Quote:
Originally Posted by MrsJoseph
But before I go... Gor? You know I have a general idea what they are about but never read them.
|
I've never read them either, and don't think I'd really care to, given what I've read
about them. Not my style.
And it seems the quality really suffers as you go farther along, because the books more obviously become what TV Tropes calls Author Appeal Fetish Fuel kind of like Piers Anthony and his panty fetish, according to the people who've actually read that far. That
Houseplants of Gor parody I linked above is said to be pretty spot-on.
But they are popular enough that there's an entire Gorean roleplaying lifestyle that's sprung up around them (mind you, apparently it's looked down upon by more mainstream BDSM practitioners because it lacks a safeword). e-Reads, which re-publishes them as e-books on Fictionwise (along with plenty of other sf/fantasy/mystery/romance backlist titles), has a
blog post about them here (warning: NSFW because the Gorean lifestyle is supposed to involve customary nudity, along with the slavery, for women).
So it maybe it might be something you'd at least like to try once, just to know for sure.
But you might prefer to spend your money on Lillian Stewart Carl's (a friend of Lois McMaster Bujold)
Sabazel series, for which the last couple of volumes are priced ridiculously cheap (you can get the entire set for maybe $5 on sale) and which the author says got its start in the
Amazons anthology series edited by Jessica Amanda Salmonson, which may be a name you might recognize if S&S is your favourite genre, or Robert Adams'
Coming of the Horseclans, which is apparently a minor classic.
Hope this helps.
ETA: I should mention that I've read neither
Sabazel nor
Horseclans yet, but I mostly trust the taste of other authors who've gotten involved with those settings in some way or another.
In fact, if you ever run across George Alec Effinger's hilarious
Maureen Birnbaum, Barbarian Swordsperson spoofs in a used bookshop, snap them up. They're well worth it.