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There is no single sort of human being; there is no single virtue. The virtue of the lamb is not the virtue of the lion; the virtue of the coward is not the virtue of the hero; that of the puppet is not that of the thinker; that of the worm not that of the eagle
John Norman believes in individual liberty, private property, a free market and limited government. Without private property you cannot own yourself; without a free market, with its millions of natural voluntary exchanges, sensitive to price information, technology and society stagnate; the market is a product of economic evolution, analogous to biological evolution; let liberals retire to their laboratories to design a better dog or cat, not a better market, which incorporates the intelligence and wisdom of generations, which is the emergent, systemic product of billions of self-adjusting economic experiments, successful and unsuccessful; and without limited government one is a slave of the state, a situation that is attractive only to those who expect to own you.
So, Mr. Norman is opposed to statism, authoritarianism, and collectivism; he is also opposed to egalitarianism, that pretty deal which requires for its enforcement the curtailment of liberty and the coercive power of the state, and redistributionism, which penalizes initiative, fosters sloth and institutionalizes theft.
He is thus in favor of a free world, a really free world, not a penitentiary in which the inmates are informed that they, at last, in their cells, are truly free.
I myself have some intolerances. For example, I am intolerant of intolerance. I find myself, for various reasons, in favor of an open society, a pluralistic society. I hope someday we will have one. Totalitarianisms, of whatever stripe or ilk, have a common arrogance, the hypothesis of the single virtue. "I cannot celebrate your difference," they say. "I fear you, for you are different from me. You will be like me. You will have my values. You will do as I say. I am the people. I am God."
”I am a libertarian, and not an establishment neosocialist, and I would have been happy to discuss the demonstrated shortcomings and dangers of statist positions. I would have been happy to talk about social dynamics, statism, collectivism, authoritarianism, the altruist-collectivistic morality, to talk about the incentive problem, the totalitarian problem, the information problem, the values of a free market, the utility of invisible-hand processes, and such.“
”Sex, as Ayn Rand tried to convince the prudes and bigots of her day, and seemingly failed, is not low, degrading, evil, and such. There are more possibilities for sex than five minutes in the dark twice a week.“
”Incidentally, I was amused to see that the programming committee was supposedly interested in strengthening its serious or literary side. I have a Ph.D. from a major Ivy League University in philosophy, and have appeared on panels having to do with Verne, Stapledon, Wells, Asimov, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Cordwainer Smith, Murray Leinster, Ayn Rand, and others. I also proposed a panel, rejected without explanation, having to do with the science fiction of Poe and Hawthorne. I suppose that is not literary enough.“
”Monothink is not the salvation of science fiction; it is its death knell as an intellectually stimulating branch of literature. Science fiction could be so much, and it is confined to so little.
I do not need this genre, but I love it. Indeed, I must love it, to have put up for years with the abusive, predictable crap of the politically blinkered ideological Pavlovians, the psychologically insecure, the emotionally immature, the morally benighted, and the sexually retarded, of which science fiction has more than her share.“
John Norman Open letter Programming Committee
The Millennium Philcon
59th World Science Fiction Convention
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U. S. A.
”The feminist prescriptions for and stereotypes of the `good woman' are demeaning, confining, and inhibitive, and irrelevant to the calm world of facts. Feminism represents as much a psychological prison for the woman as did the morality of the Victorian era."
(Norman 1996)
The standard criticism of the Gorean books, popular with those who have never read one, is that they are sadomasochistic or such. A sadist is an individual who derives sexual pleasure from the infliction of physical pain on another person, and a masochist is a person who derives sexual pleasure from the receipt of pain at the hands of another. There is not one individual in the Gorean books who meets these criteria.
In fact, sadists and masochists would seem anomalous in a Gorean culture - which does not breed them - a culture in which human nature is honestly fulfilled, rather than thwarted or denied.
The books are written from the point of view that men and women are not identical; they are different in their natures and needs. They are complementary to one another, both wonderful but not in the same ways.
The issue is not violence but dominance and strength. Many women respond to strength and force. They like it. They want it. Most women want a man capable of mastering them.
Force in itself is not evil. The male sex is naturally dominant, and the female dominance-responsive. This is an overwhelmingly general lesson among mammals and in particular primates. To be sure, it is not absolutely universal. Among hyenas, females tend to be dominant. Oddly enough, they are saturated in the womb with male hormones, which may make the difference. Among elephants and buffalo, the male will often only approach the family group when it wants sex; this means that the oldest healthy female will in effect head the male-absent household.
The Gorean point is not that one sex is better than another, but that each is unique. They are equal in value, in merit, but that is about it. The female Gorean slave with her beauty, her skills, her sex, her nature, has considerable power in her way, a point often made in the Gorean books. Fantasy in sexuality allows for a deepening and broadening of sexual relationships and an incredible enrichment of the sexual existence. A sexual life with the imagination left out seems to me to be a sexual life certainly beneath the potential of a rational animal. If imagination is permissible and commendable in life
The Gorean books are written in exquisite taste and do not contain explicit sex, by contrast with many feminist works. But I like to think that my work was the seminal pioneer work in the area of SF/F sexual fantasy.
