John Norman Introduces Volumes 7-9 of His Bestselling Gorean Saga

Introduction to The Gorean Saga Volumes 7-9
By John Norman

#7 Captive of Gor
#8 Hunters of Gor
#9 Marauders of Gor

I write fantasy.
Sometimes this type of literature is referred to as “escape” literature. Sometimes its “relevance” might be called into question.
It is perhaps worth taking a moment to discuss these observations, or charges.
Let us consider the first. That fantasy is “escape” literature.
In its cruelest connotation “escape” suggests cowardice, or evasion, a flight from conflict, the refusal to perform one’s duty.
“Escape,” of course, need not have these undesirable connotations. For example, if we looked up from reading this, perhaps having heard a small, unusual sound behind us, and discovered that several mature, possibly hungry, and seemingly ill-willed lions, had been introduced into the room, I suspect that most of us, at least upon reflection, after weighing the pros and cons, would be willing to escape. A few of us might attack them with our house keys, ballpoint pens or penknives, but probably not many. I do not think I would do so. I do not think there would be anything cowardly in our attempting to escape. It is one thing to be brave, and another, paraphrasing Aristotle, to be an irrational jerk. Similarly, we do not scorn a child who escapes from a burning building. Similarly, we do not scorn, but rather commend, say, an aviator, at least one of ours, surely, who manages to escape from a prisoner-of-war camp. He escapes from a miserable condition of confinement and returns later to fight a perhaps better war.
In short, there is nothing so horrible about “escape,” per se. Much depends on context.
Still, “escape” is a put-down word.
Calling names is not helpful when the object is not to derogate, but to comprehend, to understand.
Let us consider reality.
Reality, I have noticed, when paying attention, which I do occasionally, from time to time, here and there—reality, I have noticed, is not, all the time, all that great.
Reality is just not that real, all the time.
You have doubtless noticed this, also.
There is more to life than caulking the bathroom tiles.
One does not have, I suspect, a moral obligation to surrender the secret and splendid privacies of the imagination to the obliterating weathering of prosaic realities. We must beware lest we become what we do. And if we do only in the world, and think only in the world, we shall become that world, not ourselves, or ourselves as we might be.
There are dimensions to human existence beyond the expectations of the contemporary flatworm, complacent in its single dimension.
Immersion in the trivia of diurnal circumstance can be more an escape than fantasy could dream.
Man is a working animal, but he is also an imagining animal, a dreaming animal.
The dream, or the physiological concomitants of dreams, are apparently essential to man’s health and sanity. Clinically, a man may be driven insane by not permitting him to dream.
Dreams and play, and perhaps fantasy, of one sort or another, seem essential.
There is chess and music, and poetry and love, and collecting bottle caps and building ships, and books. Before man could read he would gather about and hear stories. And before he could speak his stories, it is not unlikely that he told them with his body, that he danced them.
Man is an animal that fantasizes, that dreams. It is his nature, as much as the intricacies of his circulation and the structure of the valves of his heart.
Now, that being the case, is there a biological sanction for this idiosyncrasy? In dreaming there seems to be. The nondreaming brain does not survive. Why this is the case we do not yet know. It could be that the role of sleep is to make possible the dream. We do know that an individual deprived of sleep and then permitted sleep dreams frenziedly as soon as he falls asleep. When he has dreamed, then, and then only, he drops into dreamless sleep. The body, under such circumstances, starved for its dreams, compensates by an orgy of fantasy.
Something of the same case may be true in the daydreams of human beings. If human beings do daydream there is probably a good reason for it, whether we know the reason or not. Telling a human being not to dream may be a bit like telling him not to drink water. Probably what is involved here is the need of the brain for stimuli. Our minds are the center process of a loop phenomenon, psychologically. The brain is a physical organ which, among other things, transforms physical stimuli into physical reactions upon a physical environment. This has analogies to the reflex-arc phenomenon found as far down the phylogenetic scale as the adagio extension of the pseudopodia of the graceful amoeba. We do know, for example, from sensory-deprivation experiments, if input stimuli from the environment to the brain are reduced considerably, or removed, the mind goes mad. The brain needs stimuli. And, one supposes, sometimes one’s normal environment just does not provide suitable stimuli, and then the brain, picking up a thread of thought, an image, tells itself a story.
Fantasy, of course, is powerful stimuli. Perhaps this has something to do with why people daydream, or read, or listen to stories, and so on. I do not know.
At any rate, just as it is the case that dreams, or their physiological concomitants, restore a human being, vitalize him, and send him roaring back into his world, so, too, it seems likely that daydreams, or fantasy, may have an energizing effect on the human being. Like recreation, like play, like rest, fantasy may increase the vitality levels of an organism. Dreams, or their concomitants, serve a purpose; so, too, one supposes, might fantasy. Accordingly, to think of fantasy as “escape” is to misunderstand perhaps not only the nature of fantasy, but that of human beings. This is not to deny, of course, that a given human being might, undesirably, spend his days fantasizing. He could, of course, spend his days undesirably taking drugs, or drinking alcohol, or eating radishes, or doing numerous trivial tasks with great energy over and over—fleeing from reality by leaping into it, so to speak. Fantasy, like dreams and table salt, and drinking water, is a good thing. This is not to say one should spend all of one’s time dreaming, or drinking water, or eating table salt. But so much for the hygiene of fantasy.
