You did it! We figured this one out! It is a truth universally acknowledged (by me for certain) that the Bitchery pretty much knows everything, and really, it's true. Scroll down to see the solution for this HaBO - and many thanks!
Welcome to Tuesday, better known here as HaBO Day! HaBO, or “Help a Bitch Out,” is our attempt to reunite readers with romances that they can remember parts of, but not the important parts like the author’s name or the title. In other words, what my brain is like 99.4% of the time.
This HaBO is from Lauren, who is looking for a book she wasn’t allowed to check out of the library:
I’m hoping the Bitchery can help me find a book I’ve been wanting to read for a loooong time. It’s a book I found in the library in late middle school/early high school (so 1989 or 1990 or thereabouts), but my mom wouldn’t let me check it out. It’s one of maybe three books my mom ever said no to, so I’m guessing it was racier than your average 1980s romance novel. I did get about ten minutes of browsing time before I was dragged away, and this is what I remember:
— It was a fairly thin book, and had a white cover with a picture of a girl on it, and I think some kind of sci fi city in the background or on the back cover.
— It starts out with the heroine shopping. She is wearing a slutty schoolgirl outfit, and notices people noticing her. She wanders into a dusty antique shop (as you do) and gets kidnapped by the creepy store owner. When she wakes up, she’s in some kind of metal box and tied down. She may have been naked, or not. I think she gets drugged or falls asleep, or both.
— When she wakes up, she’s on another planet. I believe it’s a desert world – I vaguely recall some harem imagery (but I could be confusing this with a different book).
— Towards the end of the book, she has gained some power and is (I think) fomenting some kind of feminist dissent, but was also falling for the head dude.
— There were some very erotic (to my young teenage self) sexy times. Possibly some bondage or master/slave stuff.
If this rings any bells, I will be forever grateful!
This description is tickling my memory in a weird way, but I can’t come up with anything when I Google (anything relevant and not freaky, anyway). Do you recognize this book?
I can’t name it but it sounds like the plot of a number of Sharon Green books which I discovered around the same time. A feminist undertone to a riff on the Gor-style Sexxy Fantasy books popular at the time.
Now I want to know what it was too.
After looking around, I would have to suggest the Gor series by John Norman, there are a lot and they have white covers. Or possibly an Anne McCaffrey book (no idea, must throwing stuff out)
After reading your comment Olivia, I went back to the description, and OMG it does look like the plot of a Gor book. No wonder her mother took it off her. In the Gor books though, in the few earlier ones I read, the lady usually enjoyed being made a slave.
I would actually go with the Gor books as well. Maybe Kajira of Gor or Slave Girl. The lead female, you can never call them heroines in the traditionally sense, in Kajira is a bit more feminist than the others but not by much.
It might (*might*!) be Anne McCaffrey’s “Restoree”, which was one of her first published novels. I haven’t read it since I was a teenager, so my memory of it is super-fuzzy (also, no dragons), but I remember the heroine woke up in a literal new body after being transported across space and possibly time, and maybe there was a harem?
So, for the record, Gor is not feminist. Its possible one of the female characters has a feminist dialogue going on, but you should be aware that John Norman’s books center around a notion that women are naturally subservient and lesser than men. And that every woman wants to be a slave.
If this is a Gor book (very possible), be aware that there’s gonna be a lot of misogyny, just by its very nature.
Its also NOT a romance. I think Gor is considered soft sci-fi or kind of space opera.
Also, John Norman was a pretty awful human being and he wrote the Gor series in response to the 1970s feminism at the time.
Sorry, 1960s feminism.
The Gor books are also pretty badly written too. Seriously I’ve read several and they are hard to sloughed through. They are just a rip off with of the John Carter of Mars books by Burroughs but a lot more misogynistic.
That said Kajira of Gor does start out with shopping, a trip to an antique store, and the lead female being drugged and placed in a metal box for transport. Once on Gor she wakes in a harem like area.
Sorry for typos. I’m on my mobile and autocorrect hates me
There’s no harem in Restoree. I <3 that book.
