Beasts of Gor [Paperback]

John Norman (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: Star (1976)
• ASIN: B000M64VC0
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)

Customer Reviews

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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars End of the Saga for me, December 8, 2010

By 

Thomas Neil Kiser (Aurora, IL USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

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This review is from: Beasts of Gor (Gorean Saga 12) (Kindle Edition)

I've been posting reviews for this series as I read them, chronologically. I believe I started posting reviews at #7, which was Captive of Gor. I only this year discovered the series.

I've grown tired of porting negative reviews and now, finally, I am abandoning the series. So, I am posting one final review as I have no desire to post another 17 negative reviews for the books that remain in the series and which, sadly, I pre-purchased in anticipation of reading.

Here's the story: Norman created an interesting science fiction setup, and he reasonably (although not greatly) explored and developed his setup in the first 6 books. Those books were not great by any means, but there was something to them. I did enjoy them, but the writing was not as good as it should have been.

However, starting at Book 7, things really went downhill. My take now is that this is not a science fiction story. Instead, I see this as one long excruciatingly repetitive ramble about how women are natural slaves and men are natural dominants, with a small insignificant side story about some alien races and saving Earth and Gor. It really is mind-bogglingly bad. Authors there whole lives look for a setup they can develop and build on, whether for a single book or a series. he has it, and then so badly trashes it. I imagine he has done well on this series, but that's despite himself. I have no idea why these books sold, or why people seem to still like his writing.

Here's the good:
- Good science fiction scenario with warring alien races, reasonably well developed, with differing viewpoints
- Good themes (imho) concerning honesty, honor, and loyalty
- Good exploration of the theme of slavery and domination
- At times (VERY RARE TIMES) his writing was very funny. On average I'd say each book that I have read had one section where I thought the dialog was very funny, as in laugh out loud funny. But, very rare.

Here's the bad:
- He just beats you with the baseball bat of female slavery. Unless you have read these books you can;t even begin to imagine how repetitively relentless this theme is. I would say that in these first 12 books I have skipped at least 200 pages of stupid insipid repetitive dialogue where a slave asks the same stupid questions about her learning she is a "natural" slave.
- He's not a good writer (at least not in these books). At first I made allowances as I figured he might be using an old English or archaic form of speech to represent Gorean dialogue. But after 12 books, even when people from Earth are speaking to one another, its the same stilted dialogue that would never occur in reality.


I have zero problems with the concept of women as slaves. I say this because I imagine these books, over the years, have received many reviews of people knocking them for their themes of slavery. I am not in that camp, I like that theme. But he takes it too far. Just to give the person who has not read these books a sense of it:
Let's say we have a scale of 1 to 100, where the reasonable introduction and development of the theme of slavery would represent a 5 on this scale, Norman is at a 100. You can not believe the persistence and repetitiveness of this theme. It's as if that is all he had to say, but he created this story of aliens just so he could say it.

One final note: somewhere in the last 5 books of the series that I have read (so books 7-12), Norman starts using the word "rape" to describe what Masters do to their slaves. I don't mean to be a harpie, and he has literary license to do as he pleases, but I felt this crossed the line. He doesn't use the word in a bad sense, he uses it to describe what Masters do to their slaves. I just don't feel he should have taken this word and turned it into a concept that is acceptable. The concept of Masters taking their slaves roughly and whenever they want is not a problem for me, it is just the use of the word 'rape' to describe it. That word should be a loaded one, and come with a lot of negative connotation. The way Norman uses it negates this, and as such I feel is inappropriate. Your mileage may vary. I did not stop reading his books because of this, but I was not pleased. I like the concepts of sex and slavery he explores (just not in the quantity he does so), but rape is rape. He might as well glorify murder (which he does not do in his books, quite the opposite actually).

So, this is the end for me. Evidently Norman has nothing more to say that I have not heard from him many times before and so I take my life back and sadly am forced to leave Gor, the Priest-Kings, and the Kur, behind.