As a boy, I was a huge fan of ERB’s John Carter of Mars stories and was looking for something else along those lines. As The Encyclopedia of Fantasy (1997), a huge tome sitting here on my bookshelf, notes, the first Gor books were passable Edgar Rice Burroughs pastiches, and that’s the impression I came away with too. If I read any of the sequels, I can’t recall - although I remember enjoying the first book, at least the first part of it recounting Talbot’s strange experiences (involving a mysterious package, I believe) and subsequent relocation to another world. He quickly adapts, becoming a Gorean swordsman and assimilating into the culture of his adopted planet. There he encounters a Barsoomian-inspired sword-and-planet environment. That would be Tarnsman of Gor, first published in 1966 by Ballantine, which recounts how Earth professor Tarl Cabot is mysteriously transported to our solar system’s hidden tenth planet orbiting the sun in a position exactly counter to Earth’s. I’m positive that I read the first book in the, sometime back in junior high.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |