OK I get the general idea, but surely there’s more going on in the books? Is Gornthe name of the hero, it he something like Conan? Is there a big bad guy he has to fight against? Anything actually happen besides the S&M stuff?
Crap, I read a bunch of Gor too…in my defense as a teenage boy the saving throw vs. the cover art is a tough one to make.
If I remember right it’s some dude who goes in the woods or something then he wakes up on some other planet that decides he kicks ass and stuff happens. That’s right there’s giant birds he rides, Tarn’s or something like that. I refuse to look up details.
Honestly I don’t recall. I read a couple back when I was a teenager. I think the first one I read it wasn’t that overt and there was also a fantasy story going on with beasts getting slayed etc. The second one it was more overt about the sex stuff if I recall. I moved on to other things after, although at @Chronic mentions the hawt girls covers were pretty damn appealing to a teenage boy.
I was surprised (not in a judgmental way) how popular it was (and I think still is) in SL. I just assumed it had gone the way of other more niche fantasy books of that era. But its hung around.
But yeah apparently there is a market for fantasy novels with a big sexual component in them.
That’s not a huge shock right? Just two different types of fantasy - you got chocolate in my peanut butter kind of thing.
And there’s a third series (4 books) which ends the story. I mean REALLY ends the story. Covenant is still the “main” character though most of the action is other characters and he is off-stage for most of it. But he’s still an asshole throughout.
Covenant is really the first genuine anti-hero in fantasy, I think. I’ve always assumed you are supposed to detest him.
Hmm, good point, yeah, you are right. I guess the shock is that its not more common now you mention it.
The absolute worst fantasy novel I ever read was the novelization of the first Baldur’s Gate. I’d been playing the game and was bored by the storyline… so I thought “I know! I’ll read the novel and then the story will grab me!” Wrong.
The novel wasn’t boring. It just… made no fucking sense whatsoever. So I never finished the game.
The Goodreads reviews are fun:
This book is complete shit. I love it.
It’s so bad it’s brilliant, so unintentionally hilarious that it makes you cry tears of laughter at the author’s attempts at plot, characterization or sentence structure. Read while drunk/high, I guarantee you will lose it.
I read this about 10 years ago, and it has withstood the test of the time as the worst book I’ve ever read.
I knew it was going to be terrible, I knew it was going to murder my favourite character, both in characterization and physically speaking (goodbye, Xan’s doppelganger), and yet I read it because I wanted to experience just how bad it could be… I deeply regret it.
Holy crap that is awesome. Better than some ebooks I’ve paid money for!
Yours and others’ quotes make me want to read this so bad! No Kindle edition means this won’t happen, boo…
I don’t know if it was Moorcock’s goal, but I remember hating his Elric to the guts when I was a dumbass teen and reading fantasy. (edit: reading again, I didn’t mean to imply I was reading fantasy because I was a dumbass teen!)
Noooo! Elric is kinda cool. Well except for the whole murdering everyone who he loves or likes thing. But hey, nobody is perfect! :)
If I can find it (not sure I saved it) I will happily mail it to you…
Moorecock really was the anti-Tolkien. The actual characters in the stories are less interesting than the world building around the stories. Urlic was always a wet blanket but i liked the “dying world where evil was natural” theme, and it all ended on a suitably mythological and silly note. (literally).
I also liked how the universe of order was just a flat green line and a blank blue sky. Moorecock did go a bit white goddess in conversations with him outside of the fiction where he started to naval gaze about 8 pointed stars of chaos and arrows of order as being part of shared racial memories. OTOH he pretty much invented the concept of Chaos as was ported into Warhammer later on.
And here I thought you were talking about Goodkind’s Sword of Truth series…
What… what… what does this mean?
OMG Houseplants of Gor is genius
You haven’t been reading my biography, have you? :)
You also have a Wikipedia entry? Lucky!
Justin Cronin’s highly regarded novel is on sale for $2.99 today
https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B003F3PM7A/ref=nosim/themill0b2-20