The Catalyst and Other Works Book

I'm in the middle of reading as many of the "Gor" S&M erotic fantasy novels as I can stand, as a sort of guilty holiday gift to myself; see my review of the first book, Tarnsman of Gor, for more on why these books came to my attention in the first place. This is the third book of the series and is an odd one, sort of the Gorean equivalent of Beneath the Planet of the Apes; for after two books that were naked ripoffs of Edgar Rice Burroughs' action-adventure "Barsoom" series, this third book takes place almost entirely within the labyrinthine mountain dwelling of the all-powerful gods who supposedly created this "counter-earth" where our hero Tarl Cabot finds himself, a weird and trippy story reflective of its 1968 publishing date. (The term "counter-earth," by the way, comes from the fact that the planet is supposed to be on the exact opposite side of the sun as Earth, orbiting at the same exact speed, so that none of us Earthlings ever know of its existence.)

And what does Cabot discover from his forbidden adventures inside these endless caves, from which no Gorean has ever returned? Well, basically, that the "priest-kings" of Gor are in actuality insectoid space aliens, ones way more intelligent than us, who have been kidnapping tribes of humans from Earth every so often over the last several thousand years, mostly so they can study them in case Earth ever gets technologically advanced enough to attack Gor, and also to preserve the species since these aliens have become convinced that humans will blow themselves up long before they ever have a chance to attack Gor itself. But since the captured humans on Gor could easily overpower the priest-kings if they were to possess modern technology, the aliens have made it impossible for that technology to exist, essentially freezing the human race in the "Conan the Barbarian" times we've become familiar with in the first two books; and lacking the technology that would let them "progress" into a modern "enlightened" society, they have instead worked out and perfected humanity's actual system of existence that they were supposed to have lived all along (according to author John Norman, that is), where men are the undisputed leaders and rulers of society, women their natural slaves who are only good for sexual release and doing the laundry, and intellectuals like scholars and priests are cowardly faggot scum who are at the heart of every bit of villainy found on the planet.

And it's in this, really, where we first start getting an understanding of why so many millions of people have been such passionate haters of this series over the decades, an understanding that I'm told gets just more and more obvious as the books continue; for in Norman's world, it's not that women are treated as slaves against their wishes, but that everyone understands and agrees that this is the natural way of things, a sort of foregone conclusion that of course those with vaginas are nothing more than fuckable cattle, and that it's so preposterous to suggest otherwise that no one ever does. But this isn't sexist, though, argues Norman, because on the other side of the gender equation, the only warrior-men who are allowed to own a slave are those who are noble of heart, who truly love their slave, and who are prepared to do whatever it takes to treat her right. If you don't have a noble heart, Norman argues, then by definition you're an inferior warrior; and that means a superior warrior can come along at any time, kill you and take your slave, thus providing her with the caring and loving home she deserved all along. So, see? It all works out!

Even this early in the series, I'm coming to realize that this is why critics of the "Gor" novels find them so creepy and weird, not simply bad but literally a Freudian portrait of a diseased mind; it's not necessarily from what Norman posits in these books (plenty of fantasy novels over the years have featured "love-slaves"), but rather that Norman is so obsessively fetishistic about the subjects he chooses to write about, thorough to the point of OCD mental illness and who talks about these subjects in a way that will remind you of some homeless pervert sitting across from you on the bus, sniffing a stained panty while staring deep into your eyes and grunting, "You're fuckable. Yes you are. Oh God you're so fuckable. Yes you are."

The sexual side of this obsessive fetishizing is still not on full display in this third book of the series (although it does contain the largest look yet at the sexual-humiliation rituals that are a regular part of male-female Gorean relationships); but certainly though you can see Norman the panty-sniffer lurking behind, for example, the ridiculously unending descriptions he gives in this book of how the space-alien priest-kings supposedly have a thousand-percent better sense of smell than humans, and thus have built their entire social structure around this, including permanent language based not on writing but on smelling, and how there are 72 specific scents in their "alphabet," and how instead of books they have ropes that they have "deposited" specific scents on in a specific order, so that one of the other praying-mantis-looking aliens read it by sniffing the rope from beginning to end in the same order. Ugh, Norman, stop staring into my eyes and whispering how fuckable I am!

I'm looking forward to finally getting to the point where all this fetishizing finally spills out into the open, which I've been told happens around book 6 or 7; for while these first books are kind of interesting, they're really not much more than so-so traditional swords-and-sandals fantasy novels, a genre I'm not particularly into. As always, more updates as they're available; and don't forget that when this is all done, I'll be erasing all these individual reviews and replacing them with one big essay that looks at the series as a whole.