Free Amazons of Ghor

Convention skit
Title	Free Amazons of Ghor
Fandom(s)	Darkover and John Norman's "Gor" books series.
Author(s)	Randall Garrett & Vicki Ann Heydron
Date(s)	1979 (first), others
[[File:pdf of the play is here: Free Amazons of Thor, Archived version|thumb|center]]
Related articles on Fanlore.

Free Amazons of Ghor is an "Original Musical Skit by Randall Garrett & Vicki Ann Heydron." The title puns on the Free Amazons of Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover series and a highly sexist (but at the time very popular) sword-and-sorcery series by John Norman which is set on the counter-earth planet Gor.

It was performed at several Darkover Grand Council Meetings, several Fantasy Faires, and several Fantasy Worlds Festivals. It was supposed to have been presented at Westercon in spring 1979 but was canceled due to Randall Garrett's serious illness.

The first performance was at the January 1979 Darkovercon in California.

It starred Marion Zimmer Bradley as Ms. Bee, Randall Garrett as Norman Gorman. Other cast members were Amazons, "The Editor" (who probably represented Donald A. Wollheim of DAW Books), Shrinking Maiden, Chief Barbarian, various barmaids, and a chorus.

The presentation at the 1980 Fantasy Worlds Festival starred Tracy Blackstone as the part of Ms. Bee. This may have been due to Bradley's recent minor stroke; Bradley was at the con but was perhaps not taking on AS many duties.

About

Despite the comments that the play was never published anywhere, it was offered for sale in 1979 as an audio cassette. Some of the proceeds went to Friends of Darkover.

... a musical comedy written in 1979 by Randall Garrett, a science fiction writer and close friend of MZB, and Vicki Ann Heyrdon [sic], his wife, also a writer. At the time, MZB and John Norman were DAW's two best-selling authors, so the premise of the play is that their fictionalized alter egos, Ms. Bee and Norman Gorman, agree to collaborate on a book, to 'rope in both your fans.' "Both our fans? Are you implying that we have only one fan each?" Randall wrote the words, and Vicki wrote the music. It was performed at one of the early Darkover Grand Council Meetings on the east coast as well was several Fantasy Worlds Festivals in California... I [Elisabeth Waters] checked with Randall's agent, Tracy Blackstone, who tells me that 'Free Amazons of Ghor' was never published anywhere. Sorry, but those are the breaks. And before anyone tries to persuade us to publish it, permit me to point out that we don't own the rights.

Bradley Mentions the Play in 1985

Bradley addresses the separation of the sexes in the editorial of Free Amazons of Darkover, the professional anthology with includes Bradley's story "Knives":

Elisabeth Waters makes her home in Berkeley, and lives in my household with two other women, a grown boy, a dog, and two cats. We sometimes call it a Guild House, sometimes a “pagan convent”" The grown boy, my son Patrick, causes very little conflict in this household of females (even the cats and dog are female) and Patrick, 20, occasionally comes in handy to take out the garbage—a line stolen from a delightful parody play entitled Free Amazons of Ghor, by Randall Garret and Vicki Ann Heydron—Mrs. Garrett— The basic premise of Free Amazons of Ghor is that John Norman and I should collaborate on a DAW best-seller; the ensuing ructions are hilarious, not to say hysterical.

Other Fans Comment

A fan in 1979 wrote:

