Gor, the Counter-Earth, is the alternate-world setting for John Norman's "Chronicles of Gor," a series of 26 novels that combine philosophy and science fiction.
The customs, terminology and imagery depicted in these books has inspired a related subculture. On- and off-line followers of this lifestyle call themselves Goreans.

Summary
Gor is an intricately detailed world in terms of flora, fauna, and customs. John Norman, pen-name of Dr. John Lange, a professor of Philosophy and a classical scholar — often delights in ethnography, populating his planet with the equivalents of Roman, Greek, Native American, Viking, and other cultures. The Gorean humans have advanced architectural and medical skills (including life extension), but remain primitive in the fields of transportation and weaponry (at approximately the level of Classical Mediterranean civilization) due to one-time restrictions on technology imposed by a shadowy insectoid ruling species, the ‘Priest-Kings’, who brutally suppressed technology beyond a certain point. After the ‘Priest Kings’ left the planet a few decades earlier, technology amplifies, resulting in a vast (steampowered) railroad system.

The planet Gor has lower gravity than earth's, which allows for the existence of large flying creatures, and tall towers connected by aerial bridges in the cities. The known geography of Gor consists mainly of the western seaboard of a continent which runs from the arctic in the north to south of the equator, with Thassa, the Ocean to the west, and the Voltai mountain range forming an eastern boundary at many latitudes. There are also offshore islands in the ocean, and some relatively sparsely-settled plains to the east of the Voltai. The word ‘Gor’ itself means home stone in the Gorean language (the native language of the city-states in the northern temperate region, and a widely-spoken lingua franca in many other areas).

Most of the novels in the series are action adventures, with many of the military engagements borrowing liberally from historic ones, such as the trireme battles of ancient Greece and the castle sieges of medieval Europe. Ar, a Rome-like city in which several of the novels are set, maintains a "margin of desolation" similar to that of Mesopotamia's Gu-Edin.

The series is a planetary romance and the first book, "Tarnsman of Gor," opens with some scenes very reminiscent of the first book of the Barsoom series by Edgar Rice Burroughs, who helped create the genre; both feature the protagonist narrating his adventures after being magically transported to another world. These parallels end after the first few books, when the stories of the books begin to be structured along a loose plot arc involving the struggles of the city-state of Ar and the island of Cos to control the Vosk river area, as well as the struggles at a higher level between non-human Priest-Kings and Kurii (see below) to control the whole planet.

On Gor, men are the rulers and women are sometimes chattel; their interactions often feature what some consider the machismic stereotypes of Gorean society. This has led many to regard the works as blatantly misogynistic, since the societies of Gor have a balance of power which strongly favors men, and most of the time the narrators of the books support these social arrangements. (For further elaboration on the psychosexual content of Norman's writings, see John Norman.)
Criticisms have also been levelled at Norman's prose, which is often fraught with unnecessary diction and stilted dialogue, and a fondness for certain dubious forms such as "muchly", "unoften", or the word "modality" used as a synonym for "role". Passages — especially in books later in the series, when the protagonist begins to assimilate into Gorean society — occasionally veer off into philosophical tangents lampooning feminism and liberalism at length.