Perhaps, but within the privacy of their own relationships, many women do live and love the life of a female slave. These women, who have joyfully relinquished their freedom for the collar or the anklet, who have knelt and kissed the whip, seem to have found the rewards more than adequate recompense
In expressing sexual fantasy, there have to be precautions to protect the participants. One would wish to screen out the sadists, for example. Further, given the jealousy and possessiveness of men, the desire to pair bond on the part of most women, and the danger of communicable diseases, I would think that the best way is in couples, and that any sexual congress involved would be private and limited to the master and his particular slave
That is an important and interesting strand of the Gorean fabric, but it is only one strand. An entire world is created here, with languages, cultures, artifacts, politics, religion, costuming, cooking, military strategies, weapons, plant life, animal life, complex social arrangements, and so on. Surely that is an incredible achievement. One could gather from your comments that there is nothing in the series but one particular variety of man-woman relationship: that of the virile male master and his lovely slave.
There are plenty of folks, such as Anne Rice, who are writing material which is far more erotic than what I do. Anne Rice's Sleeping Beauty Trilogy is light years beyond anything I would do or even think of doing, yet Ms. Rice is a heroine to many feminists . . . and is published by one of the houses that refuses to so much as look at anything by John Norman. To be sure, there are many spankings and bawling men in that trilogy. My work is short on such sure-fire items. So it looks like politics is the real answer.
It would require a feminist writer to fantasize men utilizing women for food, like Suzy McKee Charnas in her political tract, Walk to the End of the World. To me that seems sick, ugly and disgusting. Needless to say, the publishing house that published that pathology, and doubtless congratulated themselves on their political relevance in doing so, will not even look at anything by John Norman. My books celebrate virility and femininity. That, it seems, is their crime, and glory.
Is reality so terrible? That does not seem clear. We have been living with it for fifty thousand years, and sometimes we have even acknowledged that fact.
In any event, iron ore, and rain, and wind, and lightning are not voted on; they are not forwarded out of committees; they are part of the fabric of things, and intrude, however inexcusably; they seek no permissions, no approvals.
There is such a thing as human nature, the human heart, the human mind, the human body.
At any rate we did not invent the biotruths of human nature, no more than we invented vision, speech, the circulation of blood, the beating of the heart.
We did not invent men and women.
John Norman talking about Ayn Rand’s work
I recall Dominique Francon's fireplace "rape scene" very differently, although a rape interpretation is a common one.
It is abetted by Dominique's claim that she was raped; after all, who would know better than Dominique? On the other hand, one must consider the full background and context. Dominique and Roark are not strangers. Much has passed between them at the quarry where Roark was working. The sparks of desire have been flying like electricity between them. The symbolism of Roark's masterful and casual handling of the drill piercing solid rock is clear. Dominique is aroused and Roark, who is highly intelligent and very little socially controlled, is aware of this. Dominique longs for the power of Roark, and to be mastered. Roark is well aware of this. They want each other badly. However, Dominique is unable to bring to conscious acceptance that she, a young, beautiful, brilliant, sophisticated society woman, has met her master in this seemingly careless, vulgar figure of a common laborer.
I think the subtlety in Rand's part is to belie Dominique's conscious judgment, and to make it clear in the text that appropriate, perfectly suited lovers have met, wonderfully and explosively.
Rand's treatment of sex shows an awareness of power relations and the enhancement of sexuality by their frank admission and celebration. In Atlas Shrugged, even when Dagny Taggart is naked in bed, she wears an iron-link bracelet of Rearden metal like a slave cuff.
John Norman on Gorean and American society
The philosophies of statism, authoritarianism and collectivism are being imposed forcibly on the American people by the bayonets and guns of the state. I wonder how many people see through the rhetoric of "totalitarian liberalism" and recognize what is being done to them. The country is moving toward fascism, with ever more power being consigned to the omnipresent, paternalistic, later to be omnipotent, state. The imposition of philosophies is nothing new, or exotic, or remote. To be sure, I, unlike various editors who currently decide what you may and may not read in science fiction, disapprove of the replacement of the individual with the group, of freedom with conformity, of liberated thought with supervised, managed discourse. The current readers of science fiction are political prisoners, and most of them, I suppose, haven't caught on to that yet. And some of them, I gather, like it. It saves thinking, at any rate.
Most large-scale human cultures have been catastrophic failures in producing human happiness. They have seemed to offer their victims little more than a choice of miseries, irrationalisms, or actual social psychoses.
Most large-scale human cultures have been catastrophic failures in producing human happiness. They have seemed to offer their victims little more than a choice of miseries, irrationalisms, or actual social psychoses.
The male, cheated of his manhood, desires to inflict pain in revenge. The female, cheated of her womanhood, accepts and perhaps even desires pain, perhaps to punish herself for deserting her deepest self.
Yes, I think women on Gor would be more intellectually free than on Earth. Women here are under attack. They are supposed to forgo themselves and line up behind anti-maleites and Lesbics, espouse a militant hate-founded creed, and conform to generally alien stereotypes.
