Is the 38th of John Norman's Chronicles of Gor. Published just last year, in 2024.

Stone me. He's been writing them for almost 60 years now, and they do appear to be being published by a real publisher as opposed to a vanity publisher. Clearly there are enough people into sword and sandal themed BDSM to make them turn a profit. I wonder if Second Life is still just a containment zone for Goreans like it was in the 2000s. I dare not investigate. Incidentally, the current publisher, Open Reads Integrated Media, formerly E-Reads, which pioneered the commercial sale of e-books back in 1999, has been reissuing all the Gorean novels all the way back to the 1960s with new cover art that is entertainingly wonky though thankfully seems to be real art and not slop churned out by AI. Given that the original printings had cover art by Boris Vallejo and other top drawer fantasy artists, this is... well, it's something. And the original cover to Hunters of Gor in which a nubile slave girl is taken captive by a pair of lesbian amazons will remain unintentionally a source of great humour mainly because of the goofy expression on the slave girl's face as if she's really regretting having pledged a sorority that hazes its prospects.

But still. I had to go and see, out of morbid curiosity, what is going on in the world on the other side of the sun where men are real men, and women are grateful, nubile, universally hot, and always willing to hop aboard their menfolk's blue veined custard chuckers. So I found and downloaded a mildly naughty PDF of this. Oh boy.

Executive Summary

The official erotica of the Dull Men's Club.

A bit more detail, please?

Agnes Morrison Atherton is an astrophysicist working at a small observatory in New Mexico when she is caught snooping in computer systems she shouldn't and locates some strange asteroids which are perfectly spherical and made of metal and is called into her boss's office. After a very lengthy expounding on how Gor is real and how it stays hidden on the wrong side of the sun because the Priest-Kings (they're the intergalactic mantis demigods that rule it) fiddly-fuck with gravity to make it look like it's not there, and how the Kurii are a bestial race of Others trying to conquer Gor (and Earth) from their steel worlds, she makes a mistake of drinking the coffee they've given her, and it is drugged. She is then bound and taken to Gor where she, in the first person, is forced to adapt to a new reality as a pleasure slave for well built warrior types.

That's it. That's the plot.

Oh, of course, she finds happiness in slavery, because of course she does. The usual Gorean tropes are there. Disbelief at how Gor only exists in novels. Finding herself dripping like a fucked fridge at being force to kneel to the whip. Being well used. Increasingly inventive ways in which she and her fellow chained naked slave girls can be made to submit or be "well used." Catfights with fellow slave girls in their cages. You get the idea. But the thing that really sticks out with this novel is just how, well, utterly boring it is. That takes some doing.

Let me put it like this. John Norman really loves his infodumps and expository dialogue. In the first chapter, while Agnes is still on Earth and before she's been taken to Gor because reasons, there's a huge infodump about the asteroid belt and how asteroids are formed and the different type of them. Mid conversation no less. There's another one about how radio astronomy works. Then once she's been taken to Gor and is shown her duties, there's more infodumps about the custom of pierced ears and how they denote a slave, the number of veils that a free woman of Gor wears on her Robes of Concealment and what this means as to her social standing, the political situation between Gor's various city states, the wildlife, the agriculture, and so forth. Somehow she knows all this despite being told repeatedly that "Curiosity is not becoming in a kajira" which implies that either she's hiding in cupboards and eavesdropping on the men, or they're telling her these things because to them, a stunningly gorgeous brunette astrophysicists wearing just a whisper of satin and a doe-eyed expression is part of the furniture on Gor. Though we never see that happen either, and hiding in cupboards and eavesdropping? That's a whipping offence on Gor.

Hang on. Wasn't that the plot of one of the very early Gorean novels, where Tarl Cabot sent his lover as a slave into the big bad's estate to act as a secret agent because he knew Cernus of the House of Cernus would assume that a pleasure slave is nobody and nothing important and she could hoover up all manner of information about his plot to bring down the city? Why yes, yes it was! Then again, I suppose after 38 books you can't help but recycle plots.

