Thanks to PostModern Barney (fourth paragraph down), I learned the hideous news: Dark Horse is releasing an omnibus of three of John Norman's Gor novels. It's in the September previews; Dark Horse's site gives the pub date as November. The issue contains TARNSMAN OF GOR, OUTLAW OF GOR, and PRIEST-KINGS OF GOR. They're the first three books of this long-running series.

Words . . . no, they don't fail me. No one was happier than me when these things fell into the off-the-current-shelves abyss, when only obsessed fans and completist collectors would hunt down issues from back shelves in used book stores. I read about five of these back in the mid-70s with that same awed fascination that I watched my first film of snake knots, before the nightmares began.

Briefly, Tarl Cabot travels from our world to its opposite, circling the Sun just across from us, so we never know it's there! Gor is a fantasy world, where men wear leather harnesses and carry swords, and women wear flimsy outfits. Most women also wear steel collars and steel bracelets, because they are slaves.

You heard me.

Every bed has a slave ring attached to it. If a woman misbehaves, she gets locked to it and spends the night sleeping on the hard stone floor to teach her manners. (Gorean nights are cold, too.) Not all women are slaves--there are Free Companions, free in that they don't have to wear collars. That status is flexible:

" ... when she has been irritable or otherwise troublesome, even a Free Companion may find herself looking forward to a pleasant night on the stones, stripped, with neither a mat nor a blanket, chained to a slave ring precisely as though she were a lowly slave girl. ... A taste of the slave ring is thought to be occasionally beneficial to all women." Why do the men do this? "It is the Gorean way of reminding her ... that she, too, is a woman, and thus to be dominated, to be subject to men."

Oh--Tarl observes that Gorean women are both "beautiful and splendid." May I venture that a fulfilled masochist is beautiful and splendid?

In PRIEST-KINGS OF GOR, manly Tarl discovers mega-hottie Vika of Treve in service to the insect-like Priest-Kings. His attraction goes up in smoke when he discovers Vika's special little kink: she dominates men and makes them sleep in the slave ring! He rejects her after smacking her around. Of course she falls madly in love with him, undergoing humiliations like having her head shaved, being put on display in a plastic cage, crawling after Tarl for a few of his magic kisses. (Yes, they have broadswords and castles, but they have plastic cages.) Another bit of ick: the Priest-Kings incubate their eggs by planting them in their human slaves, including, if I recall, Vika after Tarl denounces her.

edited to add:
lizzistardust corrects my memory here:
Goreans have broadswords and castles, but Priest Kings have plastic cages. As the planet's "gods," they forbid humans from developing most forms of higher technology, with the notable exception of medicine. And the Golden Beetles reproduce by laying eggs in any available creature (it just happened to be Vika in this case because she was bait for Torl). Priest Kings don't even lay eggs. Only The Mother lays eggs, and she was fresh out of them by that book.
end of edit

Other quotes:
On Gor, if a man saves a woman's life, he can lock the slave rings on her. He figures he deserves more than an Earthwoman's kiss of gratitude, see. "One of these girls, if rescued on Gor, would probably be dumbfounded at what would happen to her. After her kiss of gratitude, which might last a good deal longer than she had anticipated, she would find herself forced to kneel and be collared, and then, stripped ... she would find herself led stumbling away on a slave leash from the field of her champion's valor."

" ... on my old world [Earth] I have met several women with something of the Gorean zest for acknowledging the radiant truth of their sex ... Yet with all due respect for the most astounding and marvelous sex, I suspect that ... it is true that a touch of the slave ring is occasionally beneficial."

The other books are more of this--swaggering male stereotypes, rape disguised as sex, with women begging for more. Women who dare to try to transcend these highly limited roles are beaten down, enslaved, conveniently killed by the plot for their presumption, or made to crawl to the father phallus hero--or forced to serve as egg farms.



And Dark Horse wants to perpetuate this. Dark Horse wants to make money with this. I have no doubt that they will. Neither do you, I suspect. This of all of those fanboys who have ordered us to cook for them, opted into hive-vagina rhetoric, demanded that we stop whining, called those of us who are men all manner of names, told us to get out of comics. They will love this world, if they don't know it already. They'll be able to live every woman-beating, woman-raping, woman-enslaving moment. Dark Horse means to enable this kind of hatred of non-phallo-stereotype men and women alike. In these books the heroes are muscular studs who prey on all that is Other.

That's us, folks. Book lovers, gentle souls, people who want equality for everyone regardless of sex, race, ability, religion, ethnic background. All of us who aren't white male jocks--we're Other.

Oh, yeah. Before people start whining about censorship--I'm saying don't buy. I'm saying protest, write, scream, review, and don't buy. Make people think about what these books are saying, and make Dark Horse think about publishing any more omnibuses. They need to know the world has damned well changed.