Fictional World

Admin Number of posts : 391 Registration date : 2009-01-02

Fictional World

The current twenty-five novels of the Gorean saga present a highly
developed and vividly realized world full of richly defined peoples,
cultures, creatures, and landscapes. It is this depth of description
that, though somewhat laborious and repetitious at times, provides the
reader with such a detailed vision of what Gor and its peoples are like.

Gor exists on the opposite side of
the sun from Earth, shielded from view by the fiery center of our solar
system, and all but unknown to the peoples of our own planet. It shares
not only the same orbit, but the same general geological and ecological
makeup as the world we know, differing only enough to have its own
character and wealth of indigenous organisms. It is a planet that is
alive with natural beauty, left for the most part unexploited and
unpolluted by the men whose cultures thrive across its lands. The air
there is clean, the skies and waters are clear of poisons, and man
exists in relation to his surroundings, not in spite of them. It is a
world where men can still dream and explore, where great adventures are
a possibility, and man is not subject to chains forged through the
overgrowth of civilization and technology.

Humanity as found on Gor is
reminiscent of those peoples seen on Earth during our world's ancient
times. Cultures resembling the Greeks, Romans, Vikings, Native
Americans, Eskimo hunters, African jungle tribesmen, the Mongols, Huns,
Tartars, and Arabian desert peoples, are all to be found on Gor, along
with variations on these and others of a similar vein. These people all
live in societies particular to their own cultures, ranging from tribes
of nomads living across great plains, to sprawling city-states whose
towering walls and cylinders reach high into the sky. These centers of
humanity are by no means backward and primitive, but boast populations
sometimes in the millions, representing highly developed social systems
which date back thousands of years since inception. Their societies are
refined and sophisticated, possessing a depth of custom and tradition
the like of which is fast being lost to the peoples of our own world.
Created to compliment the nature of man and developed as a
manifestation of this, these "heroic/master" cultures seek to promote
an environment embracing humanity's natural instincts and unconcious
drive for individual fulfillment and strength. This is in direct
contradiction to more industrialized "herd/slave" cultures of modern
times which have grown to be the antithesis of this nature, confusing
progress with the intent of sterilizing instincts and replacing them
with a dependence on society's constructs and the safe banality of
sameness and conformity deemed as correct.

Gor's denizens were transported to
that planet long ago, taken from their own time periods on Earth by the
alien Priest-Kings, a race of advanced, inquisitive creatures who are
the true masters of this Counter-Earth. Though the most powerful beings
on the planet, the nature of "the Sardar" (as they are also known) is
one of resignation and observation, they leaving humanity to inhabit
the world with almost no outside interference, while remaining hidden
away in the depths of a single mountain range, unseen and
unapproachable. From here they study mankind, much in the same way our
own scientists might examine the habits of a lower life form, remaining
apart from these creatures and providing little interference that might
pollute the experiment and its natural conditions. It is they who
manipulated the geography of Gor, and through the use of unfathomable
sciences altered the position of the planet itself, moving it to its
current location and keeping it within its selected orbit, providing a
stable ecosystem for their research and own safety.

Though they leave man to develop
and exist for the most part on his own, the Sardar do enforce certain
limitations on the technological advancements that can be made and
resulting devices that can be produced. Forms of mechanization,
explosive or advanced weaponry, industrialization, communication, and
transportation are all limited to the most basic levels, this ensuring
that man will neither destroy his world, or seek conflict with the
Sardar themselves. This also effectively protects man from himself,
keeping his own ignorance from leading to ecological and sociological
lessons learned the hard way, possibly even too late to correct. While
many forms of technology are greatly limited, others are left to
progress freely, resulting in extra energies invested in them.
Agriculture and medicine are far more advanced on Gor than on Earth,
along with alternate forms of genetic manipulation and construction.
Death itself, seen as a disease, has long been overcome by Goreans, who
are capable of stabilizing the aging process, though "unnatural" forms
of death are still very much an obvious threat to existence.

In all, the world of Gor is
something of an experiment, a study created and set in motion by the
Priest-Kings, with man left to his own direction and development. What
little outside influences that are placed upon him by the Sardar, are
enacted not to alter his nature, but to compliment it and insure the
continuation of natural selection in a manner unadulterated by
unnatural technology and overly simplistic, overly destructive weaponry
that not only takes no skill to employ, but detaches the wielder from
direct exposure and accountability. On Gor man is left to his own
innate talents and abilities, with indigenous technology seeking to add
to the glory of life and humanity, not replace nature and man's own
skill with the impersonal ministrations of the machine.

This experiment by the
Priest-Kings seems somewhat fitting when considering the actions of the
author himself who, in a fashion somewhat suggestive of the cosmic
sciences of creation employed by the Sardar themselves, has envisioned
a world and brought it into realization through the medium of fiction.
Like the Priest-Kings, Norman has fabricated an entire planet and
populated it with a cross section of humanity drawn from our own
world's "Heroic Age." Through the words he writes describing the
resulting lands and cultures, he depicts an ongoing study of humanity
and society within the confines of a particular environment and
subsequent philosophy. The author portrays man as he once was and
resultingly might have become, making no excuses for the actions of
those populating his fictional land as he allows their nature to take
its own course upon a world where it can thrive, devoid of influence
which would seek to contradict or pervert it.[/size][/size]