Beyond this, of course, the imagination of man is a noble property. Its exercise would surely seem to fall within the lawful perimeter of activities appropriate to a rational animal. Indeed, imagination, one supposes, would be an important component in a proper concept of human intelligence. It is interesting, since it seems to be an important component of intelligence, that it is not tested for in intelligence tests. This seems to be less a reflection on imagination than on the primitive state of contemporary psychology. At any rate, if a man, say, a statesman, can imagine new possibilities, new policies, new futures, new relations, new structures, new paths, he is not obviously inferior to one who does long division with great rapidity. Indeed, the latter sort of mind is commonly an arid mind. The former sort of mind we wish to make our leaders, for they have vision; the latter sort, though their I.Q.’s, at least as currently measured, may be higher, we will use for bookkeepers and statisticians.
So, what about the “escape” charge?
We have suggested that it is semantically confused and, possibly, physiologically unsound. We have also suggested that it might be a bit stupid. At any rate, there seems no particularly compelling reason to reprehend either the exercise of, or the gratification of, the human imagination. If human beings have imaginations, they might as well use them. It is probably unhealthy, in fact, to suppress portions of your person. Besides, the imagination is one of the glories of a human being. We agree not to knock it. Human beings need all the glories they can get.
Let us now, briefly, turn to the second charge, the charge that fantasy is irrelevant.
If we think of this charge we see that it is based on the premise that literature should be applied politics. That literature must subserve a nonliterary purpose, that it must be an instrument of ideology. We might note that individuals who speak this way, while commonly using the rhetoric of freedom and reason, actually have totalitarian minds. Everything must be devoted to serving the purposes which they think must now be served. Their purposes. For example, it is not simply that they believe literature must be ideologically prostituted, but that it must be ideologically prostituted to a certain doctrine. Their brothel must be the only one in town. A literature which subserved the ends of Neo-Nazism, for example, would not be cheered by them as relevant, but denigrated as pernicious.
I myself have some intolerances. For example, I am intolerant of intolerance. I find myself, for various reasons, in favor of an open society, a pluralistic society. I hope someday we will have one. Totalitarianisms, of whatever stripe or ilk, have a common arrogance, the hypothesis of the single virtue. “I cannot celebrate your difference,” they say. “I fear you, for you are different from me. You will be like me. You will have my values. You will do as I say. I am the people. I am God.”
Those who maintain that literature must be relevant, aside from the fact that they do not understand literature, or appreciate it, in its multiplex beauties and richnesses, seem to be the same ones who have the least objection to burning libraries. No one who likes to read is likely to burn a library. There are books there. If someone claims that literature must be relevant, I think we may take the utterance of that opinion as a sufficient condition for inferring that he is unqualified to form an opinion on the subject.
On the other hand, I am no advocate for either relevance or irrelevance.
As a philosopher, and, ipso facto, a reflective eccentric, I ask “relevance” to what?
All literature, in some sense or other, all song and singing, is relevant to something or other.
Is it enough for literature to be relevant to the glories of the world, that it sings them; is it enough for literature to be relevant to the sufferings and the satisfactions of human beings? Is it enough that literature helps us to see and know, and wonder and love? Literature then is relevant to the vast, profound concerns of the thinking and feeling animal that we find ourselves to be. We do not find Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, nor Rilke and Yeats, irrelevant. Their political applications may be obscure, but the human consequences of sharing their visions are exalting. What they have touched they have made significant, and radiant. They have helped us learn the fragility and poignancy of experience; they have taught us how to strike together stones; they have taught us to illuminate our darkness, and, for the time, shut away the cold; in the light of these flames we can see our world, and those with us; in these flames, too, we can see ourselves; crouching together, they have given us a wondrous thing; they have taught us how, in our darkness, to strike together stones and make fire; we do not find them irrelevant.
In closing, I would like to suggest that all fiction is, in a sense, fantasy. It did not happen, by definition. But, more particularly, what of that portion of fiction more usually designated as fantasy?
By this time, I hope, no more than other forms of literature, it stands in no need of defense.
If it did, I would suggest that its justification is that it brings joy.
It expands the mind, the imagination, the sensibility. It teaches the discovery of continents. In it we learn the lineaments of strange flags. In it we walk amongst the grasses of foreign worlds. We see new stars, new suns. In it we find a universe in which man must again, afresh, address himself to the project of his humanity. How shall he be in such a world? How shall he make his way? Will he be courageous? Will he fail? In such a place, how shall he conduct, and form, that small, fragile, cosmically insignificant, tiny, mortal possibility that is himself?
Stories make man happy.
They bring him joy.
That is their justification.
They may have other justifications, too, but who cares?
Joy is enough.

