly two
singletons for Norman -- _Ghost Dance_ in 1969 and _Time Slave_ in 1975.
I suppose "twice more than a decade earlier" does roughly equal "from
time to time," but it's really stretching the point. Maybe Clute &
Nicholls missed some books, but they states that those are his only
non-series novels.)
> > And editors don't control what chain bookstores and Kroger (whatever
> > that is)
>
> Huge supermarket chain, like Safeway or Publix or Carl's. Maybe they
> aren't in your area, but they're all over the place.
>
> > carry -- though sometimes they wish they could. So either the
> > *buyers* of all of those outlets simultaneously decided Norman was
> > evil and anathema, or they just dropped his books (or reduced their
> > orders) due to declining sales. (And buyers are not known for caring
> > deeply about the specifics of the books they carry, as long as those
> > books sell.)
>
> But buyers can't drop books that publishers aren't selling, which is the
> point you seem to be missing...
I don't get your point -- are you saying that the last couple of Norman
books sold badly because they were sabotaged by the publisher, or that
the non-existent further books in he series would have sold astronomical numbers?
*Other* publishers talk to buyers. And if Gor was outselling everything
else by a factor of ten, the buyers would have all known that, and all
wanted to know when (and from whom) the next book was coming -- so the
publishers would know it, too.
> > > > So I'm afraid your theory is just so much retconning, sorry.
> > > > Norman was a wildly popular author who outsold his sf peers by a
> > > > factor of ten. Then he got shafted by one woman with a grudge.
> >
> > I'm afraid your theory doesn't fit the facts.
>
> yes, it does.
You haven't provided a single "fact" that does anything of the sort. In
fact, the few facts you have provided are either erroneous or actually
undercut your case.
> > > Interesting theory. But I refuse to believe that no other publisher
> > > was interested in picking them up, if they actually sold that well.
> > > I'm pretty sure they didn't sell all that well, and their sales were
> > > slumping when DAW cut him off. That, at least, seems to be what
> > > bookstore owners told me at the time.
> > >
> > > They're now in print (or some subset of them are) from a small-press
> > > publisher, but don't seem to be selling very well that I can see.
> > > <http://www.newworldpublishers.com/> And a new book seems to be
> > > out.
> >
> > As I mentioned above, Norman *was* published by another house --
> > Warner's Questar imprint (of faded memory now) picked him up. The new
> > series doesn't seem to have sold much of anything, despite being (by
> > the accounts I heard) Gor in new clothing.
>
> haven't heard numbers, but all the Questar books were carried in
> supermarkets and drug stores, at least in the Atlanta area. Also the
> chain bookstores. So I'd imagine they sold fairly well.
Everybody's books were in supermarkets and drug stores in the early
'90s, so that doesn't actually say much. (If they were in those outlets
*now*, it would mean a bit more.) From what I know of Questar, the top
of their list sold about the level of the middle of other people's lists.
> BTW - your description of them is spot on: swords and spacecraft. Yuck.
>
> > So either his audience would only buy books with the word "Gor" in the
> > title (and everyone failed to realize this, and/or decided not to test
> > it) or his sales weren't actually that good at that point. (Or, I have
> > to add to be honest, that Questar was a bottom-of-the-line operation
> > that didn't do a lot of promotion and was run on a shoestring, so
> > nothing *could* be much of a success there.)
>
> Sounds right. His non-Gor stuff was usually carried in B. Dalton and
> Waldenbooks, but I'd imagine they didn't sell as well as the Gor novels.
>
> > Myself, I like Dorothy's pseudo-porn theory. It fits the known facts,
> > allows for the fact that the Gor books *were* big sellers in the '70s,
> > and gives a good reason for them to fade in the '80s.
>
> Thing about this theory is that it doesn't work. Dancer was his best
> selling title.
Which means what, exactly? Do you have any numbers? (I know Norman has
grumbled about his "blacklist" for the last decade, but I don't think
he's ever given any numbers.) In the mid-80s a fair bit of leading
SF/Fantasy was netting a hundred thousand or so in mass market, which
would make "ten times that" somewhere in the millions of copies. If he
was really selling that far above the category, he would have been
poached by non-SF publishers -- probably with offers for hardcover
publication, too.
> It came out for the Christmas '85 season, and his sales had been
> steadily ramping before that. So what you're saying is that between then
> and June '88 (when the last DAW book was published), all of a sudden
> Norman went from being at the height of his popularity (with both men
> and women, and mainly *adults*, not teenagers) to not selling anything
> at all.
Well, no. What I'm saying is that I don't *know* how well he was
selling, but I suspect he wasn't that big and was actually trending
slightly down. "As big as he ever was" is very nebulous, and doesn't
mean much without a wider context. At the time, I suspect the biggest
mass-market sellers were people like Anne McCaffrey and Piers Anthony --
maybe Jack Chalker and Stephen Donaldson.
> And remember that it was at this same time when they were making movies
> of his first two books (don't even get me started on those). So in the
> mid-80s he was not only selling books all over the place, but he was
> going "Hollywood". Then two years later, you think nobody would carry
> him because his sales suddenly went totally flat? That doesn't pass the
> sniff test, sorry.
And "everybody in publishing decided they hated him" makes more sense?
That is a completely ridiculous explanation that only makes sense if you
assume no one in publishing wants to make money.
Don Wollheim published a lot of things for a lot of complicated reasons,
but he often published things that didn't make money (or much money).
The famous example was European SF in translation -- he thought that
Americans *needed* to see the wider possibilities of the field, and so
he published as much of it as he could. He was also famously loyal to
authors, especially those who had been with him at Ace and helped him
when he set up DAW.
I don't know anything specific about this case, but those are some of
the factors I suspect were involved.
> Neither does the "better porn elsewhere" theory: VHS had been around for
> years while Norman's sales were going *up*. Odd time for him to have hit
> a wall...
Again, "up" really doesn't mean anything if we don't know "from where"
and "how much."
> > (That their readership also may have gotten too old, fat and kid-
> > encumbered for silly bondage games may also have played a part.)
>
> To make this argument you'd have to assume that Norman's reader base was
> static (i.e. teenagers who started reading him in the '70s), and that
> they all got "too old" during the same two year stretch from spring '86
> to spring '88. If that were the case, you'd see his sales steadily
> dwindling from the late '70s onwards. But again: his sales were
> *increasing*, not dropping. Lots of *new* fans were buying his books in
> the '80s. And his demographics were a lot more diverse than most people
> care to admit (read: lots of women read Gor books). So this one doesn't
> pass the sniff test either.
Well, neither of us have actual numbers. So it's impossible to say
whether his sales were going up to vast new heights or just to
mediocrity. I suspect it was the latter.
Jim Lovejoy
news:b2n161$4$1...@news.Stanford.EDU:
> "David Cowie" <see...@lineone.net> writes:
>
>>On Sat, 15 Feb 2003 15:23:08 -0500, William December Starr wrote:
>
>>> concluded or, as you say, merely stopped. (Assuming that they
>>> chronicled some guy's progressive rise in fortunes, where do you
>>> go after "king?")
>>>
>>King of somewhere bigger
>>Emperor
>>God-Emperor
>
> Chapterhouse: Gor
>
Thanks so *very* much for that image.
David Friedman
Andrew Wheeler <acwh...@optonline.com> wrote:
> Well, neither of us have actual numbers. So it's impossible to say
> whether his sales were going up to vast new heights or just to
> mediocrity. I suspect it was the latter.
I don't think anyone has responded to the figures I posted from
Amazon.com, which show a Gor novel that came out a few years ago selling
very well there. What the explanation for the publishing history of the
Gor books is I don't know, but that fact seems inconsistent with the "he
can't get a decent publisher because nobody wants to buy the books"
theory.