But yes. Back to the infodumps. They are legion. And they are constant. And they crowd out the bit that people really like the Gorean novels for, and that's the kinky sexy bits. After all, that's what they're known for, right? Sword and sandal themed BDSM. So where's that?

Well... there isn't any. It's just skated over. There's one part where Agnes is kneeling before her master. Her description of the following sexual encounter is to mention that "I felt myself oiling" followed by begging to be "used" and then skipping to after said use without even an ellipsis.

*fart* FUCK OFF NOVEL.

You can't sell us a book with the promise of non stop kinky sexy sex like what Gor is known for and thud and blunder and then not deliver. What the fuck is this shit? A bit onwards and there's yet more infodumps about Gorean politics and customs. Nobody cares that coffee, or black wine as it's known on Gor, is predominantly a product of the southern parts of Gor near the city of Turia where there's big coffee plantations for miles around. Nobody cares about the difference between a Ta-Teera and a Camisk (both types of slave girl clobber). We just want to get to the porking already. That's the only reason anyone reads Gor and the only reason anyone has read it since Slave Girl of Gor back in the 1970s. Which this one is yet another rehash of. It's like that scene in I'm Alan Partridge where the title character is getting down to business with a lady and start talking about the pedestrianisation of Norwich in order to "keep the wolf from the door."

I don't know. Maybe I'm out of touch. Maybe people in current year are so jaded by freely available Internet pornography that when they've got five wet and willing smoking hot sex slaves clinging to their legs and begging to be "well used" they'd rather just play Crusader Kings III instead. Because that's what this is like. "Please Master. Take me Master." "Not now, love, I've just declared war on the Hanseatic League."

While all this is going on, Agnes, or Mira as she ends up being called, gets sold through a whole series of masters ending with the Lady Temione of Hammerfest, a free woman and planter who deliberately buys beautiful slave girls to put to work in the fields because the rumour is she's ugly as sin. In reality she isn't and ends up being enslaved and liking it as well because of course she is. Meanwhile Mira, or Agnes, or whatever she's called this week just happens to overhead loads of stuff about the political situation down the river Vosk and endless bloviating about same. There's more skated over sexy sex bits, one of which has her beg her master - "I oil! I gush! I beg!" - for a seeing to, which he refuses her. At this point I started flicking ahead in the book because I'm not trawling through 900 pages of this tedium (yes, that's how long my naughty PDF was) to find out if there is, in fact, a plot. There isn't. There's a bit where she's captured by Kurii but by this point I wasn't bothered.

At the end, she's back with one of the masters she was bought by and facing a life of happiness in slavery with him, and because on Gor they have eternal life potions, she will live, erm, happily ever after. Yay...?

Now I have excoriated books on this place for being sick and wrong, for being pretentious, badly written, or squalid wish fulfilment, or even all of the above. But never have I had to excoriate a novel for being boring. However, now I have. Well done, John Norman. You've excelled yourself. You managed to make what could have been a rollicking tale of thud and blunder from the perspective of the nubile odalisque who clings to the studmuffin hero's mighty thew and discovers things about herself in the process, into an uphill struggle without the gratuitous sexy bits, and what approaches to same there are are so beige it was like listening to a phone sex line run by Microsoft Narrator. That takes some doing.

Or does it? Well, as it happens while doing this writeup I asked ChatGPT to produce a scene in the style of John Norman's Gorean novels in which a slave girl was introduced to her new reality as a pleasure slave on Gor. What it came out with was indistinguishable from the various equivalent scenes in this. Right down to the writing style. Does this mean that John Norman, who is 93 years old according to Wikipedia, and who has been writing Gor for nigh on 60 years, didn't actually write this? Does this mean he is simply putting his name to AI slop? Hmmmm. I think we should be told.