I wish you well,
John Norman

Note from E-Reads: Readers and fans interested in learning more about John Norman and his Gorean world can visit John Norman's Chronicles of Gor.

John Norman Introduces Volumes 4-6 of His Bestselling Gorean Saga

Introduction to The Gorean Saga Volumes 4-6
By John Norman

#4 Nomads of Gor
#5 Assassin of Gor
#6 Raiders of Gor

The concept of an unknown planet in our system, of a particular and interesting sort, rather unlike other planets, perhaps a mysterious sister or visitor to more familiar worlds, is quite an old concept.
The expression in Greek, transliterated into English letters, is “Antichthon,” which we may translate as “Counter-Earth.”
The Greeks, you see, had the concept of another Earth, a different Earth, a “Counter-Earth.”
It is interesting to speculate on these matters, to wonder, for example, from whence came this ancient, provocative concept. Had they evidence we do not? Had something touched them, perhaps carelessly, or inadvertently, long ago, at a given moment, a moment which was seldom, if ever, repeated, or, if repeated, repeated more selectively, less obtrusively? In any event, the universe is a mysterious place, and when it first opened its eyes, here or there, in one species or another, for it is through the eyes of its children that the universe sees, it doubtless began to suspect how unusual and strange it was, how sublime, mighty, vast, beautiful, terrible, indifferent, and cruel it was, how lovely, and strange it was.
In any event, speculation on the existence of the Counter-Earth is ancient.
I do not think there is much point in going into the Pythagorean cosmology in which this concept figured.
Suffice it to say that the Greeks, as the expression makes clear, did have a conception of the Counter-Earth.
I find this exciting.
Doubtless there are many Earths, grains of sand washed up on the scattered, endless beaches of space, but let us concern ourselves with one such world, a possible world, which we will call the “Counter-Earth.” Surely it, or something like it, exists somewhere.
Might it lie as close to us as was speculated, or feared, by ancient astronomers and mathematicians, whatever might have been the basis of their conjectures, whatever might have been the foundations for their belief?
One does not know.
Surely somewhere there is a Gor, or something like a Gor. Is it not a mathematical certainty? But perhaps not. But, if not, is it not a tragedy to suppose that our own world is the only world, so to speak, the only world in a cosmos in which galaxies are as plentiful as blackberries, endless horizons of blackberries? Could the universe not do better than produce our world, with its spawn of hatred, pollution, greed, corruption, misery, and fanaticism? One would hope so.
The Gorean world, of course, is not perfect.
To be sure, many would exchange it, quickly enough, happily enough, for ours.
It is surely not a Utopia but who would care to spend one’s life in a Utopia; would you not attempt to escape at the first opportunity? Some seem prisons, others cribs, perhaps padded cells, appropriate enough for any so foolish as to seek them. One notes that most propounders of Utopias wisely forbear specificities, preferring to leave the details of their projected paradises conveniently obscure. In this way, one may fill in matters with much the same liberty as is accorded to the reader of Rorschach blots. Fill in the blank checks as you wish, but, alas, there is no bank on which they may be drawn. Too often the road to paradise leads to the gates of hell. Did not Hegel lead to the Gestapo and Marx to the KGB?
So the Gorean world is far from a Utopia. It is replete with hazards and perils, and there are humans there, and humans come with natures, natures forged in the smithies of hunger, suffering, and war; natures alert to the small sounds of a predator’s paw, to the broken twig and dislodged pebble, to the scent of game, to the menace of strangers, to the grace of a lonely, uncaptured female, to the scarcity of resources. Human beings are complex, rich, and deep. Would you have them otherwise, really? But Gor is a green world, a fresh world, a world unpolluted, a world such as our Earth might once have been, and may never be again. One misses the grasses of Gor, flowing in the wind.