David Bilek
No it isn't.
The figures don't show a Gor novel selling remotely "very well" at
all. You posted that it was ranked at 1500 on Amazon. Anything above
the first couple hundred doesn't mean anything beyond "somebody bought
a copy in the last couple of days".
For comparison, _Witness of Gor_ is now listed as Amazon sales rank
16,499. Yes, it fell to 16,499 in the last 2 days or whatever because
in all likelyhood nobody bought a copy between when you posted your
figures and now. _Diplomatic Immunity_, the other figure you posted,
is now up to about 6000 because somebody bought a copy.
Teresa Nielsen Hayden (whom I assume you've heard of) has said that
watching Amazon sales rankings is as useful as looking for secret
messages in the snow of a television tuned to a dead channel.
Or to sum up: _Witness of Gor_ is probably selling like crap.
-David
Jim Battista
news:Xns9324E5F688677...@198.99.146.18:
At least we don't have Norman's kid writing _Gor: House Cabot_, ad
instant nauseam.
--
Jim Battista
A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man.
wth...@godzilla4.acpub.duke.edu
> Sean MIlls <mills...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> >Hello All
> >
> >Have just finished reading the first GOR novel (The Tarnsmen of GOR).
> >It was quit entertaining but at the same time a little bit basic. Now
> >i know there are about 10?? books in the series. My question is do
> >they get any better and do you recommend them.
>
> is, they get worse in the opinions of those who don't already
> think them so bad they cannot possibly get worse.)
>
> seventies,
But didn't someone say that the first three Gor
books were lacking the B&D element? As I recall
Ballantine marketed the first book as a sort of
return of Edgar Rice Burroughs. If they were trying
to sell soft core porn to teenage boys then I was
their market, but I managed to miss the message
completely. IIRC there was a woman on the cover,
clad somewhat more revealingly than your average
nun, but nothing out of line for covers at the time.
when they first appeared, teenagers could not get
> soft-core porn anywhere except in the kind of stores their
> mommies wouldn't let them go into--and in the local bookstore
> disguised as science fiction.
I'm not sure I agree. True, I have read only 3/4 of
one Gor book, but regarded as porn it was *very* soft
core (I recall endless boring preaching on the need of
women to be dominated, but don't recall any explicit sex
scenes). In any case by the mid 1970s if not earlier other
available SF works had far more in the way of sexual content
("High Couch of Silistra", for example).
Browsing the used stacks of "the book store" in
chapel hill the other day I came across four
books by Rena Vale. Now *there* was a writer
doing soft core porn under the guise of SF. I
had no idea she'd written more than one book.
Hardly porn at all by today's standards, I would
suspect, but more so than the Gor books. I wonder
whose pen name that was?
> Nowadays, porn of every degree of hardness can be found anywhere
> you like, and the popularity of Gor has fallen off. Not because
> of censorship on the part of the publishers, as Norman suggest--
> just from competition from a superior (if you care for that kind
> of thing) product.
>
Or because, as you say, it just got worse. The biggest
Gor fan I know recommends stopping somewhere around
book six, though he himself went to fifteen or thereabouts
before giving up.
William Hyde
EOS Department
Duke University
Terrell Miller
news:yv7zd6lq...@godzilla4.acpub.duke.edu...
> But didn't someone say that the first three Gor
> books were lacking the B&D element?
it's only sporadic in the first four, then starts to ramp up gradually for
the next four, from the ninth book onwards it's all over the place
> As I recall
> Ballantine marketed the first book as a sort of
> return of Edgar Rice Burroughs. If they were trying
> to sell soft core porn to teenage boys then I was
> their market, but I managed to miss the message
> completely. IIRC there was a woman on the cover,
> clad somewhat more revealingly than your average
> nun, but nothing out of line for covers at the time.
the Boris Vallejo covers with nearly-naked women in chains or whatever were
commissioned by Del Rey for reprints of the first seven Gor books, after
Norman moved over to DAW in 1974. The 1973 reprints of the first seven Gor
books are your typical sword-and-sorcery covers. Tarnsman, f'rinstance, just
shows a warrior with bow and arrow standing in front of a tarn, with a
couple of towers in the background.
And the original covers were even blander, not provocative at all. You're
right, the Gor series started out as updated Barsoom.
But after Del Rey lost the series, *then* they spiced up the covers.
> when they first appeared, teenagers could not get
> > soft-core porn anywhere except in the kind of stores their
> > mommies wouldn't let them go into--and in the local bookstore
> > disguised as science fiction.
>
> I'm not sure I agree. True, I have read only 3/4 of
> one Gor book, but regarded as porn it was *very* soft
> core (I recall endless boring preaching on the need of
> women to be dominated, but don't recall any explicit sex
> scenes). In any case by the mid 1970s if not earlier other
> available SF works had far more in the way of sexual content
> ("High Couch of Silistra", for example).
I think she was remembering the mid-70s DAW volumes, not the earlier ones.
Funny how the biggest critics of Norman seem to know the least about his
work...
> > Nowadays, porn of every degree of hardness can be found anywhere
> > you like, and the popularity of Gor has fallen off. Not because
> > of censorship on the part of the publishers, as Norman suggest--
> > just from competition from a superior (if you care for that kind
> > of thing) product.
> >
>
> Or because, as you say, it just got worse. The biggest
> Gor fan I know recommends stopping somewhere around
> book six, though he himself went to fifteen or thereabouts
> before giving up.
The fifth, sixth and eight books make a nice inner trilogy and are the heart
of the Gor series. After that, as your friend says, the quality dropped
considerably.
*Not* the sales, however. They peaked with the 22nd book in late 1985.
John Johnson
dbi...@attbi.com says...
Well ebay buyers seem to like the Gor novels. I see more copies of Gor
novels in the SF/Fantasy area than just about anything else, and they
tend to sell for more than other books.
--
John Johnson
"A cry in the dark . . ."
http://johnajohnson.diaryland.com
Terrell Miller
> > > Actually, they're in print now (Amazon brought up 38 items from the
> > > search "john norman gor").
> >
> > Take a little more time to look at the results. Lots of those are
> > business manuals and the like by different "Normans". And most of the
> > hits you got on his books are for used copies, not new ones.
>
> Business manuals with the word "Gor" in the title? We seem to be posting
> from different continua.
no, business manuals from authors named "Norman" or "John" or GOK.
And different used copies of the OOP books, which Amazon will list as a new
entry in the search.
I just did a search on Amazon using only "Gor". I got 145 hits, some of
which were
Selected Papers of J Robert Schrieffer: In Celebration of His 70th Birthday
(World Scientific Series in 20th Century Physics, V. 30)
by J. R. Schrieffer, et al
and
Physics of Planetary Rings: Celestial Mechanics of Continuous Media
(Astronomy and Astrophysics Library)
by A. M. Fridman, et al (Hardcover - August 1999)
and
Guiding Those Left Behind in Michigan: Legal and Practical Things You Need
to Do to Settle an Estate in Michigan and How to Arrange Your Own Affairs to
Preserve Your Assets and Provide Gor
by Amelia E., Esq Pohl (Paperback - February 2003)
somebody please 'splain to me what Amazon uses for its search engine...?
> > The only Norman books currently in print are the first four, plus the
> > new 26th one. All the rest are OOP.
>
> But they all seem to have been in print, in mass market, in the late
> '90s.
No, the only Gor books in print then were the first eleven (maybe the
twelfth, don't remember where Masquerade stopped).
The last half of the series (13-25) has not been in print since the late
'80s.