I also <3 these HABO posts. 🙂
I agree with Ms Pym… I haven’t read that specific book, but it sounds a lot like the Sharon Green books I did read back in the 80s. (Looks like she has re-issued a lot of her books as ebooks on her website, so you could poke around and see: http://sharon-green.net/index.html )
If there is more curiosity about john norman and the gor books, I just found a thing on him done by i09, where in the comments someone reproduced “Houseplants of Gor” which reproduces hilariously exactly what the Gor books are like. It took me decades back in time and I was howling with laughter. Here it is
http://www.rdrop.com/~wyvern/data/houseplants.html
Here is the i09 thing on john norman
http://io9.com/5783833/john-norman-the-philosopher-who-created-the-barbaric-world-of-gor
where they interview him and he is quite affronted by BDSM but okay with the whole Master/Slave thing. He is/was a philosophy professor who loved Nietsche.
Oh my God I just laughed SO hard at Norman’s belief that the Gor books are “intellectual and philosophical.”
That’s hilarious and completely untrue. Theyre clearly inspired by some philosophies, but omg they’re space opera fantasy novels.
Also, now I remember another reason I only read one. Norman is wordy as hell! Good grief, whatever happened to veracity?
Thanks so much for your help! I’ve been wondering about this book forever. After looking through the suggested books, I can definitely rule out Restoree (although I’m so going to read it – I can’t believe I missed any Ann Mccaffrey book! I worshiped her when I was younger, and read all the Pern books several times). The covers of the Sharon Green books (especially the Terrilian books) seem right, but the descriptions don’t ring a bell at all.
I *think* it may be Kajira of Gor. There’s a sample of the first chapter on Amazon and something about it seems familiar. No wonder my mom hustled me out of the library so fast!
I was too late to this HaBO!
But, while you figured it was probably the Gor books, the set up is pretty similar to the McCaffrey short story “Thorns of Barevi” (in the Get Off the Unicorn story collection). Colorado coed in regular clothes snatched up and taken to space, escapes being slave to live in the wilderness in stolen flitter craft, and then … rescues an alien male. Ah. Requisite blow-my-teen-mind thing going on there.
I think it’s worth reading it in the original short story form – although it got expanded into the Freedom series, (Catteni) – which I liked but which didn’t seem to have the same impact when read as part of a full length novel.
Dear Lauren, You have exactly described the beginning of Kajira of Gor by John Norman. This man definitely believes women are second class citizens, subservient to men in all things. I know because I forced myself to read quite a number of them, despite the way they revolted me. Except for the first book, each one basically retells the same story over and over and over. I suspect certain politicians have been influenced by Norman’s view of women.
There is another parody called Bejeweled Bikers of Gor that I can share with everyone if they like. It’s hysterical. Someone in the Second Life Gorean community wrote it.
How did I not know this subculture existed? Is my life better or worse now that I know? What exactly is the Second Life Gorean community? How is this still a thing (to quote John Oliver)? My Habo was answered, but it has led to so many more questions. 🙂
Please do share Bejeweled Bikers of Gor! I’m guessing it will be better than Emily’s magic bejeweled codpiece…
Courtney, I think you mean Bejeweled Gay Nazi Bikers of Gor. It’s brilliant. There’s also the somewhat older and equally on point and hilarious Houseplants of Gor.
Here’s the link. It’s pretty funny and a great send up of Norman’s books and writing style.
http://books.adult-fanfiction.org/story.php?no=544176437
Okay, so what I want to know is, how come we’ve all read the Gor books!?
I THINK I found them in my teens in second hand bookshops in the f & SF section, having read burroughs and conan. It was long long ago….
I read them because it is important to know how the enemy, in this case the anti-feminists, think. Sadly, John Norman’s view of women, while crudely expressed, are pernicious and invasive. Worse, many of our conservative politicians reflect them.
Sure, we can laugh at Norman and caricature him, but there are men, and evidently a number of women, who agree with him and think these are the roles for which women are best suited.
Women and children all over the world are at risk from men (and women) who think like John Norman.
Gloriamarie, did he posit any religious/spiritual basis? Or was he totally secular? I got out before reading too much of it.
I once had dealings with a man who renamed himself “Tarl Cabot”. Not a good sign, I thought.
Oh dearie me… I read them sometime in the 1980s. I want to say, “no, no religious basis” but to be honest, I don’t really remember. What I do remember is that it seemed to me he was writing about a society in which it was just so deeply ingrained that women were so much less than men. I read several of them but could not manage them all.
As for a man who renamed himself Tarl Cabot, I’d think about a restraining order.