Many women want romance in their lives, and with men. They do not find the miniaturized, docile male, the poodle male prescribed by feminism, of much sexual interest. He is a bore and tends to be a lousy lover. By contrast, in the works of John Norman certain women are literally slaves, owned women, and they find their joy and their fulfillment in their condition as uncompromisingly dominated females. They revel in their condition; they would exchange it for nothing; they have tried freedom and found it wanting; they love their masters; they are hot, devoted, and dutiful. They are happy. A literature which does not recognize that such women exist is limited, incomplete and naive.
Economically, of course it is. The state can deprive an individual of his property, his freedom and his life. It may limit his thought and control his life as it pleases. The average American works 123 days a year to pay his taxes and the more successful work longer for the state, which harvests the fruits of their labor even more ruthlessly. The First Amendment itself is under attack from the feminist left; if not repealed, it will be reduced or nullified by judicial activism, subjecting it to creative interpretation - falsification to accord with self-serving political goals.
[84] Smith: So you are in essence demanding the freedom as a male writer to celebrate female sexual slavery. There is something incongruous in this.
Norman: I am not demanding freedom but rather calling attention to the fact that it has been denied to me.
[85] Smith: Even if some people find it offensive?
Norman: Not everyone likes my work. That is a problem for anyone who has serious edges, hard surfaces and sharp corners - clear views and something to say. I think the many thousands who do like my work have a right to see it in print, and to enjoy it. The main point is censorship versus freedom. I come down on the freedom side of things. In my view people should try to do what seems fine, and worthwhile, and even great and important to themselves, rather than conform to the preferences and yardsticks of others. To be sure, this is a recipe for integrity, not success. There is no standard, ideal human being which we should all attempt to emulate. Each human being has a right to exist for his own sake, and as he chooses to exist, subject to certain obvious qualifications having to do with sanity, civility, safety, health and love. My own search for truth in life, and in literature, has led to defeat, to the ashes and desolation of censorship, slander, misrepresentation and blacklisting.
John Norman on the meaning of the Gor Series
Essay by John Norman 2007
Ayn Rand used to insist that A was A, which amused some folks, who took her to be uttering a tautology, e.g., a circle is a circle, which would be without empirical content. On the other hand, considering her remarkable intelligence, and such, I think we might try to understand, instead, what she presumably meant, namely, try to see what things are, in their fullness, and reality.
One supposes Gertrude Stein, with her notion that a rose is a rose is a rose, and so on, had something similar in mind. So I am not enthusiastic about trying to diminish the reality of the Gorean series by telling you it is this or that, and means this or that, because it is large and complex, and means a great deal more than a description can encompass. What does a loved one mean to you? Try putting that into words.
In a sense, I suppose the Gorean experience might be analogized to an epic poem. It is not an epic poem, of course, but it is indisputably epic in its proportions and poetic, it seems, in its vision. It is, at any rate, as far as I know, the longest, most complex, most carefully worked out single-world series in science fiction, or, if you prefer, adventure fantasy, or, if you prefer, in its own genre, the Gorean genre I am not sure that my work has a target, unless it be the truth.
I have always written to tell the truth, and love the world, and as it is, in all its depth and complexity, a depth and complexity often vehemently denied.
That is one of the problems, you see, namely, that the Gorean works do not label well, nor easily occupy the currently provided, taken-for-granted, prefabricated containers. Too, they are not "pushing the envelope" or "escaping the envelope," or engaging in any of those exciting projects in which manufactured novelties compete for attention, and awards. Rather, they are unaware of envelopes. They are on their own shelf, so to speak. And, being different, they must accept the perils of difference, which, I have learned, are often considerable.
John Norman on ”Utopia“
The Universe is a Mysterious place. John Norman
It is surely not a Utopia but who would care to spend one's life in a Utopia; would you not attempt to escape at the first opportunity? Some seem prisons, others cribs, perhaps padded cells, appropriate enough for any so foolish as to seek them. One notes that most propounders of Utopias wisely forbear specificities, preferring to leave the details of their projected paradises conveniently obscure. In this way, one may fill in matters with much the same liberty as is accorded to the reader of Rorschach blots. Fill in the blank checks as you wish, but, alas, there is no bank on which they may be drawn. Too often the road to paradise leads to the gates of hell. Did not Hegel lead to the Gestapo and Marx to the KGB?
So the Gorean world is far from a Utopia. It is replete with hazards and perils, and there are humans there, and humans come with natures, natures forged in the smithies of hunger, suffering, and war; natures alert to the small sounds of a predator's paw, to the broken twig and dislodged pebble, to the scent of game, to the menace of strangers, to the grace of a lonely, uncaptured female, to the scarcity of resources. Human beings are complex, rich, and deep. Would you have them otherwise, really? But Gor is a green world, a fresh world, a world unpolluted, a world such as our Earth might once have been, and may never be again. One misses the grasses of Gor, flowing in the wind.
All uncredited quotes are from The New York Review of Science Fiction, part one in Issue #92, Volume 8, No. 8 in April, 1996 (ISSN #1052-9438) and part two in Issue #96, Volume 8, No. 12 in August, 1996 (ISSN #1052-9438).