> One presumes that a series that sells "ten times its sf
> competitors" would not drop out of print so quickly.
One would presume that, since that's *precisely* what was happening until
1987 or thereabouts. His back titles were moving quite well and getting
multiple reprints, then...nothing.
> > > They just don't sell a whole lot of copies.
> > > (Though they seem to be selling nicely enough for the small press
> > > that's been doing them -- it's all a question of scale and
> > > expectations.)
> >
> > Bingo. Masquerade reprinted the first dozen or so in the late '90s, and
> > you used to find those in the chain bookstores.
>
> Yes, and if they sold consistently you would *still* find them. That's
> my point, actually.
I can't find Masquerade anywhere on the web, and the latest copyright I've
seen from a Masquerade book is 1999, so they may well have gone out of
business. New World is reprinting them now, looks like they've taken up
where Masquerade left off. Sounds like they must sell consistently whenever
the publisher can remain in business.
> "Blacklisted" is a silly word in this case. If there were any "black
> list," I'd certainly know about it. There is no such thing. There may
> not be any major SF publisher who wants to publish Gor books at the
> moment, but that's not at all the same thing.
since we're talking about the late '80s, not today, of course it isn't
> > I forgot the date of his death, but as you say, Katie was starting to
> > take over when DAW dropped Norman.
>
> Katie who? There's no one named Katie associated with DAW. Don's wife
> was Elsie, his daughter is Betsy. The other DAW editor is Sheila.
Sorry, I meant Betsy. I'm terrible with names, have to use them a dozen
times before I remember them.
> > but not before he got dumped by DAW, and not before he couldn't find a
> > buyer for his 26th Gor book.
>
> <shrug> That's quite possible. However, the point remains that he was
> *not* blacklisted and *did* continue to publish.
after dedicating the first Telnarian book to "those who oppose
blacklisting".
> One generally gets dumped by ones publisher for poor sales. And, if the
> dumping was due to any other reason, one is picked up immediately by
> somebody else.
As you say, Norman was picked up by Questar in 1990, less than two years
after getting dumped by DAW...
> The Clute-Nicholls _Encyclopedia of Science Fiction_ lists exactly two
> singletons for Norman -- _Ghost Dance_ in 1969 and _Time Slave_ in 1975.
>
> I suppose "twice more than a decade earlier" does roughly equal "from
> time to time," but it's really stretching the point. Maybe Clute &
> Nicholls missed some books, but they states that those are his only
> non-series novels.)
Not quite.
Ghost Dance was copyrighted by Lange in *1970* while he was still with
Ballantine, but not published by DAW until 11/79.
Imaginative Sex (nonfiction and non-sf, which is probably why Clute omitted
it) was published 12/74.
Time Slave was published 11/75.
The "bonus" Gor novels that were Part 2 of the immediately preceding novel
and were published outside his usual "new Gor book every March" schedule
were
Guardsman 11/81
Blood Brothers 11/82
Dancer 11/85 (his best seller)
So as I said earlier, from time to time DAW published a "bonus" Norman book
for the Christmas holidays. Happened six times overall.
> > But buyers can't drop books that publishers aren't selling, which is the
> > point you seem to be missing...
>
> I don't get your point -- are you saying that the last couple of Norman
> books sold badly because they were sabotaged by the publisher,
Yup. No marketing or promotion whatsoever. I didn't even know the last DAW
one had come out until months later. It was tucked back in teh stack, no
display when it first appeared in June 88.
> or that the non-existent further books in he series would have sold
astronomical numbers?
Not non-existent. He'd already written Witness, which was a direct sequel to
the last DAW volume. He clearly had much more to say in the Gor series, and
still does.
> > haven't heard numbers, but all the Questar books were carried in
> > supermarkets and drug stores, at least in the Atlanta area. Also the
> > chain bookstores. So I'd imagine they sold fairly well.
>
> Everybody's books were in supermarkets and drug stores in the early
> '90s, so that doesn't actually say much. (If they were in those outlets
> *now*, it would mean a bit more.) From what I know of Questar, the top
> of their list sold about the level of the middle of other people's lists.
Sounds about right. He hooked up with a shaky publisher. Not the last time
that's happened, sadly.
> > Thing about this theory is that it doesn't work. Dancer was his best
> > selling title.
>
> Which means what, exactly? Do you have any numbers? (I know Norman has
> grumbled about his "blacklist" for the last decade, but I don't think
> he's ever given any numbers.)
As you yourself have said many times, getting sales figures from book
publishers is...difficult...under the best circumstances. You're the editor
of teh SF book club, why do think I would have more luck?
> In the mid-80s a fair bit of leading
> SF/Fantasy was netting a hundred thousand or so in mass market, which
> would make "ten times that" somewhere in the millions of copies.
As late as 1979 DAW were using the "over one million John Norman novels in
print" blurb. That was halfway through the series.
> If he
> was really selling that far above the category, he would have been
> poached by non-SF publishers -- probably with offers for hardcover
> publication, too.
Were any sf writers not named Asimov being "poached" back then for
mass-market? Or was sf still pretty much a ghetto?
> And "everybody in publishing decided they hated him" makes more sense?
> That is a completely ridiculous explanation that only makes sense if you
> assume no one in publishing wants to make money.
...but then you say that
> Don Wollheim published a lot of things for a lot of complicated reasons,
> but he often published things that didn't make money (or much money).
> The famous example was European SF in translation -- he thought that
> Americans *needed* to see the wider possibilities of the field, and so
> he published as much of it as he could. He was also famously loyal to
> authors, especially those who had been with him at Ace and helped him
> when he set up DAW.
So you say that Don often made publishing decisions for non-financial
reasons, but earlier you state that "no one in publishing" (specifically
including his own daughter) does anything other than try to make money.
Which is it?
> Well, neither of us have actual numbers. So it's impossible to say
> whether his sales were going up to vast new heights or just to
> mediocrity. I suspect it was the latter.
Norman had sold over a million books with his first 13 Gor books (plus three
standalones). His largest seller was nine volumes later. By definition, his
last three DAW books did not sell as well as Dancer, so figure they tailed
off to 1977-1981 levels. Still very high volume.
David Bilek
>
>Well ebay buyers seem to like the Gor novels. I see more copies of Gor
>novels in the SF/Fantasy area than just about anything else, and they
>tend to sell for more than other books.
Yep, and porn is one of the few things on the internet that actually
makes money. In other words: Ebay bidders are not representative.
-David
David Friedman
> dbi...@attbi.com says...
> > David Friedman <dd...@daviddfriedman.com> wrote:
...
> > I don't think anyone has responded to the figures I posted from
> > Amazon.com, which show a Gor novel that came out a few years ago selling
> > very well there. What the explanation for the publishing history of the
> > Gor books is I don't know, but that fact seems inconsistent with the "he
> > can't get a decent publisher because nobody wants to buy the books"
> > theory.
> No it isn't.
> The figures don't show a Gor novel selling remotely "very well" at
> all. You posted that it was ranked at 1500 on Amazon. Anything above
> the first couple hundred doesn't mean anything beyond "somebody bought
> a copy in the last couple of days".
You are correct about the change between my post and yours, but I think
you are substantially overstating the instability of Amazon rankings. If
"somebody bought a copy in the last couple of days" puts a book at 1500,
then the rankings of books ought to jump around much more eratically
than, in my experience, they do.
The books I know most about are, of course, mine. My most successful
book has ranked in the 14,000-18,000 range every time I have checked in
recent weeks. My next most successful about 40,000-70,000. If your
account is correct, or close to correct, those ought to be jumping
between 1,500 (when someone happens to have bought a copy) and 200,000,
or whatever the rank is for a book that nobody has bought in the most
recent period. In fact they are a lot more stable than that.
