Big series when I was a kid: Horseclans and Gor

I haven't read any of these, and as much as I want to judge Norman as a weird pervert, the sort of things that are apparently in modern romantasy books written for and by women, and considered acceptable, if not lauded, by the same, suggests that Norman was simply just ahead of his time.

 - A YouTube comment

Both of these series were very long sword & sorcery or sword & planet series, and when I was a kid and teenager in the 80s, they were everywhere. I saw them at bookstores, in the book sections of regular Big Box stores, and at the library: the Gor series and the Horseclans stories. In the 80s there were twenty-five Gor books, and they were picked up again in the 00s and thirteen more were added.

I think they have a probably deserved reputation as being creepy and perverted, but as pointed out in the post above, that doesn't mean that John Lange (John Norman's real name) was wrong, merely that we wish that he were. Paraphrasing an old Heartiste quote blended with a Neal A. Maxwell similar quote, people tend to want to believe pretty lies rather than harsh or "wintry" truths. But pretty or not, what is true is true, and isn't likely to change based on our opinion of it. To also quote little Benji, facts don't care about your feelings. A little bit ironic that he uses that line to peddle plenty of lies that he feels very strongly about, but that's neither here nor there. The quote is still true.

In any case, I've read the first book of the Gor series, and I believe the second. The first book is quite good. I had a copy back in the day, which I lost or got rid of or something, and I bought a copy on the used market more recently. It's readily available in multiple formats, but the older 80s version with the Boris Vallejo cover is the one that you have to have. It's likely Vallejo's single best piece of work. 

Word on the street is that the series quickly devolves from this strong start, which—as I said—starts out as a pretty good Barsoom pastiche, except with a slightly more interesting social setting, if not necessarily in any other dimension, and I have no problem really recommending it to any boy or man who wants to be entertained in a story written especially for his sensibilities. Although, as noted in the quote above, apparently women love it too, although they hate to acknowledge that they do, and have to both change the name of the genre, the context in which those ideas appear, and dress it up as something else in order to admit—grudgingly—how much they actually enjoy that too.

The Horseclans was the other big series of sword & sorcery, but like Gor, was also kinda not. If anything, it seems to resemble the setting of Thundarr the Barbarian more than anything else; a far future post apocalyptic setting that resembles sword & sorcery but has a wildly different backstory in most respects, taking place in a post nuclear war America with people who are clearly lingering devolved groups of Mexicans, Greek Orthodox, cowboys, hippies (who don't eat animal meat, but which have now become enthusiastic cannibals), and more. 

Anyway, I don't think that either of these series are necessarily really great books. I've only read one of the Horseclans books, and it was decades ago, and I don't remember thinking that it was super great, although in retrospect, I might like it better now than I did then, when I was still more in a Raymond Feist and that style of fantasy. Although Ken Kelly's clearly Frazetta-inspired style of cover art was obviously something that caught my eye on this series.

I think especially in today's market of "for modern audiences" fantasy, trawling through older stuff is likely to be more productive in finding something that's actually entertaining than trawling through the modern bookshelf (if you can even find a decent library or bookstore, which is another sad development over the last few years.)