Let us embark on some remarks, having to do with Gor. There are many premises on which this unusual series is based, and it will not be remiss, I suppose, and it might be helpful, to call our attention to two or three of these. There is much to be said concerning each of these premises, incidentally, but the constraints of time and space effectively militate against any extensive explanation, against informative, multiplex detail.
1. Gor is near. Presumably it is an immigrant to our solar system, governed by masters of gravity, perhaps having sought a viable sun, deserting a dying star, and may emigrate, should it be deemed judicious, and be the will of her masters.
2. The word ‘Gor’ in Gorean means “Home Stone.” Gor and Earth have a common star, which we call Sol, and which in Gorean is spoken of as “Tor-tu-Gor,” which would translate as “Light upon the Home Stone.” It is not easy to convey to one unfamiliar with Gor the nature, the meaning, of the Home Stone, so we will not attempt to do so, certainly not within our present limits. Let it be said that a city, a town, a village, will have a Home Stone; too, even a peasant’s hut is likely to have its Home Stone, and the peasant, in his hut, with its Home Stone, is, in effect, a ruler, a king, a monarch, a Ubar. A human being without a Home Stone is a fragment, a leaf at the mercy of the wind. He is alone, shorn of fellowship. He lacks brethren. Who will care for him? Should he be in need, who will stand with him? Those with whom he shares a Home Stone. Without a Home Stone how is he important? How shall one justify his existence who has no Home Stone? The humans of Earth, and their domiciles, and their cities and towns, many of them, it seems, lack Home Stones. One wonders if they understand the emptiness of their skies, their poverty.
3. The human being is not the dominant life form on Gor. That form is the Sardar, or, as Tarl Cabot, whom one will encounter in the series, will have it, the “Priest-King.” These are the masters, even the gods, of Gor, at least for those limited to the First Knowledge. They have imposed technology restrictions on humans on Gor. It is, after all, their world, and they see no point in risking its ruination at the hands of a reckless, unsupervised hominid species, one brought to Gor over millennia, largely for aesthetic and scientific purposes. Gor, for the Priest-Kings, you see, is rather like a zoological or botanical garden, or an observational laboratory, if you wish, which they have stocked, bit by bit, with an interesting variety of species, exotic and otherwise, from throughout the galaxy, over millennia, as it pleased them. Priest-Kings, on the other hand, it should be noted, while enforcing their technology restrictions on humans, particularly those dealing with weaponry, transportation, and communication, accord human beings almost total freedom, allowing them to behave much as they like, killing one another, loving one another, whatever be their wont.

I wish you well,
John Norman.

Note from E-Reads: Readers and fans interested in learning more about John Norman and his Gorean world can visit John Norman's Chronicles of Gor.

John Norman Introduces Volumes 1-3 of His Bestselling Gorean Saga

Introduction to The Gorean Saga Volumes 1-3
By John Norman
#1 Tarnsman of Gor
#2 Outlaw of Gor
#3 Priest-Kings of Gor

Our spirits rouze at an Original; that is a perfect stranger, and all throng to learn what news from a foreign land ...
Edward Young, Conjectures on Original Composition (1759)

Rules, like Crutches, are a needful aid to the Lame, tho’ an Impediment to the Strong.
Edward Young, Conjectures on Original Composition (1759)

