Customer Reviews

Guardsman of Gor (Jason Marshall Trilogy, Bk. 3) (Chronicles of Counter-Earth, Vol. 16)

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Guardsman of Gor continues the story of Jason and Beverly, both from New Your City who were captured and transported to Gor in Fighting Slave. Guardsman begins with a naval battle on the Vosk river between pirate fleets and a loose confederation of river cities. Norman spends the first several chapters on three days of the battle during which time the battle is almost lost and the remaining 3 confederation ships make and escape. In a dramatic turn around things get better from there. While the river battle has been going on the men of the cities have formed a fighting alliance on land and wait in ambush for the remaining pirate vessels. Victory over the pirates is complete with Jason earning considerable wealth, including female slaves, captured from the pirate fortress. The last part of the book describes Jason as a dominant man of Gor, no longer the Earth wuss who had been controlled by feminist women in a feminist dominated culture. Jason plays match maker, distributing appropriate female love slaves to the heroes of the pirate battle who are now his friends. Because they are slaves, the females fall deeply in love with strong manly men who control and dominate them, much more so than Earth feminist women. Finally, Jason completes his complete enslavement and domination of the former Beverly of New York City, now transformed into a submissive Gorian love slave. Jason gives her a good whipping and makes her grovel at his feet. Miss. Beverly, now transformed into Norman's vision of true femininity, loves her life as Jason's salve and vows to serve him fully and well.

I found the book tedious in many places with slow action and long repetitive conversations that could be skipped, especially in the last half. If you're reading the whole Gor series you might enjoy it and it wraps up the 3 Jason books. Tarl Cabot of Port Kar is not mentioned, nor are the Priest Kings or other space aliens, nor the war between Cos and Ar. The Fighting Slave trilogy stands by itself set on Gor as a commentary on Earth men and women. John Norman's commentaries on human sexual instincts and personalities is interesting, though some would disagree with his assessments.

My first recommendation would be to start at the beginning of the series. While you can figure out what is going on; and each book is a story unto itself - the climax which builds in knowing the full history of Gor, the characters and emotions driving the plot line, is critical in my opinion. As any who have encountered Norman's undertakings knows, there are aspects of his writing style that are dry; redundant and so explicitly technical it borders on dullness. However, this also denotes a seeming trademark, something you come to expect and almost relish as you submerse yourself into the world he has created for us to escape to. Holding true to form, there are twists and turns that leave you cheering for the hero and celebrating a clearly ingenious mind! I highly recommend picking this up, whether you are a long time follower of Gor or if you are just beginning .. you'll get hooked I promise!

Guardsman of Gor culminates the trilogy centered on the new character of Jason Marshall, an everyday man who was abducted to Gor and forced into slavery. In the first two books Jason was bewildered at his circomstances, but his coming of age came when he escaped from slavery and gained his freedom.

Like the great Fredrick Douglass (Read My Bondage My Freedom), Jason escapes and forces his former owners and tormenters to learn the error of their ways. Then he becomes a guardsman who fights against the pirates who are opressing the river towns of the Vosk River.

This book was one of the few books where Norman went into detail concerning pirates, who had previously only been alluded to. Here we see pirates and a massive naval battle (A Rarity In The Gor Books). This was what enthralled me-and why I give it Four Stars. Seeing the fighting aboard vessels and the tactics that were used. I wish that Norman had gone into more details like these in his later books instead of boring us with verbose and pedantic ideas on the "superiority" of one gennder over another. I felt like saying: "OK, I get the idea and I heard it all before 100 times. Now I want adventure and action with the principle characters!"

Ironic, because there is actually very little sex in any of these Gor books. Just theoretical discussions about what can and will and should be done, etc. If you want to read a really good book trilogy with lots of sex but with plenty of thick plot, I highly reccomend The Seer King, The Demon King and The Warrior King by the late Chris Bunch. See my review concening the Seer King. It was great! The character Damastes Cimabue would give Tarl Cabot a serious run for his money.

A. Nathaniel Wallace, Jr.

If you've read any of this "man's" books, you'll notice they almost all have the same theme: all female characters are portrayed as either dominant witches or cowed love slaves to men. Apparently, Norman believes these are the only two kinds of women who exist. I realize there's a reason these books are called "fantasy", but this is one sick fantasy I wish to God never showed its hideous face to the world.

In just about every book, Norman clearly pushes his agenda that the world is full of wimpy men and dominant women. Therefore, he removes these people from Earth to Gor, where men are quickly lifted as gods and women are eventually shoved to their knees for something even more degrading than forced oral pleasuring. If the men begin as slaves in these books, they end as masters. If women start out as controlling witches, they end up as lust slaves to the pitiful men, often beaten and cowed into doing so. The only thing more amusing and pitiful than this joke of an author's picture of "Earth" women as man-hating feminazis is his pathetic view that they are the way they are because they don't have men to control them, and this is what they all secretly want! And, in Norman's weak hands, that's the ending they get: the women in these books, man-haters all, are eventually whipped and/or raped into becoming faithful slaves who love their macho masters and promise to serve them always.

Hey, I hate female-controlling males, but even I don't pen sick fantasies about nasty women raping them, whipping them, and otherwise mentally and physically breaking them into slave-hood. I don't believe in doing that to anyone, and even indulging in such sick fantasies would hurt me emotionally and mentally. You don't play with sadism and ultimately, it's not just a fantasy, it's a state of mind. The only thing as pitiful as this author's "fantasy" solution to dealing with feminists is his apparent idea of what women want: to be slaves! Norman never deserved sympathy because of feministic attacks to begin with, because his ideal of womanhood was warped from the start. One could very well conclude that the reason he hates feminism is not because it abuses manhood, but because it uplifts womanhood to something beyond slavery.