I would interpret the evidence on the Gor book as indicating a bunch of
orders in a short period--no guess as to why--followed by a lull. But a
book that varies between 1500 and 16000 is till doing pretty well--well
enough to make it surprising that the author has a hard time finding
publishers.
Combine that with the fact that John Norman is about as politically
incorrect as it is possible to be, and the theory that his problem
finding publishers is in part due to what he is saying isn't all that
implausible.
Karl M Syring
By that argument, news group posters are not
representative at all.
Karl M. Syring
David Bilek
I would agree with that. Including myself.
-David
Karl M Syring
But why does the Gor stuff stir up the emotions? I mean, most
of the Norman output is quite tame, compared to some
Farmerish stuff (not that I have read much of the Gor series :).
Karl M. Syring
John Johnson
dbi...@attbi.com says...
Sure, but I see a great deal of the novels there, with fairly heavy
activity associated with them. To me this doesn't indicate a lack of
potential buyers, which was the original argument for the Gor books
being out of print.
David Friedman
Karl M Syring <syr...@email.com> wrote:
> But why does the Gor stuff stir up the emotions? I mean, most
> of the Norman output is quite tame, compared to some
> Farmerish stuff (not that I have read much of the Gor series :).
Because John Norman is explicitly attacking conventional views on sex,
morality, and much else, and doing so in a way calculated to offend
modern educated opinion--quite explicitly anti-feminist. If he did about
a tenth as much of it it might be an asset--it's interesting to see a
really different point of view. Unfortunately, he is so obsessed with
being a voice crying in the wilderness that the sex and preaching drown
out the story.
Richard Kennaway
> But didn't someone say that the first three Gor
> books were lacking the B&D element?
The B&D is fairly low-key, and isn't the central feature of the books,
but it's definitely there. It suddenly gets more intense around book 4
or 5. I've heard that this marks the point where Norman first attended
a con, at which he received a consciousness-raising experience regarding
the nature of his work, but I don't know if that's true.
> I'm not sure I agree. True, I have read only 3/4 of
> one Gor book, but regarded as porn it was *very* soft
> core (I recall endless boring preaching on the need of
> women to be dominated, but don't recall any explicit sex
> scenes).
In the middle and later books, sex happens on-stage, centre stage, but
without any actual naming of parts.
-- Richard Kennaway
Joseph Michael Bay
>> "David Cowie" <see...@lineone.net> writes:
>> Chapterhouse: Gor
Could be worse: _Children of Gor_.
Joseph Michael Bay
>Guiding Those Left Behind in Michigan: Legal and Practical Things You Need
>to Do to Settle an Estate in Michigan and How to Arrange Your Own Affairs to
>Preserve Your Assets and Provide Gor
>by Amelia E., Esq Pohl (Paperback - February 2003)
If I die someday, I really don't want to provide Gor to my heirs.
James Angove
>
> "Blacklisted" is a silly word in this case. If there were any "black
> list," I'd certainly know about it. There is no such thing.
But if there was such a thing, you would hardly tell us about it, now
would you. And I must admit, I have no trouble picturing you as a
mustache twirling super villain, surpressing the works of John Norman
as a vital part of your campaign of oppression.
BTW, if you think this last was over the top, before sense returned, I
wrote the first thousand words of a superfriends style teleplay
casting you as the leader of the Legion of SF Editors Out to Rule the
World. I'm really quite frightened by that.
--
James Angove
Brenda W. Clough
Did he get a costume? One with spikes and straps?
Brenda
--
---------
Brenda W. Clough
Read my novella "May Be Some Time"
Complete at http://www.analogsf.com/0202/maybesometime.html
My web page is at http://www.sff.net/people/Brenda/
David Bilek
No, even if he only said a tenth as much he'd be an ass.
The problem with Norman isn't that he attacks conventional views on
sex, it's that he argues that *all women* wan't to be enslaved and
completely dominated sexually, and further that women who claim
otherwise are either lying or deluded.
Yes, he has said as much.
-David
John M. Gamble
Terrell Miller <mill...@bellsouth.net> wrote:
>"Andrew Wheeler" <acwh...@optonline.com> wrote in message
>news:3E4DA163...@optonline.com...
>
>> > > except on the Internet. The *availability* of Gor books has fallen
>
>
>Bingo. Masquerade reprinted the first dozen or so in the late '90s, and you
>used to find those in the chain bookstores.
>
I am probably being unduly influenced by the subject, but when i came
across the phrase "chain bookstores" i'm afraid that i thought of
something entirely different.
--
-john
February 28 1997: Last day libraries could order catalogue cards
from the Library of Congress.
John M. Gamble
"John Norman became a best selling author because of his ability to
build novels out of the books of my youth, when they usually consisted
of only eight pages of text and illustrations."
Howard DeVore
15 November 2001 Locus Online
[This is only the last paragraph of his letter, which is pretty funny.]
Steve Taylor
> So I'm afraid your theory is just so much retconning, sorry. Norman was a
> wildly popular author who outsold his sf peers by a factor of ten. Then he
> got shafted by one woman with a grudge.
And couldn't find another publisher, despite being popular?
> Terrell Miller
Steve
David Friedman
Steve Taylor <sm...@ozemail.com.au> wrote:
That's very implausible.
How about "and couldn't find another major publisher, because even
though quite a lot of people wanted to buy his books, quite a lot of
other people hated them."
That could result in some publishers refusing to carry his books because
the owner of the firm or the editors didn't want any connection with
them, others because they thought readers and other people in the
profession would think less of them if they published them.
Andrew Wheeler
That actually implies that they're fairly rare; common books don't go
for much (if anything) on the resale market. Another piece of data
against "sold ten times as well as anything else in the field." (Check
what similar vintage McCaffrey and Anthony books are going for.)
I don't have much to say about the Amazon ranking, except that those
rankings really are a backwards way of determining how long its been
since someone bought one. Top hundred or so means "within the last
hour," under a million means "probably never." And, from the information
in this thread, _Witness_ probably sells a copy every week or so.
(And I, personally, think it would be more fun if Amazon did it that way
to begin with -- I'd love to look up books and see "Last Bought: April
23, 1997." But that may be just me...)
--
Andrew Wheeler
--
"It's a sad day for American capitalism when a man can't fly a midget on
a kite over Central Park." -Jim Moran
David Friedman
> David Friedman <dd...@daviddfriedman.com> wrote:
> >In article <b2rjig$1eotlp$1...@ID-7529.news.dfncis.de>,
> > Karl M Syring <syr...@email.com> wrote:
> >
> >> But why does the Gor stuff stir up the emotions? I mean, most
> >> of the Norman output is quite tame, compared to some
> >> Farmerish stuff (not that I have read much of the Gor series :).
> >
> >Because John Norman is explicitly attacking conventional views on sex,
> >morality, and much else, and doing so in a way calculated to offend
> >modern educated opinion--quite explicitly anti-feminist. If he did about
> >a tenth as much of it it might be an asset--it's interesting to see a
> >really different point of view. Unfortunately, he is so obsessed with
> >being a voice crying in the wilderness that the sex and preaching drown
> >out the story.
>
> No, even if he only said a tenth as much he'd be an ass.
The question wasn't whether he was an ass but whether the books would
gain or lose by his unconventional views.
> The problem with Norman isn't that he attacks conventional views on
> sex, it's that he argues that *all women* wan't to be enslaved and
> completely dominated sexually, and further that women who claim
> otherwise are either lying or deluded.
>
> Yes, he has said as much.
