Customer Reviews

Time Slave

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As a devotee of John Norman' Gor series, I found Time Slave, a non-Gor story refreshing. Not only does the last available story of Gor, Magicians of Gor, become pretty slow, one wonders how much more the central character, Tarl Cabot, can do in this land, with the fall of glorious Ar and the untimely death of its Ubar. Moreover, the massive and extensive detours into discussions of male dominance and female submission have grown ever more cumbersome. In fact, one has already internalized these values if one has gotten this far in the series, and so these are now really unnecessary. The committed reader of Gor understands this philosophic context.

Against this backdrop, Time Slave offers a fresh, new venue for Norman to present the degradation of human dignity in the grey web of modern, sterile Western civilization, where men are emasculated and women have lost their femininity. In Time Slave, the brilliant and driven Danish scientist, Herjellsen, lures his colleague, the beautiful mathematician, Dr. Hamilton from Cal Tech, to work on a project in Africa. This project is the construction of a time machine, and Herjellsen's secret purpose is to send someone back in time to "rectify a mistake" in man's genetic heritage. This person, it turns out, is Dr. Hamilton. There, stripped and kept in a cell in the bush, tormented and threatened with sexual assault by Gunther, Herjellsen's German assistant, she is finally sent back to the Cro-Magnon period without any real knowledge of her goal.

There she is captured by a tall hunter from a Tribe called simply "the Men", who are a hunter-gatherer group competing with (and struggling against) other groups such as primitive herdsmen, and the contemptible "weasel people". Hamilton's adjustment to life in the camp, and the shock of her lowly status, take a toll on her modern pretensions. Nonetheless, Tree, the hunter who captured her in the first place, works to make Hamilton into a real woman, in touch with her senses, and alive to the strong sensuality that flows within her being. Indeed, it is through her subjugation to the men of the Tribe, and especially through the efforts of her lover, Tree, that Hamilton recovers her true sense of womanhood, and becomes a full-fledged woman of "the Men" and a member of the Tribe.

Tree, however, is only able to accomplish the breaking of Hamilton's civilized rigidity with the advice of the tribal matriarch, Old Woman, who is in charge of the fire and the women's chores in the camp, and who acts as a repository for tribal wisdom. Thus, she tells Tree, who is puzzled over Hamilton's inability to have an orgasm, "Every woman can be made to kick".

The child eventually born to this love union, true to the state of nature, is to be the one who redresses the false genetic turn humanity allegedly took so long ago. Frankly, I think the logic of the story would be better reversed, with humanity being renewed by going back to get Cro-Magnon stock to re-strengthen the degraded modern gene pool, rather than a renewal through the injection of the genes of a modern woman into that world 50 thousand years ago.

Despite what I thus perceive as a flaw in logic, Time Slave forces the reader to think about what has become of the strong genes of hunter-gatherer groups that survived and even prospered to propagate the race in that world of pre-civilization. Moreover, this new setting gives Norman a chance to raise the issue of a "natural philosophy" afresh, and with new elements. For instance, Time Slave has as a major undercurrent, man's need to explore, to transcend his current reality, and ultimately to reach to the stars. Thus, Norman has one character in the tribe, Drawer, who creates cave paintings, and another who gazes at the stars. Indeed, Herjellsen instructs Hamilton to turn the ancient men toward the stars as he sends her into the unknown.

In this sense, the book is prophetic. Today's soft, Western world is too busy creating the socialist caretaker state to invest the time and energy necessary for space travel. Instead, we promulgate a system that rewards and supports those least genetically capable of survival in the natural realm (those who comprise the welfare class) while withdrawing support from the adventurous who reflect our true ancestry and with whom the future of humanity lies. Norman depicts modern humanity as torn between the proponents of security, who would stifle and shut off the risk-taking necessary for our long-term survival as a species, and those few bold persons who retain within their make-up the heritage of hunters, adventurers, explorers, and Masters (there's that old Gorean word again!).

Today, public funding of NASA projects is increasingly doubtful, more and more persons cry for intensive socialization, strong aggressive and even defensive behaviors are being "trained" out of American males through the public school systems, with their "zero-tolerance" policies and enforced administration of drugs such as Ridalin to settle boys down. In such an era, Time Slave is a must-read for the man and woman who do not want to be lost in this world of insipid and meaningless routine, where conformity to idiotic, commercial-generated norms and the pursuit of existence for its own sake have replaced the struggle to survive and remain strong. I thus recommend this book to everyone who shares Norman's prescient insight into the pathology of modern civilization, and into the fading but still present virtue of our natural genetic heritage.

Take one very old myth. Stir in a partisan viewpoint or two. Pointedly ignore the effect it will have on those who read it only to whip up pre-existing outrage. Thoroughly entertain your appreciative fans.....

OK... Let's face it; this guy is a pretty crummy writer. Even so, I have read every one of his novels.... several times!

So who says you have to be a good writer to be a good story teller!

Another reviewer was convinced that this was a tongue-in-cheek swipe at humorless feminists, and also felt it could not be filmed as anything other than a comedy. I totally disagree. The body of work that Norman has produced over many, many years is all in this same vein, so this is not a one-shot deal, and he started writing this type of stuff before feminists were a common feature of our culture. I also think that a director on the level of Roman Polanski could film it quite effectively as something definitely not comedic! That said, however, I found it a tough read, even though I am in agreement with many of it's premises. Norman's style is strange, idiosyncratic, and quite cumbersome. One often finds whole chunks of descriptive detail re-occuring at different places in the book, verbatim, and his use of punctuation is...strange, to say the least. It was, and was obviously intended to be, mildly erotic. It's a fantasy that expresses a qausi-scientific framework for the male chauvinist the lurks within many men, and as such, could have been written in a lighter, less cumbersome, more accessible style.

TIME SLAVE

Time slave by John Norman is just like all of his books that I've read. The Man and woman is an animal premise, woman just wants to be dominated by the strongest man. In my opinion this is geared for boys going through or maybe pre- puberty.

Recommended for adolescent or older boys just going through puberty.

Gunner September 2007