Linus&#8217;s secret revealed!
<p>Yeah, that whole Finland thing? It&#8217;s just a cover story.</p>
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<p>Back in the early Seventies an otherwise unassuming professor of philosophy named John Norman had a minor <em>succes de scandale</em> with a series of books set on a planet called Gor, a sort of counter-Earth in the same orbit as our planet but on the exact opposite side of the sun.  These were quite like Edgar Rice Burroughs&#8217;s &#8220;John Carter of Mars&#8221; novels and probably patterned after them &#8211; sword-and-planet swashbucklery in a miliieu that mixed tropes from Earth history with plot hooks involving aliens and exotic super-science.</p>
<p>What made them scandalous was Norman&#8217;s sexual ideology. On Gor, women are slaves, and <em>like</em> being slaves.  A lot.  Norman had this idea that the unacknowledged heart of female psychology is a desire to be dominated into a state of ecstatic sexual surrender.  It is fair to note that this isn&#8217;t completely crazy; studies of female sex fantasies consistantly report rape and domination as the #1 most popular theme (a female friend of mine, commenting on this fact, calls these the &#8220;It&#8217;s not my fault&#8221; fantasies).  But fantasy isn&#8217;t reality, and the firestorm of indignation you&#8217;d expect eventually got Norman quietly blacklisted at all of the major SF imprints.</p>
<p>I read the first four of the Gor books so long ago that I had almost completely forgotten them.  If you&#8217;re wondering why, three reasons.  First, Norman&#8217;s worldbuilding was pretty good, considering; the man knows a lot of history and ethnography and I had fun playing spot-the-references.  Second, this was before the post-Star-Wars boom in SF publishing, when the total published output of SF and fantasy was so much smaller that anyone who read as fast as I did more or less had to take anything they could get. Third: while I never believed Norman&#8217;s ideology or identified much with his unintentionally funny caricatures of masculinity, it was sort of clinically interesting to watch him unfold the ideas and see how far he&#8217;d push them.</p>
<p>But I lost interest pretty quickly and forgot about these books for nigh-on forty years.  Until last night, when I dropped a joking reference to John Norman on someone much younger than me, found myself explaining it, hopped on over to Wikipedia, and discovered a <em>shocking fact</em>!</p>
<p>Er, no, not that Norman is still cranking out Gor e-books and up to #32 (&#8220;Smugglers of Gor&#8221;). No. The <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gor">Wikipedia Gor page</a> has a <em>map</em>.  A map, not featured in any of the paperbacks, that reminded me of a toponymic detail meaningless to me at the time, but which since 1992 must assume <em>ominous new significance</em>.</p>
<p>Like Edgar Rice Burroughs, John Norman frequently played with the fabulation that the Gor books are no fiction but an actual chronicle of a counter-Earth, and that his heroes are real people who traveled, through the instrumentality of the alien Priest-Kings, from Earth to Gor&#8230;or from Gor to Earth.  Even now, Goreans may walk among us, marvelling at our decadence and pitying our unhappy, undominated women. Perhaps exhibiting strange powers of interplanetary techno-wizardry born of civilizations more ancient and advanced than our own.</p>
<p>Strange powers of interplanetary techno-wizardry, I say.  And there, on the map of known Gor; far to the north, beyond the Sardar Mountains where the Priest-Kings have their impenetrable fastnesses; north as well of the port city of Lydias at the edge of civilization; between the vast boreal forests and the frigid arctic; there is a place where hardy Vikingoids do the hardy Vikingoid thing with the huge battleaxes and furs and drinking horns and yeah, you know the drill.</p>
<p>And on the map of Gor, the name of that place is writ clearly: <strong>Torvaldsland</strong></p>
