Time Slave

By John Norman

Book Overview

Dr. Brenda Hamilton--a PhD mathematician from Caltech--is beautiful, though she does not know her true beauty. She is a woman, though she does not know her true womanhood. Deep within herself she is... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Mass Market Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0879973226
• ISBN13: 9780879973223
• Release Date: November 1975
• Publisher: Daw Books
• Length: 380 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.

Customer Reviews

More Darwinian philosophy, with major movie quality at that!

As a devotee of John Norman' Gor series, I found Time Slave, a non-Gor story refreshing. Not only does the last available story of Gor, Magicians of Gor, become pretty slow, one wonders how much more the central character, Tarl Cabot, can do in this land, with the fall of glorious Ar and the untimely death of its Ubar. Moreover, the massive and extensive detours into discussions of male dominance and female submission have grown ever more cumbersome. In fact, one has already internalized these values if one has gotten this far in the series, and so these are now really unnecessary. The committed reader of Gor understands this philosophic context.Against this backdrop, Time Slave offers a fresh, new venue for Norman to present the degradation of human dignity in the grey web of modern, sterile Western civilization, where men are emasculated and women have lost their femininity. In Time Slave, the brilliant and driven Danish scientist, Herjellsen, lures his colleague, the beautiful mathematician, Dr. Hamilton from Cal Tech, to work on a project in Africa. This project is the construction of a time machine, and Herjellsen's secret purpose is to send someone back in time to "rectify a mistake" in man's genetic heritage. This person, it turns out, is Dr. Hamilton. There, stripped and kept in a cell in the bush, tormented and threatened with sexual assault by Gunther, Herjellsen's German assistant, she is finally sent back to the Cro-Magnon period without any real knowledge of her goal. There she is captured by a tall hunter from a Tribe called simply "the Men", who are a hunter-gatherer group competing with (and struggling against) other groups such as primitive herdsmen, and the contemptible "weasel people". Hamilton's adjustment to life in the camp, and the shock of her lowly status, take a toll on her modern pretensions. Nonetheless, Tree, the hunter who captured her in the first place, works to make Hamilton into a real woman, in touch with her senses, and alive to the strong sensuality that flows within her being. Indeed, it is through her subjugation to the men of the Tribe, and especially through the efforts of her lover, Tree, that Hamilton recovers her true sense of womanhood, and becomes a full-fledged woman of "the Men" and a member of the Tribe. Tree, however, is only able to accomplish the breaking of Hamilton's civilized rigidity with the advice of the tribal matriarch, Old Woman, who is in charge of the fire and the women's chores in the camp, and who acts as a repository for tribal wisdom. Thus, she tells Tree, who is puzzled over Hamilton's inability to have an orgasm, "Every woman can be made to kick". The child eventually born to this love union, true to the state of nature, is to be the one who redresses the false genetic turn humanity allegedly took so long ago. Frankly, I think the logic of the story would be better reversed, with humanity being renewed by going back to get Cro-Magnon stock to re-strengthen the degraded modern g

Switch off the world, sit back and enjoy....

Take one very old myth. Stir in a partisan viewpoint or two. Pointedly ignore the effect it will have on those who read it only to whip up pre-existing outrage. Thoroughly entertain your appreciative fans.....OK... Let's face it; this guy is a pretty crummy writer. Even so, I have read every one of his novels.... several times!So who says you have to be a good writer to be a good story teller!