Worldbuilding Wednesday 8/29/18: Kajira

I don’t quite approve of Gor, so here is some humor to make it more palatable.

Kajira is the term used for the eternally youthful, eternally hapless, eternally helpless slave girls found in John Norman’s Gor series. Gor, for those not in the know, is a Conanesque  planet superficially similar to Earth and sharing the same orbit, but on the opposite side of the sun so it remains undiscovered.  The first novels (there are 33 all together) are about Earth men who somehow blunder their way there and have all sorts of swords n’ steroids barbarian adventures. Or earth women, but their adventures consist of being kidnapped, enslaved, branded, and auctioned off to these manly men like commodity goods.

If you’re thinking this is a pretty hot sexual fantasy, you’re right. John Norman got to it decades before any number of erotic sword-and-planet romances currently being penned by women in Alpha Male lust.

The earlier books made some pretense of plot but the later ones just go on and on about the psychological benefits of this kind of female slavery, the characters’ pontificating acting as thinly veiled editorialization by the author, who takes a special delight in having accomplished or educated women fall into slavery and find contentment with their lot. Not cool.

One of the points Norman harps on a lot is how, once a slave, the girls lose their identity and become virtually interchangeable with each other as they are  traded from man to man, losing their original names and each subsequent name given to them by their owners. The names are usually simple two-syllable ones like Tuka, or salacious, but PG-rated, ones like Pretty Ankles. (In spite of the books’ covers, especially Boris Vallejo’s, sexual acts are not described in detail. “I took her in the furs” is about as much as Norman goes into it.) Both of them are here.

Kajira of Gor