Quote from: GRIM;960495Be happy to.

Great! The schedule is in my signature.

Quote from: Voros;960369I checked and the other book I read was Rogues of Gor. It was an obssesive series of slave/master scenes and dialogue between a male dom and female sub with some very clumsy biological determinist rhetoric that was not presented as a sf conjecture but as a fact that those on Earth foolishly denied. If you cut that out there wouldn't be much book at all.

That may be atypical, you have much wider knowledge obviously but just randomly picking up one of the books and encountering page after page of slave/master dialogue is not what the average science fantasy reader is looking for. I have no problem with pornography or BDSM but I think most of those not interested in either of those things should select the books with care after some research.

In terms of world building, obviously Brackett and Burroughs are adventure writers first, just as was REH but I think it is easy to underrate the imagination of Burroughs in particular, he invented so much that became fantasy cliche later.

And Vance to me is a much superior world builder, especially in his more sf work rather than science fantasy: the worlds in Languages of Pao, The Eyes of the Overworld, The Last Castle and The Dragon Masters are all terrifically imaginative and inventive.

I have read book 2 and parts of 1. There's lots of adventure in these, but also some girl slave stuff. The main protagonist (who is actually a hero here) objects to the slavery and he frees some slave girls. Maybe he is converted later?  But book two can definitely also be read as "women rulers = bad" in between the adventuring. I have actually never encountered this preference/kink in fantasy/sf before. Swooning damsels yes, but not this (and even the damsels are much rarer in literature than people say). I have to give the guy a point for originality at least

Quote from: Trond;960578I have read book 2 and parts of 1. There's lots of adventure in these, but also some girl slave stuff. The main protagonist (who is actually a hero here) objects to the slavery and he frees some slave girls. Maybe he is converted later?  But book two can definitely also be read as "women rulers = bad" in between the adventuring. I have actually never encountered this preference/kink in fantasy/sf before. Swooning damsels yes, but not this (and even the damsels are much rarer in literature than people say). I have to give the guy a point for originality at least

He is "converted" several books later, after being captured and his captor, an woman, puts him in front of the choice to plead to be enslaved or to be killed. Which is why I say Tarl suffers from extreme PTSD or similar, and all the moralizing is due to him losing faith in the ideals that require men to protect women:).

The fun part is that Tarl explains his actions by the "this is natural" spiel, while in "Imaginative Sex", Norman himself calls this "the naturalistic fallacy", or something to this effect;).

Quote from: AsenRG;960653He is "converted" several books later, after being captured and his captor, an woman, puts him in front of the choice to plead to be enslaved or to be killed. Which is why I say Tarl suffers from extreme PTSD or similar, and all the moralizing is due to him losing faith in the ideals that require men to protect women:).

The fun part is that Tarl explains his actions by the "this is natural" spiel, while in "Imaginative Sex", Norman himself calls this "the naturalistic fallacy", or something to this effect;).

So he wrote a book about the kink specifically? How interesting. I checked it out on Amazon, and had some fun when I read the reviews and part of the Foreword :

Here's one:
"Extremely offensive as a woman.!!"

And a completely different point of view:
"I owned a copy back in the late 70's but lost it. For many years I searched to find another copy. In fact, I met my late husband who owned a book store by asking for him to see if he could find it. In the 90's I called the publisher only to be told by a very snooty woman, their company didn't produce pornography like that. .......... I hope you enjoy it as much as I have."

Here's from the foreword by a feminist (purportedly) :
"John Norman is a bad boy, okay? He's a sexist pig. And I own just about everything he's ever published; it's some of my most consistently rewarding jackoff material."

Looks like John Norman is a bad boy indeed

Quote from: Trond;960677So he wrote a book about the kink specifically? How interesting.

Yes, and I take it that the views in it, being non-fiction, supersede the thoughts of the character in a fictional book;).

"There is a technical term for someone who confuses the opinions of a character in a book with those of the author. That term is idiot." - S. M. Stirling

Meh, loads of writers, particularly in sf use their books to lecture the audience through a transparent mouthpiece. I don't always buy the author's claims about the intent of their work, best to look at the actual text not the author's retroactive rationalizations of the same.

Quote from: Voros;960805Meh, loads of writers, particularly in sf use their books to lecture the audience through a transparent mouthpiece.

That's their problem, and Stirling's rule still applies.

Quote from: AsenRG;960807That's their problem, and Stirling's rule still applies.

Yeah, it can be impossible to tell when a character is presenting the author's views. Rorschach is the most popular character from Watchmen, and apparently Alan Moore is a bit horrified by this. Mark Knopfler got in trouble for the lyrics of Money For Nothing, even though he wrote it as the ramblings of a "bone head" as he put it.

Quote from: Trond;961470Yeah, it can be impossible to tell when a character is presenting the author's views. Rorschach is the most popular character from Watchmen, and apparently Alan Moore is a bit horrified by this.

I'd say it's fully predictable for Rorschach, but yes, I can see why he would be disturbed by this:D!
And yes, you don't have to like a character to write about him.

But my point was that Stirling's rule that I quoted above also applies to writers who use characters as mouthpieces;).

Quote from: AsenRG;961482I'd say it's fully predictable for Rorschach, but yes, I can see why he would be disturbed by this:D!

Slight sidetrack--why do you think people like Rorschach? I like him because he is the only one who didn't betray his beliefs. The rest of the "heroes" to my way of thinking became villains.

Quote from: Tod13;961584Slight sidetrack--why do you think people like Rorschach? I like him because he is the only one who didn't betray his beliefs. The rest of the "heroes" to my way of thinking became villains.

There's more than one possible reason why that I've been able to identify.
First, he's the only one who refused to compromise, as you said:).
Second, he died for his beliefs, making him the tragic hero:p.
Third, he's obviously a person who has snapped, but snapping is what made him dangerous. More than one person, especially anyone who's frustrated IRL, would like to believe snapping would make them more powerful, not less;).
Fourth, he's got no really special powers, yet he made the obvious "bullies" fear him instead of the other way around, in a situation that would have normal people broken.
Fifth, he's inventive and concentrated, which I'm willing to give him.

And just for the record, the only one I liked was the Catwoman stand-in:p. She just bent to superior power and to the fact that she couldn't do anything about stuff that has already happened. I can't fault her that, but everyone else in this movie was, in different ways, a failure:D!

Who is the "Catwoman stand-in"?

Quote from: GRIM;960176We playtested some, though that tends to be in short con-style sessions. Tends to play out much like the books, minus the lecturing. That is the culture etc as a backdrop and flavour and the game itself being more intrigue and swashbuckling and secrets.

The objection does seem to be rooted in the maledom nature of the world. There's plenty of (some borderline fetishistic) female revenge porn/dominance/empowerment games out there that pass without comment.

There are?

Just throwing this out there, but a while back I wrote a review of the first Gor novel.

Quote from: Dumarest;961622Who is the "Catwoman stand-in"?

Laurie Juspeczyk a.k.a. Silk Spectre, the one that is doing the Batman stand-in (but it was years since I watched the movie).