Tal, Goreans,

Greetings, visitors,

Welcome once again to the Booknotes column. We have a new book to begin once again, the seventh volume in the series, and it promises a somewhat different viewpoint than we have had to date. Let us therefore open the cover of "Captive of Gor" and see what delights await us.

Chapter One

Here we find ourselves viewing the scene through the eyes of a narrator who is by no means Tarl Cabot, even under his new name of Bosk, nor even a man, but a woman who announces that her name was formerly Elinor Brinton and that her master is now that same Bosk, and that she was formerly of Earth, and that she is a kitchen slave worth fifteen pieces of gold. This shows that we are still on the gold standard as far as slave prices are concerned, of course. In later books women become cheaper.

Elinor tells us a little of an Earth upbringing in which it is plain that all the plums that life has to offer the rich and beautiful fell effortlessly into her lap, with the signal exception of any kind of meaningful affection, let alone love. Indeed, her own mother callously poisoned seven-year-old Elinor's favourite pet for some trifling offence. (Pay attention. This will be important eventually - and it's one of Norman's better pieces of storycrafting.) As an adult, Elinor has little interest in women and less still in men, except as objects to be manipulated or spurned as it pleases her whim. Although she is independently wealthy thanks to her late father's estate, she manages to get her mother to pull enough strings to land her a modelling job, and she might have led an empty but largely blameless life thereafter.

But while she is still a young graduate - only a few weeks after she has begun her modelling career - she suffers an abrupt shock. In the privacy of her own apartment, and with absolutely no memory of how it got there, she discovers a painless but burned-in mark on her left thigh, and a matching character drawn on her mirror in lipstick. Unsurprisingly, she faints.

Chapter Two

When Elinor recovers from her swoon, an unknown but short-ish time later, her woes are compounded by the discovery of a snugly-fitting locked steel collar on her throat. It bears an illegible inscription in an unknown alphabet (we can probably hazard a guess as to the nature of the inscription). This discovery and a very pardonable sense of fear doesn't keep Elinor from taking steps to deal with the unknown intruder who has committed these acts. In the usual tradition, her telephone doesn't work, and when she goes for her gun she finds it not merely stolen but, to rub it in, melted into slag; and her horror is lent fresh wings by the realization that no mere Earth science could have done this.

Having no telephone and no weapon but a kitchen knife, Elinor is at first relieved to hear the police calling, and then terrified by the realization that she hasn't called for the police - could not - and so this is surely an impostor.

She has the initiative to escape via the window on a rope of knotted sheets, though she has to leave the knife behind, but no sooner has she touched down than she is blindfolded and gagged by someone who says in satisfaction "We have her".

Chapter Three

Elinor has been taking some more swoon-time, and comes around again to find herself in her own apartment, bound hand and foot with silken cords. Capturing her has been a task for four men, and she hears plenty to puzzle her; some talk in an unknown language, and some mysterious conversation in English. She is doped, and informed that she will be returned for at midnight and "crated for shipment". Other than that, she is told nothing of what will happen to her, and she is not encouraged to be curious, for "curiosity is not becoming in a Kajira". At this point the dope kicks in.

Hours later, when it wears off, she awakens, alone and bound, and after a brief and unsuccessful struggle with her silken cords, she remembers the knife that she left behind and uses it to cut her way free. She quickly dresses, grabs a few valuables and flees. She is conscious that she is acting strangely and starts at every shadow, which is only reasonable, and she is startled to find that when a man looks at her more intently than she likes she cannot reduce him to a quivering, apologetic heap with a mere scowl, which has always worked until now and been her major form of social interaction with the opposite sex. Getting into her Maserati car, she lights out for the tall timber.

She spends a good deal of the next hour in a car chase with a mysterious stranger in pursuit, but it is evident that she does know how to use the high-performance car she owns, and through a combination of bold driving and the use of her wits she manages to give her pursuer the slip. Thus heartened, she finds a wayside motel and holes up there.

Believing that she has put paid to the plans of her kidnappers, she is dismayed almost at once to find the same letter as was drawn on her own mirror - the same as is branded into her thigh - drawn once again in lipstick on the mirror in her motel apartment. Desperately, and not without some courage, Elinor flees once more, sprinting for her car and flooring the accelerator as soon as its engine fires. Soon she is being tailed once again, not by a car this time but by what for all the world seems to be a small black flying saucer. Driving up side roads doesn't help her. Driving across the fields doesn't either, but it does get her car irretrievably bogged down and she is forced to abandon it - and she looks on helplessly as the UFO disintegrates it.

The final flight, on foot, does not last very long. Soon Elinor finds herself in a forest clearing, and there, waiting for her, is the leader of the quartet who captured her the previous day. He rebukes her for being troublesome, but informs her that she is now exactly where he would have taken her himself - "Point P" - and has her fitted with an anklet.

Chapter Four

A man emerges from the small UFO that was chasing her, and Elinor now sees a larger one in the clearing - a ship, she calls it. Seeing unconscious girls being loaded aboard it, she makes a desperate bid for freedom, using the last weapon left to her, the knife, but is promptly zapped with what we might as well call a phaser. Even the man she knifed during her intended escape seems to bear her no ill-will for this, and the leader calls her "superb" - as though, there being no real risk of her escaping, they might as well applaud her spirit for the attempt. All that annoys the unnamed leader is that she scratched her face in the fight, and might have disfigured herself.

He deigns to explain how it was that her every escape attempt failed. Of course she was carrying a trace all this time - in her powder compact, as it happens, as well as in her car - and during the final stages of her flight, when it seemed as though the small UFO couldn't find her, it was in fact herding her. She was never in with a chance of escaping. The man shows off a bit more of their superior technology, and then as the sun rises on her last dawn on Earth, as well as the first one she has ever actually seen, she is forced on board the ship, loaded into a transparent cargo tube, and feels the ship take off. She is still conscious when she becomes aware that they are in free-fall and sees a man go by in metal-soled shoes. Presumably these are magnetised, affording him traction on the steel deck, and so they don't have artificial gravity, which must rule out any slight chance that the Priest-Kings had anything to do with this operation, and the forces Elinor feels during the closing paragraphs of this chapter must be to do with acceleration; but the man introduces anaesthetic into her breathing air, and yet again Elinor loses consciousness.

We have probably knocked out and revived Elinor enough times for one instalment, so let us leave her for now on her mysterious voyage she knows not where (we do, though), until next month when she will find that instead of being a captive of no-one and nowhere in particular, she is now truly a "Captive of Gor".

I wish you well,

Socrates