The fact that this sickness came from any man's head and especially was actually published is very disturbing to me. I can't see why anyone would love this kind of fantasy anyway, but maybe it would help to know that this is NOT just fantasy. There are women tortured in other countries, whipped by their husbands here in the US, and raped as well. If you shudder when hearing a horrible story on the news about a psycho keeping a woman chained and whipped in his basement, yet feel any kind of satisfaction when reading trash like this, you're a class A hypocrite. Just think of the porn images that have emerged of women being raped from behind or degraded in some other way. If you'd ever care to see some fictional story behind those sick images, this is basically what Norman has written.

Now, for more than fifteen years I've avoided the Jason Marshall books and stayed with the Tarl Cabot-led titles because I once went through about the first 50 pages of "Fighting Slave Of Gor" and felt let down. Of course, that was many moons ago and, just for the hell of it, gave in and went through books 14, 15, & 16 - found myself unable to put them down!!! What a moron for not having read through them in the first place, years ago! But then, after reading Guardsman of Gor, I can remember WHY I may have decided to put it off: MINDNUMBING EPIC-LENGTH RANTS ON THE DOMINATION OF WOMEN BY MEN. Now, I'm not going to waste my breath on the argument - in fact, I can quite safely say that the entire proposal in the series is self-contradictory; instead, my problem lies in the nearly unbearable REPETITION & LENGTH - as though our good fellow Mr. Norman has been trying to convince the unconvinced by beating them about the head and shoulders - some of us who like the series can make it through the abuse by circumventing much of the cognitive drudgery. I've gotten so good at skipping through THOUSANDS of words of it that I feel like I'm only reading 1/4 of a book, and that I'm reading the same 3/4's of a book over and over again with merely the names changed. Still, I keep reading the series, repeatedly. Why? Because it's John, and John's stuff has a certain fascinating magic to it, as though he actually loves the imaginary places he writes of; as if he loves the adventures themselves.

TRIVIA QUESTION OF THE DAY: Why is it that EVERYBODY in the Jason books possesses, apparently, the 'Second Knowledge', in that EVERYBODY knows everything there is to know about the existence of Earth; whereas, in other books, most people are generally clueless?

Some folks don't like the Vosk ship battles - I thought they were great. Matter of fact, all the scrapping in all three books of the Jason trilogy are way neat - I don't care how fantastically unlikely some of them are, ya gotta admit they moved things along.

One thing I can definitely say is that when I wasn't skimming over the repetitive slave stuff, it was a speedy read even when he was detailing such things as markets, crops, tools, towns, etc.

Okay, I'm a weakling Earth Man, so I will betray my codes by making one commentary on the male domination thing, and it is this: Those of you who are Gor fans who are perplexed by the reactions of those who despise the series based on the treatment therein of female characters should perhaps consider this formula, constantly expressed throughout:

A: Women are natural slaves
B: Slaves are as low or lower than animals (common livestock)
C: No amount or extreme degree of abuse to women is cause for outrage
D: Any such outrage flies in the face of the natural order and demonstrates cowardice, weakness, and a lack of intelligence
E: Women, being livestock, and yet intelligent, naturally enough, secretly desire and love to be abused - and are only fulfilled when such cruelty is forthcoming...

REALITY begs to differ, of course. The series pretends to embrace reality that is denied by Earthlings, yet reality is reality; hence, this world and the way we live in it is entirely natural and normal, whilst the Gorean concept is self-contradictory and delusional; hence, FANTASTY. Of course, any truly thinking person must inevitably reach the conclusion that any Gorean society would collapse in upon itself. If, in the series, the Priest Kings were to go hands-off on technology restrictions, Gor would be a smoldering cinder.

Now, imagine if your race, religion, or ideology were substituted for 'WOMEN' in the equation listed above, and perhaps you, being smarter than a doorknob, might comprehend why not everybody sees any appeal in the Gor series. If you like it, fine - enjoy it. If you don't like it - fine. Shut up already (some of you apparently have a difficult time handling your emotions) and go find yourself something you DO like. As for myself, I don't need to justify reading the series - I like it. Period. We could always address the matter with the sword. Some people just "GET IT", and some people don't. Hey, don't judge me - I don't judge YOU when you're watching your friggin' JERRY SPRINGER and your LARRY THE CABLE GUY MOVIES!

Volume 3 of the Jason Marshall trilogy is a book with a split personality. The first 136 pages is nearly nonstop action and the last 162 pages is nearly nonstop bondage play. When I started reading it, I thought that John Norman had gone back to the good old days of emphasizing the adventure aspects of his creation. It even took about 60 pages before a slave girl showed up, surely a record for all but the earliest volumes in the Gor series. That said, the action in this volume is not up to the level of the Tarl Cabot books. Basically it consists of a protracted battle between pirates and the forces of the defending towns on the Vosk River. As such, it somewhat lacks variety compared to Cabot's adventures but has scenes which are just as ludicrous, such as the one where Jason finds himself bound to the ram of an enemy ship but escapes by inducing eels to bite off his bonds. Yeah, right! I've discovered that you can pretty much tell when you are in for a dissertation on the glories of bondage. Just count the pages in the chapter. The chapters in the first part of the book range from 2 to 19 pages. Those in the second part range from 16 to 58 pages. Figure it out. It's not like he has something new to say that he hasn't already said far too often. Enough already! Give it a rest! It's really a shame. The Gor books could have been one of the all-time great action-adventure fantasy series. If only John Norman hadn't ruined it with his obsession with bondage...