There is really no religious connotation to the books. I’ve read about 6 of them and recently. I wanted to see what the hype was all about when a friend mentioned them to me.
As with any fantasy book there is a religion set up in the world but it’s not a huge part in most of the books. Viking/Norse mythos for one group of books and things called the “priest kings” for the other
His work is really more about women ” secretly yearning to be at the feet of men” and that kind of trope. Gor is all about men being men and superior and women being second class.
They’re pretty terrible books.
I read a Gor book because I thought the cover looked awesome. You have to understand, I have a really high tolerance for genuinely, upsettingly trashy books. At the time I was reading Conan – books and comics, Piers Anthony, all the old school romances (it was the only school at the time)…I was so sure Gor was going to be the best and most awesomest series ever. It was not. Houseplants of Gor is seriously better written. You can’t adequately parody something that appalling. It’s not sexxxy and illicitly tittilating, it’s boring and mind searingly stupid.
I just read a few of them innocently decades ago, and never thought about them again (other than meeting Tarl) until this HaBo came up. I googled Gor and John Norman – that’s how I found the i09 and houseplant thing – and the internet said there are 26 Gor books. 26.
@Anna Richland – hah! I vaguely remember reading an Anne McCaffrey shirt story with thorns in the title – your plot description doesn’t ring any bells, but the “blow my teenage mind” part does.
There are 33 books. He self published that last 7 because DAW refused to publish anymore and dropped his contract. Probably because they are so misogynistic
@cleo – that’s supposed to be short story, not shirt story. Sigh.
33. Good lord. I’m a bit surprised at the fuss. I think I got the idea from them, and conan and burroghs and all those old school sci fi dudes (isaac azimov, ee doc smith, robert heinlein etc etc) and then my subsequent feminist reading that that’s how men really think of women. The Gor books are probably part of why I became a radical feminist.
@Des Livres I’m amazed that he had enough relatively fresh ideas for 33 books! As someone earlier commented they are honestly the same story over and over again. Lol
Fascinating discussion. I encountered the Gor books when I started reading science fiction in the 70s. I married a man with a broad and varied sci fi and fantasy collection, and I remember being pretty appalled by the Gorean tales I read. (I badgered the spouse into weeding them once we had kids.)
Aside from the misogyny, I seem to recall freaking pages and pages devoted to descriptions of the proper design and use of stuff like collars and chains. Taken as either science fiction or porn, it was pretty much snore pie with yawn sauce. All this and offensive too!
The scariest thing to me is that some of the controversies in the science fiction community indicate that Norman’s “philosophy” is still alive and well in some quarters.
Oh, lord, the Gor books. I remember stumbling upon them when I was a teenager discovering SF/F. I read one and kept thinking that something would happen to move the woman to a position of agency. And, oh boy, did it move . . . in the opposite direction.
You can still find old Gor books in used bookstores. I highly suggest running in the opposite direction.
Personally, I’ve never picked them up. I’m familiar with the parodies, but I first encountered them via the Goreans in the BDSM scene and that was enough to leave me wanting nothing to do with them. The real problem is that the writing is so atrocious that they even fail as porn, and yet there’s a subculture that’s dedicated to acting as thought they’re accurate psychologically and just no.
My dad apparently read a bunch of them back in the 80s. He and my mom disagree on how many, since he insists he stopped early when they started getting weird and she disputes that. This is a really weird thing to know about one’s father and I honestly wish I didn’t. On the other hand, it means he is never, ever allowed to judge anything I pick up ever again on pain of being reminded of this lapse in good taste.
There should be a group for those of us whose teenaged minds were blown by Thorns of Barevi. I know several other women who’ve had that same experience.
And to further horrify or amuse you, there are at least 2 80’s movies based on the novels. Hysterically bad–one of which was done by MST3K. Not so much with the extreme Gorean bdsm lifestyle, but with more 80’s hair, cheese and Jack Palance.
I had no knowledge of the Gor books; however, the mention of the two 80s movies reminds me of a first date movie whose title I thought was Caveman of Gor. (It was likely Gor, and I’m just misremembering.) What I do recall is that the movie was so bad that it was funny.
I first came across the books years ago when I spent $5 for a paper shopping bag full of paperbacks…. At the time I looked it up… I found there were RPing sites along with instructional ones telling someone how to act. This was back in ’98 or so.
If I remember right the non-slave girls were unnatural, bitches, or lesbians.