Ducks: Queen of Frickin' Everything

Good Gad! I'd managed to totally push the existence of the Gor novels out of my mind. They were something of a joke amongst my crowd of s-f fans back in the day (the 1970's, to be precise). I dimly remember seeing John Norman with his significant other at a con, once. The SO in question was behaving like a perfect little Gorean female...complete with ostentatious neck jewelry that really, really looked like his damned collars. Gah! Now I'm going to have to spend another ten years pushing those images out of my mind, again.

Mentioned this to the spouse, who used to be a president of the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society, again, back in the day. He reminded me that the Gor novels stirred up a lot of controversy, even then. The Gor apologists insisted they were a throwback to the fantasy pulps of the 30's. People like George Scithers and L. Sprague De Camp, who remembered the fantasy pulp novels of the 30's having actually been around then, or shortly thereafter, pointed out that if there were slave girls in the old pulp stories, the point was to get them out of slavery, not rape them while they were enslaved.

Sigh. It's a pity Dark Horse is stooping so low as to bring these out.