As I mentioned in my review for Assassin of Gor, I bought this book at Patten Books to round out my collection of early Gor paperbacks. I paid $3.95 for it, which indicates how much I enjoy the fantasy series so far.
It’s fitting, I suppose, that I read this the most immediately after Assassin of Gor, as this book is the prequel. In it, Earthman is grabbed while camping by a spaceship and taken to a castle-like home of his father, another Earthman taken to Gor. He’s trained to be a Gorean warrior and is sent to the city of Ar to steal its home stone and to reduce its strength in the eyes of the other city-states on Gor before it becomes the dominant nation.
The book is shorter than the later ones in the series, and it reads almost as a tentative dip into the fantasy milieu. At the end, Tarl Cabot is returned to Earth and wonders if he’ll ever see Gor again. Of course, with forty years since the first novel in the series and twenty some years and twenty some novels gone by, we know he will. Still, I found it interesting to see the first try. And I’ve got number 2 around here somewhere; I know Ko-Ro-Ba, Cabot’s home city, will fall and Talena, his love, will be taken somewhere on Gor, but I don’t know how. Which is worth finding out.
The new (!) editions below are expensive; if you look around, you can find these books for a couple dollars each in used bookstores (in different editions). Yes, they’re paperbacks, but take it from your gentle author Brian J. that there are few authors for whom he’ll spend green on the paper. Norman is proving to be one. John D. MacDonald is the other.