And perhaps he even believes it. But what would come across if he held
the same views and greatly toned down the expression would be the idea
that lots of women want to be dominated. I don't know if that is true
either, but it is one part of a package of views of the world that is
sharply divergent from the views in the background of most other
writing, so might make for interesting books.
Jim Battista
@news.Stanford.EDU:
> Jim Lovejoy <ji...@ix.netcom.com> writes:
>
>>jm...@Stanford.EDU (Joseph Michael Bay) wrote in
>>news:b2n161$4$1...@news.Stanford.EDU:
>
>>> Chapterhouse: Gor
>
>>Thanks so *very* much for that image.
>
> Could be worse: _Children of Gor_.
Or:
_Gor: House Cabot_ by John Norman's kid who needs an addition to
his house
_The Shadow of the Tarnsman_
_Gor Revealed_ and _Garden of Gor_ with Gentry Lee
_Manifold: Gor_
_Red Gor_, _Green Gor_, and _Blue Gor_, which liven up the boring sex
with long, didactic discussions about left-libertarian ecotopianism
and, in which thermodynamics is MADE TO SUBMIT!!!!
_Steel Gor_: "In five years, the bullwhip will be obsolete!"
_Goronomicon_, featuring lengthy digressions about the proper use of
Captain Crunch in beating up women
_Marching through Gor_, in which women are made to submit to other,
stronger, more lesbian women.
_The Gor Fraction_, about the happiest community-under-the-King.
Wild AI's are MADE TO SUMBIT!!!!
_Gor's Ladder_ by Greg Egan, just like Gor but except that it's
theists who realize that they crave enslavement, and enhance their
servility through axiomatic neuro-dinguses.
And that which I fear to mention: _Starship Tarnsmen_
Andrew Wheeler
>
> "Andrew Wheeler" <acwh...@optonline.com> wrote in message
> news:3E50515A...@optonline.com...
>
> > list," I'd certainly know about it. There is no such thing. There may
> > not be any major SF publisher who wants to publish Gor books at the
> > moment, but that's not at all the same thing.
>
> since we're talking about the late '80s, not today, of course it isn't
Well, there were actually *more* separate publishers then, publishing
*more* books in a much healthier mass market. It wasn't exactly a golden
age, but it was about as good as SF publishing has ever been.
> > However, the point remains that he was
> > *not* blacklisted and *did* continue to publish.
>
> after dedicating the first Telnarian book to "those who oppose
> blacklisting".
Look up "rhetoric" in the dictionary.
If a writer is successful enough that another publisher wants to publish
him, and that writer is equivalent in the public's eye to one series,
then that publisher will *want* that series. The fact that Questar was
willing to publish Norman but not Gor is very strong evidence that the
books were selling badly (they presumably thought that they could turn
his career around with a new series, and get back some of his lost fans).
> > I don't get your point -- are you saying that the last couple of
> > Norman books sold badly because they were sabotaged by the publisher,
>
> Yup. No marketing or promotion whatsoever. I didn't even know the last
> DAW one had come out until months later. It was tucked back in teh
> stack, no display when it first appeared in June 88.
Mass market books don't get much promotion to begin with. What they *do*
get is an order equivalent to the number a store thinks it will sell.
Thus a big-selling book will have many copies on the shelves. A book
expected (by that store's buyers, based on previous sales) to sell
poorly will only have one or two copies. This seems to be what you describe.
> > > haven't heard numbers, but all the Questar books were carried in
> > > supermarkets and drug stores, at least in the Atlanta area. Also the
> > > chain bookstores. So I'd imagine they sold fairly well.
> >
> > Everybody's books were in supermarkets and drug stores in the early
> > '90s, so that doesn't actually say much. (If they were in those
> > outlets *now*, it would mean a bit more.) From what I know of Questar,
> > the top of their list sold about the level of the middle of other
> > people's lists.
>
> Sounds about right. He hooked up with a shaky publisher. Not the last
> time that's happened, sadly.
Not "shaky" -- I hope I didn't give that impression. Questar was the SF
imprint of Warner Books, part of what was then just Time Warner, one of
the largest publishers in the business. But SF wasn't one of their
priorities, so Questar didn't seem to get much money or attention.
> > > Thing about this theory is that it doesn't work. Dancer was his best
> > > selling title.
> >
> > Which means what, exactly? Do you have any numbers? (I know Norman
> > has grumbled about his "blacklist" for the last decade, but I don't
> > think he's ever given any numbers.)
>
> As you yourself have said many times, getting sales figures from book
> publishers is...difficult...under the best circumstances. You're the
> editor of teh SF book club, why do think I would have more luck?
No, but I think if John Norman had really been selling a million copies
per book, he'd have been saying so. Since he hasn't said so (and he
would know), I think he sold decently for DAW of the time, or mediocre
at best.
> > In the mid-80s a fair bit of leading
> > SF/Fantasy was netting a hundred thousand or so in mass market, which
> > would make "ten times that" somewhere in the millions of copies.
>
> As late as 1979 DAW were using the "over one million John Norman novels
> in print" blurb. That was halfway through the series.
So, with 10-15 of his books published, they were basically saying that
none of them had cracked a hundred thousand? (And "in print," just means
that they printed them at some point -- not that they sold. The number
sold to readers would be somewhere in the range of half to
three-quarters of the larger number. Divide that by ten books, and you
get roughly 75 thousand copies each sold to readers, as a very very
back-of-the envelope calculation.)
I see, editing this message, that he had 16 books in print by this
point, which means that (even assuming the Gor books sold twice as well
as the others) the Gor titles only had 70 thousand or so copies
*printed*, over their lifetimes -- and, presumably, the older books
would have been reprinted to keep them available as time went on. So the
first book could easily have had a hundred thousand copies "in print"
(from another publisher, as you say), and the new books were bring
printed at about 50 thousand.
> > If he
> > was really selling that far above the category, he would have been
> > poached by non-SF publishers -- probably with offers for hardcover
> > publication, too.
>
> Were any sf writers not named Asimov being "poached" back then for
> mass-market? Or was sf still pretty much a ghetto?
Herbert, Heinlein and Clarke all signed multi-million dollar contracts
in the '80s. Anne McCaffrey did so as well, for her "Pern" books, and
Donaldson probably got substantial money for the second "Covenant"
series. Del Rey was the big bestseller publisher then, though they
mostly grew their talent in-house (McCaffrey, Anthony, Eddings,
Donaldson, Chalker, and so on). Zelazny was also getting big paychecks
from Arbor House (and then Avon) for his new "Amber" books. There wasn't
a whole lot of jumping from one house to another, but the people who
sold big numbers were getting big bucks (and hardcover publication).
In that same period DAW discovered Tad Williams and published his first
book in hardcover, as well.
> > And "everybody in publishing decided they hated him" makes more sense?
> > That is a completely ridiculous explanation that only makes sense if
> > you assume no one in publishing wants to make money.
>
> ...but then you say that
>
> > Don Wollheim published a lot of things for a lot of complicated
> > reasons, but he often published things that didn't make money (or much
> > money). The famous example was European SF in translation -- he
> > thought that Americans *needed* to see the wider possibilities of the
> > field, and so he published as much of it as he could. He was also
> > famously loyal to authors, especially those who had been with him at
> > Ace and helped him when he set up DAW.
>
> So you say that Don often made publishing decisions for non-financial
> reasons, but earlier you state that "no one in publishing" (specifically
> including his own daughter) does anything other than try to make money.
> Which is it?
