When Tarnsman of Gor was first published in 1966, author John Norman introduced the world to Tarl Cabot, a man ripped from his homeland and cast across space into the savage world of Gor. A world of magic and mystery, where the kidnapped prisoners numbering in the thousands were slaves, and power was wielded by a jealous few known as the Priest-Kings, their will enforced amongst men and women through torture, bondage and sexual rites. Part science fiction, part adventure novel, the stories in the world of Gor would unfold to show Tarl Cabot's growth from a novice to a man whose fate might determine the course of every man woman and child on Gor. Over the course of twenty-six novels and more than forty years, the Gorean Saga is one of the longest-running epic fantasy series in publishing history, with millions of copies in print worldwide in numerous languages.
John Norman, pen name of John Frederick Lange, Jr. (born June 3, 1931), is a professor of philosophy, but is better known as the author of the Gor series, which was popular in the 1970s and early 1980s with millions of copies sold, and still has many fans. He holds a Ph.D. from Princeton University and was a Professor at Queens College of theCity University of New York, in New York City
Norman is a follower of Edgar Rice Burroughs, and his influential Gor series bears parallels to Burroughs' John Carter of Mars. His novels include lengthy philosophical and socialogical dissertations criticizing the malaise of modern society (everything from common dishonesty to nuclear holocaust). A wide variety of societies, cultures, moral concepts, and technologies are described in depth in his novels; however it is always within the context of the male adventure genre, and, as such, families, children, and other mundane aspects of real life are generally absent and those roles are left undiscussed.
His fiction places emphasis on living in accordance with a Nietzsche-esque natural order, sponsoring a hierarchy of talent, especially strength. Based on this assumed hierarchy, combined with a particular usage of evolutionary psychology to analyze gender differences, he contends that woman is the submissive natural helper, and figurative slave, of dominant man. His work often takes this observation literally: heroes enslave heroines who, upon being enslaved, revel in the discovery of their natural place. Norman and Goreans have been criticized for this tenet of what they consider honoring nature. The extent to which Norman intended this philosophy to be taken literally, rather than as a vehicle of sexual fantasy, is debatable.Bondage in the novels and in his Imaginative Sex Guideguide is overtly and completely sexual in nature and while the philosophy presented is unquestionably that of male dominance, the male characters are themselves often temporarily and elaborately enslaved by powerful females.
It should be noted that Norman's interpretations of evolutionary psychology represent one set of viewpoints among many, few of which define men's and women's roles as John Norman does. Rather, evolutionary psychology provides theories and evidence that may be interpreted and used in many ways, like almost all science fiction.
Professionally, John Lange has been an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Queens College,CUNY for some time; as their philosophy department has not yet gotten a web page at this time and web wanderers are locked out of the faculty evaluations, I can't say definitively that he's there to this day – but the best information available indicates that he is.
As John Lange he has written 'The Cognitivity Paradox: An Inquiry Concerning the Claims of Philosophy' (© 1970 Princeton University Press, ISBN 691-07159-4) and edited C.I.Lewis' 'Values and Imperatives: Studies in Ethics' (Stanford, 1969).
The Gor novels, his best known works, span 25 books written from 1967 to 1988, plus three installments of the Telnarian Histories, two other fiction works, and a nonfiction paperback entitled Imaginative Sex which was out of print for many years but has been reprinted.