As you might have noticed, I've lately been working my way through Alan Burt Akers's stories of Dray Prescot, a sword-and-planet series that began in 1972 with Transit to Scorpio and then continued through 52 volumes for the next quarter-century. The books aren't deep, but they're fun, engaging yarns of the sort that used to be commonplace in fantasy and science fiction. When I talk about "pulp fantasy," these are precisely the kinds of tales I mean. They're the stuff on which the hobby was founded.
Early on in Transit to Scorpio, the protagonist, Dray Prescot, a Napoleonic era English sailor, is in the "swinging city" of Aphrasöe, home of the technologically advanced Savanti who are responsible for bringing him to the planet Kregen. While there, the Savanti instruct him about Kregen and its various continents and the peoples who dwell on them. One of those continents is called Gah.
"You were telling me about Gah," said Maspero, walking up with a wine goblet for me. He drank from his own.
Again Golda laughed; but this time a different note crept into her deep voice. "Gah is really an offense in men's nostrils, Maspero, my dear. They delight so in their primitiveness."
Gah was one of the seven continents of Kregen, one where slavery was an established institution, where, so the men claimed, a woman's highest ambition was to be chained up and grovel at a man's feet, to be stripped, to be loaded with symbols of servitude. They even had iron bars at the foot of their beds where a woman might be shackled, naked, to shiver all night. The men claimed this made the girls love them.
"That sort of behavior appeals to some men," said Maspero. He was looking at me as he spoke.
"It's really sick," said Golda.
"They claim it is a deep significant truth, this need of a woman to be subjugated by a man, and dates right back to our primitive past when we were cavemen."
I said: "But we no longer tear flesh from our kill and east it smoking and raw. We longer believe that the wind brings babies. Thunder and lightning and storm and flood are no longer mysterious gods with malevolent designs on us. Individuals are individuals. The human spirit festers and grow cankerous and corrupt if one individual enslaves another, whatever the sex, whatever specious arguments about sexuality may be instanced."
Golda nodded. Maspero said: "You are right, Dray, where a civilized people are concerned. But, in Gah, the women subscribe also to this barbaric code."
"More fools them," said Golda. And, then, quickly: "No – that is not what I really mean. A man and a woman are alike yet different. So very many men are frightened clean through at the thought of a woman. They overreact. They have no conception in Gah of how a woman is – what she is as a person."
Maspero chuckled. "I've always said that women were people as well."
In case it isn't obvious, this section is intended as a rebuke of John Norman's Gor series, the first volume of which was published a few years before Transit to Scorpio. For some reason, I didn't remember this section of the novel. Reading now, though, it's quite striking, especially when one considers that the Gor books were contemporary with the Prescot novels, so Akers's critique was very much of the moment. So far as I know, Prescot never visits Gah in any of the novels. Whether this is the only reference to the continent and its barbaric customs I can't say.
Ken Bulmer (the author's real name) was a bit of an oddity. He has the style and massive output of a hard-working pulp author, but he only started writing in 1952 as pulp magazines were dying off, and was still working on Prsecot books up until 1997, leaving a few unfinished a few years later when he died in 2005. Relatively few of his works appeared in magazines first, with many going straight to mass market softcover.
ReplyDeleteHe also took another common "old school" pulp author quirk to an extreme, using upwards of fifteen different pen names over the years - more if you count the "house names" he shared with other authors. He was also prone to providing fictitious biographical sketches for some of his many pseudonyms, often designed to make it seem like his books were being written by an "appropriate" nationality, eg his Viking series was done under the name Neil Langholm who purported to be Danish, and I believe the Sea Wolf series were by Bruno Krauss, supposedly a author of German descent.
Bulmer's always been quite popular in Germany, more so than in English. Many of the Prescot books were published only in German despite having been written in English (Bulmer was British) and some only got English printings in the 2010s . There were even a couple of cases where the new publishers were forced to re-translate from German volumes owing to the English transcripts having gone missing. Bit like Perry Rhodan in some respects, although those started in German and have had a shaky and incomplete history of English translation.
I never read any of the Gor books, but don't the knuckle-dragging aspects emerge - or become more prominent - only after the first few books in the series?
ReplyDeleteI read one Dray Prescott book - the one where he explores the dungeon of a motyr lord. Very D&D.
Re: Gor, yes, that's correct.
DeleteI don't remember that obvious dig at John Norman, either. But then, I only read Transit to Scorpio, and that was only for a secret project to write a very mean parody of Dray Prescot to tease a friend who was hooked on the series and had almost all the books.
ReplyDeleteI read a lot more of the Gor books, but only because some of the (non-B&D) cultural details were moderately interesting, and because Norman's obsession with gender-based slavery and other examples of bad writing made I and my friends bust up laughing. I think the funniest line I read in a Gor book was "It's no wonder that some men scream and throw themselves to the ground writhing, just to feel the freedom of movement."
Oh man, Slave Girl of Gor... I haven't thought about that in a long, long time. It's part of this heritage, though, like it or not. I recall a friend had nearly all the Gor novels, I have no idea where he'd collected them all, this was the mid-80s and they were reprints. But then, he was an obsessive in the best sense, he had everything of that sort - all the well-known stuff too, of course. He also loved the Piers Anthony books (never cared one whit for those, too punny by half), Thomas Covenant (those I did like, for the most part), Saberhagen's Swords (those were great), you name it. He died years ago. I still wonder what became of all his cheap paperbacks.
ReplyDeleteThe best John Norman critique is probably still Houseplants of Gor
ReplyDeletehttps://mindstalk.net/houseplants.html
I need to read more S&P. Just one of those blank spots in my experiences, and one I know I should fill. Read the first five Barsoon books and Lin Carter's Tower at the Edge of Time. At some point I want to read the first Gor book, because it was early enough it became influential despite its... uneven quality, but I will definitely put some Dray Prescot books on the list too.
ReplyDeleteDo yourself a favor and read de Camp's Planet Krishna stuff at some point as well - or just read the GURPS sourcebook, if you can find a copy that doesn't break the bank to buy. Does a decent job of taking sword & planet tropes and making them feel a bit plausible while humorously poking a few holes in the worst of them. De Camp isn't the most engaging of writers, but he's at his best when working with his own original material rather than his attempts to ape Howard.
DeleteWell, he's at his very best when Fletcher Pratt is doing a lot of the heavy lifting as a co-author, but that's a whole other thing.
Will do! Pratt and de Camp are also a bit of a blank spot for me. I've only read The Roaring Trumpet out of The Compleat Enchanter and didn't hugely care for it.
DeleteOh, I did read Almuric too, can't believe that one slipped my mind.