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3.0 out of 5 stars
Tarl Cabot in Darkest Africa, Jun 7 2001
By A Customer
This 13th Gor novel marks the halfway point in the series thus far. (As I write this the 26th book is being prepared for publication after a 13 year hiatus and a 27th volume has been announced.) In this one Tarl Cabot once more goes on a mission for the Priest-Kings, this time to recover the shield ring of the Kurii (last seen in Volume 10, Tribesmen of Gor). During his wanderings through the African landscape of the unexplored equatorial region of Gor he encounters intrigue, treachery, a hidden empire, crocodilian river tharlarion, cannibals, a boar-like tarsk, pygmies, army ants, amazons, an 8-foot thick rock spider, a lost city, a ring of invisibility, and the Kurii. Sounds pretty exciting, doesn't it? Unfortunately it's not as exciting as it sounds. None of those things show up until you're about 200 pages into the novel! Somehow the villains in this one don't seem as villainous and the dangers don't seem as threatening as they should be. In his better adventures Tarl Cabot usually meets up with a stereotypical rogue who is charming, knowledgeable, a true warrior, and knows how to handle women a la Gor (i.e., terrorize, brutalize, and rape them). In this one the role was divided between 2 characters: Ayare who is the smart charmer and Kisu who is a violent lout (which is good on Gor). It just doesn't work as well. But the real reason this one didn't click is because the flow of the story was continually broken up by interminable discussions of Gorean philosophy. At 464 pages this may very well be the longest of all the Gorean books (some of the later ones have more pages but they also have bigger print). The difference in length is taken up entirely by the theory and practice of the enslavement of females. The author may have invented a few new ways to restrict his slave girls both physically and psychologically but philosophically speaking I don't recall anything in this book that he hasn't already beaten to death in previous volumes. At this point in the series he is just preaching to the converted---if you've bought in to his point of view, it's redundant and if you haven't, further haranguing will not change your mind. I realize that a lot of the people who buy his novels are into bd/sm and therefore expect this but I suspect that there are a lot of readers who are not. It would better serve the stories and all of the readers to confine the bd/sm aspects to example and leave the unnecessary and unrealistic philosophical discussions out.
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1.0 out of 5 stars
The worst Gor novel..............by far, Jun 15 2000
Long winded, low on plot, high on pages upon pages of boring description. The only redeming feature of this book was the Chris Achilios cover on the UK edition. If you are a fan of Gor just skip this one, it adds nothing.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Way to go stirner!!!, Oct 12 1999
By A Customer
As an avid Gor fan I must agree that the Master/Slave relationship is a big part of the Gorean ethos. I feel that John Norman is trying to put over a fundemental point that men and women have stopped talking to each other about what concerns us most the continuation of the human species. Procreation has become a chore and increasingly if you listen you can hear the words "men (or women just don't understand us women (or men)" how can we if we don't or won't or can't talk frankly and openly to each other. The situation he uses may be distasteful to some but it is merely a metaphor for our inability to talk to one another. She is offered the choice "Talk or Die" I know I would rather talk. The book offers marvellous views of life up the amazon (Gorean equivelant) or the nile it is a book of discovery and adventure. the correctness is subjective.
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