**SOME MINOR SPOILERS, THOUGH NOT MANY AND I CAN'T BE ARSED TO GO THROUGH AND SEEK THEM OUT INDIVIDUALLY SO I'M TACKING THIS ON THE FRONT HERE INSTEAD!**..........Volume 6 of The Gor Chronicles and we see Tarl Cabot the great warrior originally of Earth becoming first a slave, then a pirate and a captain, and finally an admiral. It's all rather exciting stuff as Tarl assumes an alter ego, namely Bosk of Port Ka, which apparently is much like Mos Isley(from Star Wars) in that it is a veritable hive of villany and scum and pirates and so on. Oh, and it's also home to those great and respected slavers who 'know well how to treat their slave girls'. Well, you can't argue with that then can you really?So Bosk, as he now is chooses slavery over death and mopes about it a good deal afterwards and generally goes around feeling sorry for himself. Meanwhile he enslaves the woman who originally made a slave of him and then proceeds to treat her like less than nothing until, of course, he falls in love with her. He does that a lot it seems, almost to the point of falling for a different slave girl in each book. What gets me more than anything about this is that he was originally supposed to be searching for and rescuing his very first lover who's name I now forget due to him being so prolific in the treating-them-like-the-lowly-slaves-they-are-then-falling-for-them-department. Nobody's expecting him to become a monk while he searches for her of course but you'd think he might think upon her from time to time. In fact the only time he seems to think about her or even mention her at all is generally as an afterthought appended to end of the book, usually in the last page of so.Anyway, I expected this one to be very heavy on the mistreatment of slaves since that's basically what the cover blurb hints at, and also because a number of the reviews I've read seem to have been complaining about just that. I can't say I felt it to be particularly harsh with reagards to slaves, certainly no more so than almost any of the other books in this series so far, and in fact a good deal less than one or two.So, another rollicking good adventure on Gor. I liked it well enough, although it's not my favourite so far by quite a margin. I think that honour is still held by the first book in fact.Very enjoyable, though not quite so much as the others. Still very good though.
Tarl Cabot is forced by a bunch of swamp hillbillies to choose between honorable death and ignoble enslavement, and much to his surprise (and ours), he crumbles and chooses enslavement. High seas piracy, derring-do, and light BDSM ensue.Tarl's stint as male slave doesn't last long, and the femdom he endures (enjoys?) is novel but unimaginative, but this experience resonates throughout the rest of the book. He abandons all pretense towards honor, courage, and love, considering himself unworthy. He even abandons his mission to serve the Priest Kings. And instead, he embraces the lowest qualities a man can achieve.At least, that's what he claims to do, but really, despite his protestations to the contrary, his actions pretty remain consistent. And like any good installment of a series, he experiences no true change, and by the end, he winds up right back where he started.