That's not at all what I said. I said 1) that your scenario only made
sense if all SF publishers were idiots (notice to the peanut gallery --
I said "all," OK? <grin>) and that 2) Don Wollheim would deliberately
publish books that didn't make money. Those things are not
contradictory; publishers are in business to make money, but
occasionally publish books for other reasons (service to the field,
blind optimism, religious fervor, nepotism, and so on).
I did not say, and never would say, that everybody in publishing only
tries to make money. I *did* say that, if one of the best-sellers of the
field was in play, several of them would try to get that person's next
book. And they would *gloat* if they got him (I recently had lunch with
an editor who was still glowing over recently winning an auction for a
big name, for example).
> > Well, neither of us have actual numbers. So it's impossible to say
> > whether his sales were going up to vast new heights or just to
> > mediocrity. I suspect it was the latter.
>
> Norman had sold over a million books with his first 13 Gor books (plus
> three standalones). His largest seller was nine volumes later. By
> definition, his last three DAW books did not sell as well as Dancer, so
> figure they tailed off to 1977-1981 levels. Still very high volume.
I suspect that we're talking about, at the best, that _Dancer_ topped
out at a little under a hundred thousand net copies sold (but it could
have been half that). From what I know of the time, that would be decent
but not great. (I'd have to dig through back issues of _Locus_ and
_Publishers Weekly_ to find out exactly what the best-selling books were
doing in the mid-80s, and, frankly, I really don't care that much.)
I think Norman kept getting published because Don Wollheim was loyal to
his authors, despite mediocre sales. And then he got a second chance to
re-launch his career, which didn't do anything. I don't like to see
anybody's career fail (hey, I'm in the *business* of selling books), but
I just don't see anybody doing anything to John Norman. I see a guy who
got so wound up in his own obsessions that his audience walked away --
and that's happened many times in many genres.
Sean O'Hara
> Andrew Wheeler <acwh...@optonline.com> wrote in message when Norman got blacklisted).
> >
> > "Blacklisted" is a silly word in this case. If there were any "black
> > list," I'd certainly know about it. There is no such thing.
>
> But if there was such a thing, you would hardly tell us about it, now
> would you.
>
publishers be any different?
--
Sean O'Hara
Karl M Syring
<snip list>
My entry:
Mama comes to Gor
Karl M. Syring
Andrew Wheeler
>
> James Angove wrote:
>
> >
> >>"Blacklisted" is a silly word in this case. If there were any "black
> >>list," I'd certainly know about it. There is no such thing.
> >>
> >
> >But if there was such a thing, you would hardly tell us about it, now
> >would you. And I must admit, I have no trouble picturing you as a
> >mustache twirling super villain, surpressing the works of John Norman
> >as a vital part of your campaign of oppression.
I do have a mustache, but it's a bit too short to twirl. (Hm. <note to
myself: ... >)
> >BTW, if you think this last was over the top, before sense returned, I
> >wrote the first thousand words of a superfriends style teleplay
> >casting you as the leader of the Legion of SF Editors Out to Rule the
> >World. I'm really quite frightened by that.
> >
>
> Did he get a costume? One with spikes and straps?
Be careful what you say. <dramatic pause> My...ears...are everywhere.
<stalks off to terrorize some innocent author>
Andrew Wheeler
>
> In article <syP3a.44618$a95....@fe05.atl2.webusenet.com>,
> Terrell Miller <mill...@bellsouth.net> wrote:
> >"Andrew Wheeler" <acwh...@optonline.com> wrote in message
> >news:3E4DA163...@optonline.com...
> >
> >> > > except on the Internet. The *availability* of Gor books has
> >> > > fallen
> >
> [snip]
> >
> >Bingo. Masquerade reprinted the first dozen or so in the late '90s, and
> >you used to find those in the chain bookstores.
> >
>
> I am probably being unduly influenced by the subject, but when i came
> across the phrase "chain bookstores" i'm afraid that i thought of
> something entirely different.
Context really *is* everything, isn't it?
Terrell Miller
news:Xns9325C9D9E5B6...@216.168.3.44...
> _Gor Revealed_ and _Garden of Gor_ with Gentry Lee
<g>
Revelation Gor
Beggars in Gor
The Forever Gor
Guns Of The Sardar
Gorgren
Second Stage Rarius
--
Terrell Miller
mill...@bellsouth.net
"Not making fuck-ups on the ground, is not an option. Humans fuck up,
period. Human institutions fuck up. Human processes intended to prevent
fuck-ups, fuck up. This cannot be avoided no matter how much time and
resources you expend in the effort, though NASA and the rest of the space
industry certainly try."
-John Schilling
Robert Sneddon
Miller <mill...@bellsouth.net> writes
>Revelation Gor
>Beggars in Gor
>The Forever Gor
>Guns Of The Sardar
>Gorgren
>Second Stage Rarius
Marching Through Gorgia
Under the Yoke (no change there)
The Stone Gors
A five-volume trilogy -- The Belgoriad
Its five-volume sequel -- The Mallgoreon
Some light relief -- The Eye of Argorn
--
Robert Sneddon nojay (at) nojay (dot) fsnet (dot) co (dot) uk
Terrell Miller
news:1fqjpf0.1kqpalkjiltz4N%ar...@dircon.co.uk...
> <wth...@godzilla4.acpub.duke.edu> wrote:
> > But didn't someone say that the first three Gor
> > books were lacking the B&D element?
>
> The B&D is fairly low-key, and isn't the central feature of the books,
> but it's definitely there. It suddenly gets more intense around book 4
> or 5.
four is still pretty tame, five he's getting there, six was one of those
"whoa Nelly!" experiences...
> I've heard that this marks the point where Norman first attended
> a con, at which he received a consciousness-raising experience regarding
> the nature of his work, but I don't know if that's true.
That would have been in 1970. Back then you could have a
"consciousness-raising experience" and the only thing you had to worry about
afterwards was remembering to take all the antibiotics ;)
Seriously, though, something pretty strong *did* happen to Lange around that
time. Not just the B&D content in his novels, but the whole tone of them
went from upbeat and inventive to harsh and derivative. He stopped coming up
with his own cultures and just recycled diatribe-as-dialog in historical
Earth settings.
One of the charming things about the first five Gor books is the contrast
between modern and ancient technology. People fight with swords but get the
equivalent of boosterspice and light their homes with energy bulbs. Very
interesting mix of elements.
All that went out the window, and he just ranted on and on about B&D and
mixed in a few swordfights, none of which are remotely realistic.
> In the middle and later books, sex happens on-stage, centre stage, but
> without any actual naming of parts.
yeah, that was more than a little hypocritical. IIRC he only uses the word
"fuck" in exactly one scene, and it's in one of the standalone novels, not
the Gor series.
Bill Snyder
<no...@nospam.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>In article <BOg4a.16415$lI3....@fe08.atl2.webusenet.com>, Terrell
>Miller <mill...@bellsouth.net> writes
>>Revelation Gor
>>Beggars in Gor
>>The Forever Gor
>>Guns Of The Sardar
>>Gorgren
>>Second Stage Rarius
>
> Marching Through Gorgia
> Under the Yoke (no change there)
> The Stone Gors
>
> A five-volume trilogy -- The Belgoriad
>
> Its five-volume sequel -- The Mallgoreon
>
> Some light relief -- The Eye of Argorn
Grunts of Gor
("Pass me another Priest-King; this one's gone all smeary and mushy.")
--
Bill Snyder [This space unintentionally left blank.]
Dorothy J Heydt
Chuck Bridgeland <chuckbri at computerdyn dot com> wrote:
>On Sat, 15 Feb 2003 05:33:00 GMT, Jorj Strumolo <buirlv...@spammotel.com> wrote:
>> Dorothy J Heydt <djh...@kithrup.com> wrote:
>>> The initial popularity of the Gor series arose because in the
>>> seventies, when they first appeared, teenagers could not get
>>> soft-core porn anywhere except in the kind of stores their
>>> mommies wouldn't let them go into--and in the local bookstore
>>> disguised as science fiction.
