Tal Traveler

Before you lies the plains camp of the Tuchuk tribe, a community of men and women sharing a belief in and commitment to a particular set of ideas and principles coming together to share them.

The word "Gorean" comes from a series of science fiction novels written by John Norman. In these books, the author created a "Counter Earth," the planet Gor, a world not dissimilar to our own in outward appearances, but quite different in the course its history has taken. It is an innocent and pristine world; a world full of possibility and future, a young world where the land is still free and the air is still clean. It is populated by human beings, gathered in cultures and civilizations much like those written of in history books... descendants of men taken from the great peoples of Earth's past and transported to Gor, there to build and begin anew. It is our own history, altered and set forward again to create a world that might have been.

So if the books are fiction, where does the "philosophy" come from? It is in the actions of these people, in the descriptions of their society and customs, and in the contrast that this fictional world is to our own, that the reader finds the philosophical points made by the author. What the Gorean novels present are these examples, collected and packaged in a fictional form and manifested upon an imaginary world. A world serving as an allegory of sorts, a means of expressing and demonstrating clearly considered philosophical and sociological assertions through the stories told of that fictional planet and the characters who walk upon it. A model built and populated by the author as a way to explore and illustrate specific and purposely repeated ideas through the creative medium of an ongoing science fiction saga.

But the true foundation of this philosophy is not found in the books of John Norman, though they are what define it. These ideas are buried inside of ourselves as human beings, waiting to be found and embraced along with the often forgotten natural world that surrounds us. It is our forgotten nature, and our lost past. In this way the Gorean Novels serve to awaken something that is already within, or perhaps reacquaint us with a part of ourselves that our own modern world has clouded and caused to be forgotten. Not a text book for living, but viewpoints illustrated through fictional example, with the reader left to consider, agree, or refute. Not people trying to be characters out of a book, but individuals trying to live as is natural to them, as feels right to them, and taking some inspiration from the ideas an author shared in his work. In this way, the customs and traditions of the fictional people of Gor, their outlook on life, family, community, society and man's place in the world, serve as a model whose aspects can be a part of one's own real life.

Perhaps, here and there, men will form themselves into small communities, where the names of such things as courage, discipline and responsibility may be occasionally recollected, communities which, in their small way, might be worthy of homestones. Such communities, emerging upon the ruins, might provide a nucleus for regeneration, a sounder, more biological regeneration of a social structure, one not antithetical to the nature of human beings

-Explorers of Gor-