In The Novels
In the original novels, Goreans are simply those humans who live on the planet Gor. The back-story of the setting holds that various humans were transported from Earth to Gor in ancient times, a process which continues at a low volume in the present mostly in the form of Earth women taken to Gor as slaves.
In the books, although most slaves on Gor are female, most females are actually free women. The ratio has been presented as approximately 40 free women to one slave girl (though the various hints about Gorean demographics given in different Gor novels are not entirely consistent and are difficult to reconcile with references in the novels to the cheapness and abundance of female slaves). Male slaves are less common than female, and are usually criminals, debtors or prisoners of war, and are mainly used for manual labor. Female slaves are called kajirae (singular: kajira) and male slaves are called kajiri (singular: kajirus) in the Gorean tongue. Slave ownership in Gor is not necessarily gender-oriented, i.e., a kajira can be owned by a free man or a free woman (or a family, or even a city, then being referred as "city slave"). Similarly, free men or free women can own male slaves.
Read more about this topic: Gorean
Famous quotes containing the word novels:
“Compare the history of the novel to that of rock ‘n’ roll. Both started out a minority taste, became a mass taste, and then splintered into several subgenres. Both have been the typical cultural expressions of classes and epochs. Both started out aggressively fighting for their share of attention, novels attacking the drama, the tract, and the poem, rock attacking jazz and pop and rolling over classical music.”
—W. T. Lhamon, U.S. educator, critic. “Material Differences,” Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s, Smithsonian (1990)