First printing in1968, reading from the 1977 eleventh printing, from Del Rey, with the Boris Vallejo cover, 317 pages

Gor is a planet that is in fact a generation ship used by a race of advanced giant social insects that appear like great upright ants, and are known by the people that they have enslaved and bred as slaves, as ‘the Priest-Kings’. Gor describes a controlled orbit on the other side of the sun from Earth, through what I gather is like a dimension door in the author’s mind such as that linking Edgar Rice Burroughs alternate mars [Barsoom] with our visible mars.

As science-fiction Priest-Kings of Gor is weak and belongs in the science-fantasy category. However, the narrative pace is excellent and the moral sensibilities of the characters are more finely etched on the page than what is typically found in either the sci-fi or fantasy genre. One of the social issues best explored in this novel is the vulnerability of an oppressive hierarchy dependent on a servile laboring class. The author’s obsession with slavery, as well as his contention through the narrative that the human fear of ostracism would make them the prefect slave species for an emotionless alien race, is effectively conveyed by the passionate leading man, Tarl Cabot.

Cabot is the archetypical passionate Western man of honor. His irrational drive to act according to his just passion for freedom and humanity makes him a muscular version of a TV leading man from the very same period of this book’s composition: Captain James T. Kirk of the Starship Enterprise. In today’s cynical age it is almost quaint to read a self-sacrificing character like this.

I found Priest-Kings of Gor to be an entertaining and somewhat edifying read, whereas, in my youth I had read it as an escapist adventure.