The Gorean series, to the best of my knowledge, is the longest, most complex, most carefully worked out single-world series in the history of science fiction, or, if you prefer, adventure fantasy. On the other hand, the Gorean series has grown, like a forest, in “foreign lands.” It is not really science fiction, as that genre is normally understood, nor is it adventure fantasy, in the usual way that genre is understood. It transcends genres and its ships beach on unusual shores. For better or for worse it is an “Original,” and it bears all the interest of a new literary form, and risks all the perils of the same. The Gorean books, unlike much science fiction and adventure fantasy, have their affinities not with the politically filtered, formulaic multitudes that today burden the shelves of bookstores teetering on the brink of bankruptcy but serious literature. The Gorean books are not literary baby food. They are more than adventure fantasy, so to speak. They are also, in their way, intellectual, philosophical, and psychological novels. They contain ideas, and, as if that were an insufficiently grievous fault in itself, the ideas do not in all instances echo, propound, and promote the narrow, politically correct nonsense insisted upon by the small number of wary, insecure individuals who, for the most part, control what you will and will not be permitted to read. A fox, it seems, is feared in the hen house. Hence the blacklisting, to which E-Reads, a nonestablishment house, is unwilling to subscribe. More power to them, and to others, who believe in a free press, oppose censorship, favor diversity, despise intolerance, and, in general, do not much care to be told what they may and may not think, and what they may and may not do.

Perhaps one or two further observations might be in order.

The Gorean books are written for adults, not in the sense of WOW, but in the sense that the ideas, the vocabulary, the depth of literary engagement, and such, is beyond children, as well as, apparently, some critics. In any event, the Gorean books are written for adults, highly intelligent adults, and highly sexed adults, of both sexes. Too, they are written for the whole adult, intellectual, psychological, and emotional. They recognize the radical centrality, for example, of sexuality in human life. Most science fiction and adventure fantasy seems to be written for one-fifth of the human being. The Gorean books are written for the whole human being. Further, they are aware of the whole human being, and not the mere one-fifth of a human being which many writers confuse with the entire human being. I wonder if they understand the other four-fifths exist, or give any thought to the true nature of that other four-fifths. Too, of course, ideas, and sexuality, in their ways, frighten many people. I find that surprising, but it seems to be true. Some people would rather die than think, just as some others who can think would rather die than act. I have tried, in my way, to do both, to inquire, to learn, to think, and to act, for example, by writing books which do not eschew or deny that other four-fifths of our minds and hearts. Naturally, this has disturbed a number of people, writers of stagnant juveniles who would like to restrict an entire genre of literature within their own limited horizons, mediocre editors, fearful of a free literature, who are less editors than political partisans intent on imposing their own views on a dwindling readership, and the moral cretins and sexual retardates with which science fiction is so abundantly blessed. They have every right, of course, to deny themselves inordinate pleasures, and they have every right to try to persuade you to deny yourself inordinate pleasures, but you, too, in these matters, have a right, which is that of declining to enter into their small, dark, ugly, Puritanical world.

Secondly, I fear I am a “stranger, from a foreign land,” so to speak. I am a foreigner from the point of view of an establishment. I arrived from nowhere, certainly uninvited, and soon resented as an intruder. Worse, I never bothered to establish credentials, or sue for citizenship. I have not condescended to flatter an establishment, though I understand the value of such a thing in securing acceptance and advancement. I do not do that, as I find it distasteful. Similarly, I have never cultivated large frogs in small ponds. So I am an outsider, kept on the margins of the pack. As yet I have not been picked off by the leopards. I am grateful, of course, for the success that I have known, in millions of books sold, prior to the blacklisting, movies made, and the world-wide Gorean phenomenon on the internet, a country not yet under the tyranny of a single, intellectually uniform, politically motivated establishment. This success, of course, is not due to being favored and advanced by the contemporary exponents of monothink, but to my work, and my readers. The market, when it was open and free, was kind to me. One tends to be grateful for such things. I have never written for others, but for myself. To write for others is to be a hack, or, worse, a white-collar prostitute. I do not disparage individuals who write as the political winds blow, or the polls of editors indicate, but I have never done it. In evolution, it is said that genes cast the dice, and the environment selects the winning numbers. That is, in effect, what I did. I wrote as I would, as honestly, as well, as authentically, as I could. And then I waited to see what would happen, and I was much pleased. I have striven for greatness. I do not expect to achieve it, of course, but what is the point of writing, or of doing anything, if one does not strive for that? I have set my course by that star. What else is worth doing? I would rather fail in that voyage than stay at home. Wouldn’t you?

I wish you well,
John Norman

Note from E-Reads: Readers and fans interested in learning more about John Norman and his Gorean world can visit John Norman's Chronicles of Gor.