>>
>> Which reminds me of something I read in seventh or eight grade
>> (1975 or so). All I remember is that it had a miniature man
>> with a spear doing something inside a body, a very low-tech
>> Fantastic Voyage. Fighting cancer, I think, though I won't
>> swear to it. The only reason I (vaguely) recall it is that
>> there was sex in it. There was a seamy feel to it. Anyone
>> hazard a guess based on these near-zero facts?
>
>Protagonist takes a mind-altering drug, goes and fights his own personal
In the original _DV_, I thought. I don't think I ever read
_ADV_.
If so, it was of course "The Carcinoma Angels" by Norman Spinrad.
With a genuinely creepy ending.
Dorothy J. Heydt
Albany, California
djh...@kithrup.com
http://www.kithrup.com/~djheydt
Dorothy J Heydt
Terrell Miller <mill...@bellsouth.net> wrote:
>"Dorothy J Heydt" <djh...@kithrup.com> wrote in message
>news:HA9z2...@kithrup.com...
>
>> No. They don't get better; they get, if anything, worse. (That
>> is, they get worse in the opinions of those who don't already
>> think them so bad they cannot possibly get worse.)
>
>No, they get worse regardless of what you think of the first few.
Well, everybody's MMV, but there have been some on this group who
are of the opinion that the first three or four weren't so bad.
That said, I must admit I have not read them at all. The Other
Change of Hobbit used to have a page from a Gor book pinned up on
the end of one of its bookcases, with the caption "The Following
Is an Example Of Why We Don't Stock Gor Books." I suppose I read
the page, but all I remember now is the caption.
Dorothy J Heydt
Andrew Wheeler <acwh...@optonline.com> wrote:
[Why Gor don't sell no more]
>
>Myself, I like Dorothy's pseudo-porn theory.
It isn't mine; I picked it up from someone else, probably on this
group, to whom I would gladly give credit if I could only
remember his/her/its name.
It fits the known facts,
>allows for the fact that the Gor books *were* big sellers in the '70s,
>and gives a good reason for them to fade in the '80s. (That their
>readership also may have gotten too old, fat and kid-encumbered for
>silly bondage games may also have played a part.)
Heck, they may just have gotten married or formed other
semi-lasting arrangements and discovered that real live sex with
a real live human being is (a) not much like a Gor story and (b)
noticeably superior to same.
Dorothy J Heydt
And let's not forget Free Amazons of Gor, a one-act musical by
Randall Garrett which actually exists and is very funny.
Dorothy J Heydt
David Friedman <dd...@daviddfriedman.com> wrote:
>In article <b2rjig$1eotlp$1...@ID-7529.news.dfncis.de>,
> Karl M Syring <syr...@email.com> wrote:
>
>> But why does the Gor stuff stir up the emotions? I mean, most
>> of the Norman output is quite tame, compared to some
>> Farmerish stuff (not that I have read much of the Gor series :).
>
>Because John Norman is explicitly attacking conventional views on sex,
>morality, and much else, and doing so in a way calculated to offend
>modern educated opinion--quite explicitly anti-feminist. If he did about
>a tenth as much of it it might be an asset--it's interesting to see a
>really different point of view. Unfortunately, he is so obsessed with
>being a voice crying in the wilderness that the sex and preaching drown
>out the story.
Yes. It's known in some circles as LeGuin's Disease. The
preaching, not the sex particularly. I mean, too high a
percentage of sex per square inch of printed page will make *me*
refrain from buying the book, but this is not true of most people
I don't think.
Dorothy J Heydt
Jon Meltzer <jmel...@pobox.com> wrote:
>
>Is "Free Amazons of Gor" available online?
I don't think so. I have a copy, but I'm not going to post it;
it is under copyright.
James Nicoll
_Cotton Comes to Gor_.
--
"Repress the urge to sprout wings or self-ignite!...This man's an
Episcopalian!...They have definite views."
Pibgorn Oct 31/02
Lawrence Watt-Evans
<acwh...@optonline.com> wrote:
>I don't have much to say about the Amazon ranking, except that those
>rankings really are a backwards way of determining how long its been
>since someone bought one. Top hundred or so means "within the last
>hour," under a million means "probably never."
No, no number at all means "never." A seven-digit number means
someone at least made an attempt to order a copy once.
I would note that Amazon is not representative of the book market as a
whole; even just tracking the B&N numbers against the Amazon numbers
will give you drastically different results for the same book.
And when I actually compare these with my royalty statements... well,
Amazon numbers aren't very representative.
I would point out that Amazon is relatively hard to browse, compared
to a bookstore shelf, so generally books that sell on Amazon are books
people _have specifically gone looking for_, where a huge percentage
of book sales elsewhere are impulse buys, or the result of going
through the SF/fantasy section until one finds something that looks
interesting.
This means that small press books sell disproportionately well on
Amazon.
--
The Misenchanted Page: http://www.sff.net/people/LWE/ Last update 11/18/02
My latest novel is ITHANALIN'S RESTORATION, published by Tor.
Callisto
> In article <b2rjig$1eotlp$1...@ID-7529.news.dfncis.de>,
> > of the Norman output is quite tame, compared to some
> > Farmerish stuff (not that I have read much of the Gor series :).
>
> Because John Norman is explicitly attacking conventional views on sex,
> morality, and much else,
"Attacking conventional ways"?
That's euphemism all right.
Adolf Hitler also attacked conventional ways on race, morality, and
much else. Unfortunately, unlike Mr. Norman, he got a country to play
with...
(Then we get in Iron Dream territory, with Adolf becoming a SF author
whose III Reich happens between the covers of his cult novels...)
Callisto
Which would make it a business decisions. After all, no matter how
many people love pink flamingoes and other lawn ornaments, many stores
would refuse to carry them, because they would scare off the market
they want to reach...
Let's face it, the GOR books are not what anyone could call "classy".
And a publisher who aims for the "classy" market does not want to
publish tacky stuff.
And the tacky stuff, well, he's got too many competitors now who do
the same stuff but better, naming body parts. (I remember that the GOR
books disappeared shorty after Ann Rice's "Beauty" books hit the
stores - whether that was a connection or not, I cannot tell). And if
many women read GOR for the sex, now they can read Laurell K.
Hamilton, who can also throw lots of gore into the pot, and such
delightful concepts as sexpots who turn to discomposing corpses in the
middle of the sexual act. Compare *that* to having to read the same
speech *over and over and over*, as if we missed the point, before we
get to the heavy breathing part. (I wonder how boring Mr. Norman's
lectures can be, if the only way he thinks he can get anyone to listen
to him is to tie them up.. looks like some much of a professor revenge
fantasy)
Terrell Miller
news:89dcabe3.03021...@posting.google.com...
> > Because John Norman is explicitly attacking conventional views on sex,
> > morality, and much else,
>
>
> "Attacking conventional ways"?
>
> That's euphemism all right.
>
> Adolf Hitler also attacked conventional ways on race, morality, and
> much else. Unfortunately, unlike Mr. Norman, he got a country to play
> with...
why is it that when liberals don't approve of someone, they *always* compare
them to Nazis?
Childish, really.
