One way to look at Magicians of Gor and the entire Gor series is as a reallife tragedy in which an author of great talent, whose second and third books show that the first was not a fluke, who could have become a premiere storyteller, perhaps better than Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert E. Howard, but who instead chose to write tales that have made him only a footnote — and perhaps not even that — in the history of American fantasy literature.

A discussion could profit from comparison of Tarnsman of Gor, Outlaw of Gor, and Priest-Kings of Gor to Magicians of Gor. Note how in the first novels even minor events become the stuff of epic adventure; even digressions involve flights of imagination. Note further the friction in the first three novels between Cabot's American values and those typical of the peoples of Gor...