Gor

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

"When we are to be raped, and must serve you as slaves," begged the first girl, she who had been in his arms, "let me be the first to be raped, the first to serve you as a slave."
"You will not be forgotten, my beautiful little slut," he promised her.

"Thank you, Master, " she whispered.
Slave Girl of Gor

The Chronicles of Gor is a Science Fantasy novel series (one of those that blur the lines between the Science Fiction and Fantasy), written by John Norman (real name Dr. John Frederick Lange, Jr., a professor of philosophy). The Chronicles of Gor starts out as a Planetary Romance before moving on to a sex-slave culture where most of the female main characters are legally property. The planet Gor is a Counter-Earth, a hypothetical planet in Earth's orbit on the other side of the sun, always blocked from view [1]. On Gor, some Sufficiently Advanced Aliens decided to take humans from various eras in human history and dump them together and see what happens, after removing any type of firearm and burning anyone who tries to violate said ban.

For a complete list of the books, see that other Wiki.

A complete subculture has been spawned by these books, taking the philosophy of these books and applying them to their daily lives. This philosophy, known as the Gorean lifestyle, does not revolve around the master/slave relationship, although it certainly can incorporate it. There is some debate between practitioners of traditional BDSM and Gorean S&M about the validity and safety of the other's practices, most of it revolving around the fact that safewords are not mandatory.

Two films based on the Gor series were adapted into sword & sorcery films in the late Eighties, Gor (1987) and Outlaw of Gor (1989). Loosely adapted from the first two books, the films depict professor Tarl Cabot's adventures after being magically transported to Gor. For better or worse, the films Bowdlerized the sex-slavery aspect. This is by no means the only instance of a movie bearing no resemblance (save a few names) to the book that supposedly inspired it, but it is a particularly egregious example from the word "sorcery" onwards.

For the Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode Outlaw featuring the film Outlaw of Gor, please go to the episode recap page.


Tropes used in Gor include:
  1. An impossible situation, and thus fantastic, given the gravitational influences observed upon every comet passing into the inner solar system, even before the advent of interplanetary exploration in the 1960s; then again, if the alien species in question is capable of moving entire planets into orbit around stars, erasing traces of gravitational influence would likely not be such a problem. And in fact, this is the explaination given to the main character in the first book, when he raises this very objection. You know what, just see the Wikipedia page on Counter-Earth.