Terrell Miller
> Well, neither of us have actual numbers. So it's impossible to say
> whether his sales were going up to vast new heights or just to
> mediocrity. I suspect it was the latter.
from Simon van Meygaarden's "Bibliography" series of essays that appeared in
The Gorean Voice last year:
<The first seven Gor books were published by Ballantine Books between
December, 1966 and December, 1972, and they were reprinted until the
twenty-third reprint of Tarnsman of Gor in July, 1990, the nineteenth
reprint of Outlaw of Gor in October, 1984, the sixteenth reprint of
Priest-Kings of Gor in September, 1982, the seventeenth reprint of Nomads of
Gor in October, 1985, the eighteenth reprint of Assassin of Gor in November,
1986, the sixteenth reprint of Raiders of Gor in July, 1985 and the
seventeenth reprint of Captive of Gor in July, 1986. Based upon 10,000
copies for each reprint, the total number of printed books seems to be about
1,280,000 copies.
...
In the fourteen years between 1974 and 1988, John Norman had produced
eighteen Gorean novels, which were all published by Donald A. Wollheims
publishing company DAW. But during the coarse of 1985, Don Wollheim became
seriously ill and in the first week of 1986, this is what he wrote in a
letter to a friend.
"1985 was a very bad year for me insofar as I had been hospitalized for a
long time. Four major operations - and just in December a fifth and I trust
the last. My daughter - a very competent person with experience - is
handling my desk at the office and she has determined to cut down on those
authors and series which never quite justified their advances."
Donald Wollheim intended to overrule his daughter, Elisabeth (Betsy)
Wollheim, on several occasions, but as his health deteriorated, so did his
influence. The sales of the Gor series could not have been the issue; in
March 1982, the DAW sales alone reached three million copies, a year later,
in March of 1983, the figure came close to four million. Even so, in June,
1988, Magicians of Gor, was the last of the series published by DAW. Two
years later, Donald Allen Wollheim, futurian and founding father, died of
cancer, and John Norman decided to postpone his Gor series.>
So 1.25 million for the seven Ballantine books, 4 million for the DAW books.
Simon doesn't say where he got the DAW figures, but I'd imagine they're
pretty accurate. And that 4 million doesn't include the last seven DAW
books, including his best-selling title, so teh DAW figure may be as high as
5 million.
Joseph Michael Bay
>> Adolf Hitler also attacked conventional ways on race, morality, and
>> much else. Unfortunately, unlike Mr. Norman, he got a country to play
>> with...
>why is it that when liberals don't approve of someone, they *always* compare
>them to Nazis?
Liberals? Conservatives have been using the term "jack-booted thugs",
well I guess I haven't noticed that as much from talking heads now that
the government is pretty much all "conservative", but comparing someone
you don't like to Hitler or to Nazis in general is a universal part of
American discourse. Also the rest of the English-speaking, USENET-using
world.
--
Joseph M. Bay Lamont Sanford Junior University
www.stanford.edu/~jmbay/ DO NOT PRESS
When encryption is outlawed, om;u h$g9!ap k#-j tv*d$]p.
Terrell Miller
> That said, I must admit I have not read them at all. The Other
> Change of Hobbit used to have a page from a Gor book pinned up on
> the end of one of its bookcases, with the caption "The Following
> Is an Example Of Why We Don't Stock Gor Books." I suppose I read
> the page, but all I remember now is the caption.
no offense, but the people who are the harshest critics of Norman's work
tend to be people who've never bothered to actually read any of what they're
criticizing. At best they flip through *one* Gor book until they get to a
passage they don't like, and they get hysterical.
Ignorance is righteous indignation...
Terrell Miller
> Heck, they may just have gotten married or formed other
> semi-lasting arrangements and discovered that real live sex with
> a real live human being is (a) not much like a Gor story and (b)
> noticeably superior to same.
try it sometime, you might be pleasantly surprised ;)
David Cowie
> stuff
_Gor Lensman_
_Foundation and Gor_
_American Gors_
Anything by Gorson Scott Card
--
David Cowie david_cowie at lineone dot net
David Allsopp
Miller <mill...@bellsouth.net> writes
>"Dorothy J Heydt" <djh...@kithrup.com> wrote in message
>news:HAHK2...@kithrup.com...
>
>> That said, I must admit I have not read them at all. The Other
>> Change of Hobbit used to have a page from a Gor book pinned up on
>> the end of one of its bookcases, with the caption "The Following
>> Is an Example Of Why We Don't Stock Gor Books." I suppose I read
>> the page, but all I remember now is the caption.
>
>no offense, but the people who are the harshest critics of Norman's work
>tend to be people who've never bothered to actually read any of what they're
>criticizing. At best they flip through *one* Gor book until they get to a
>passage they don't like, and they get hysterical.
>
>Ignorance is righteous indignation...
Well I've read more of them than I like to admit, and I think they're a
terrible waste of dead trees.
To be fair, the first few aren't bad in a sub-Howardian kind of way, and
the Priest-Kings stuff was an OK idea, but even there the dominance
ranting strikes an odd note. By the time you're getting to double
figures, there's a short story's worth of plot fighting for air in
amongst 4/5ths of a book of preaching. *Bad* preaching. I'd go so far
as to say self-evidently false preaching, since it posits a single
uniformly applicable sexual behaviour to half the human race.
And I even recognised this reading them when I was an adolescent without
a girlfriend.
--
David Allsopp Houston, this is Tranquillity Base.
Remove SPAM to email me The Eagle has landed.
Gazza
skipping 40 pages of rambling diatribe at a time.
I did like the setting though and read about 20 of them when I was in
my teens.
g
Randy Money
> "Dorothy J Heydt" <djh...@kithrup.com> wrote in message
> news:HAHK2...@kithrup.com...
>
>
>>That said, I must admit I have not read them at all. The Other
>>Change of Hobbit used to have a page from a Gor book pinned up on
>>the end of one of its bookcases, with the caption "The Following
>>Is an Example Of Why We Don't Stock Gor Books." I suppose I read
>>the page, but all I remember now is the caption.
>
>
> no offense, but the people who are the harshest critics of Norman's work
> tend to be people who've never bothered to actually read any of what they're
> criticizing. At best they flip through *one* Gor book until they get to a
> passage they don't like, and they get hysterical.
>
> Ignorance is righteous indignation...
>
> --
> Terrell Miller
I read 1 & 2. The first was all right Burroughs-like fantasy with
promise of an interesting world developing.
The second left the bad taste of misogyny and I didn't bother going back
for thirds.
The contention that "John Norman is explicitly attacking conventional
views on sex" (David Friedman) strikes me as reasonable in the same way
as applying that phrase to the works of the Marquis de Sade is
reasonable, though Norman (in the books I read) was certainly a lesser
degree of disturbing. His work then has to survive not only the
question, did he do it well or not, but also the question, did choosing
this particular conceit work? The answer for most readers over 18
years-of-age is, no. It provided titillation but by putting sexual
relationships solely on a power-basis presented the subject
simplistically and thus inaccurately.
Randy M.
Karl M Syring
<snip>
> this particular conceit work? The answer for most readers over 18
> years-of-age is, no. It provided titillation but by putting sexual
> relationships solely on a power-basis presented the subject
> simplistically and thus inaccurately.
There are a million of romances in novels that are unrealistic
and rise wrong expectations in young girls. There must be
something else that stirs emotions.
Karl M. Syring
Keith Morrison
>>Heck, they may just have gotten married or formed other
>>semi-lasting arrangements and discovered that real live sex with
>>a real live human being is (a) not much like a Gor story and (b)
>>noticeably superior to same.
>
> try it sometime, you might be pleasantly surprised ;)
I suppose if one wants their sex partner to be the equivalent of
a blow-up doll, Gor might be your thing. Those of actually who've
actually had sex with a real life human and not polyethylene replica
of same probably have cause to disagree.
--
Keith