Since I have NOT read John Norman's "Gor" novels, a lot of the jokes went over my head, but it was hilarious anyhow; it had to do with MZB and John Norman collaborating on a novel, with characters acting out the various scenes they thought up, after which one or the other of the authors would get up and scream with rage. Paul Zimmer, half-naked in a loincloth and shield (and nothing else) was a Typical Barbarian Hero; there were two Free Amazons, rather on the chubby side; two Assistant Barbarians, who were big blonde teenage boys about fifteen (making it extra funny, as the Amazons were both obviously in their thirties) and Randall Garrett making bad jokes as an Editor and singing a long patter-song which went halfway between Gilbert and Sullivan and Tom Lehrer. Well, at least it wasn't U.S.S. Trek-a-Star! About the best acting was done by Paul Zimmer, who glowered and slammed the women around very realistically, (earlier he had done a demonstration of swordplay) and by Dorothy Breen, who was wearing a typical pulp-magazine-cover as a costume (or almost wearing it) and they had some monstrous and rib-tickling horseplay; the whole thing was written by Mr. Garrett and was an obvious spoof on ALL sword-and-sorcery novels, not just Darkover and GOR.

In 2013, Dorothy J. Heydt wrote:

There's no Lysistrata-like action in the story, though the Free Amazons end up treating the Brawny Barbarians the way the latter had treated them. With each instance, one of the authors objects noisily to the other's plot. Finally, the characters themselves rebel, saying, "Treat us like people, not cliches," whereupon the editor sings a song whose burden is, "You've got to make it good to be a seller!"

Dorothy J. Heydt wrote in 2017:

Okay. Do you know about "FREE AMAZONS OF GHOR", a fan-musical by Randall Garrett and Vicki Ann Heydron? It used to get performed at Darkover cons. I've seen it twice, and the second time I snagged a discarded copy of the script.

The plot, if we may dignify it by that name, is as follows:

Back in the day, the Gor books and Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover books were both published by the same house (would that have been Ace? DAW? I forget), and selling very well.

So...

The EDITOR gathers Norman Gorman and Ms. Bee together and suggests that they collaborate.

Loud shrieks of "NO!" from both parties.

Their arguments are interspersed by repeated confrontations between the Chief Barbarian and the Shrinking Maiden, the latter presently joined by a pack of Free Amazons.

Repeat. Repeat.

Finally the characters themselves interrupt the EDITOR and the authors, and tell them what *they* want out of a story, which is to be portrayed as human beings.

Perhaps it will be counted as "fair use" if I quote from the final aria, sung by the EDITOR:

"About three thousand years ago,r

The Greeks were fond of fighting.

They laid their Trojan neighbors low,

And found it quite exciting.

The story-teller, Homer,

Made his tales of that fight glow,

The people loved each one of them,

And passed them on, and so

It's likely that old Homer made a decent bit of dough!

You've got to make it good to be a seller!"

Tag lines:

"How about SLAVE BOYS OF DIMOVER?"

"NOooooooo!"

"Absolutely not!"

"Maybe next year ...."

The Gor Books

Back in the early Seventies an otherwise unassuming professor of philosophy named John Norman had a minor succes de scandale with a series of books set on a planet called Gor, a sort of counter-Earth in the same orbit as our planet but on the exact opposite side of the sun. These were quite like Edgar Rice Burroughs’s “John Carter of Mars” novels and probably patterned after them – sword-and-planet swashbucklery in a milieu that mixed tropes from Earth history with plot hooks involving aliens and exotic super-science.

What made them scandalous was Norman’s sexual ideology. On Gor, women are slaves, and like being slaves. A lot. Norman had this idea that the unacknowledged heart of female psychology is a desire to be dominated into a state of ecstatic sexual surrender. It is fair to note that this isn’t completely crazy; studies of female sex fantasies consistently report rape and domination as the #1 most popular theme (a female friend of mine, commenting on this fact, calls these the “It’s not my fault” fantasies). But fantasy isn’t reality, and the firestorm of indignation you’d expect eventually got Norman quietly blacklisted at all of the major SF imprints.

Sample Text

• 

  first page

• 

  page fourteen

• 

  last page

Further Reading/Meta

• For something completely differnt...What literary series should Turbine mine next? - Page 3, ^{Archived version} (2010 discussion)

• Linus’s secret revealed!, ^{Archived version}, August 26, 2013 (2013, a lengthy discussion about the Gor books)