What Is a Kajira? The Slave Girl at the Heart of Gorean Fiction

If you spend any time reading John Norman’s Gor novels—or talking to people who love them—you eventually encounter the word kajira.

The simplest definition is straightforward: in Gor, a kajira is a female slave. The plural is kajirae. But that dictionary definition does not really explain why the kajira has become such an enduring image, or why readers looking for Gorean fiction, kajira fiction, kajira erotica and Gor-inspired fantasy continue searching for stories built around her.

Because the kajira is more than simply a woman who happens to be enslaved.

She is a particular fantasy archetype. Her collar means something. Her movements mean something. Her relationship with men means something. The way she kneels, serves, speaks and reacts to ownership is bound up with the civilization around her. She is simultaneously an erotic figure, a social class and one of the clearest expressions of how radically different Gor is from our own world.

That is the part of the kajira idea that fascinates me, and it is why slave girls occupy such an important place in my own Hyperborean stories.

I do not use Norman's world or simply reproduce Gorean terminology. Gerard's women are Hyperborean slaves rather than Gorean kajirae. Yet, if we understand what makes the Gorean slave girl so compelling, we can immediately see the family resemblance. The broader material around my books deliberately sits in that territory: Gorean-style fantasy, slave-girl fiction, male dominance, female submission, sword-and-sorcery and explicit erotica for men.

A Kajira Is Not Just a Woman in Chains

This is the first distinction I would make.

Fantasy fiction has contained enslaved women for as long as fantasy fiction has existed. Put a beautiful captive in chains, and we certainly have a slave girl.

But we do not necessarily have anything that feels Gorean.

The kajira is interesting because slavery has become her condition, not merely her immediate predicament. The world around her recognizes it. Her collar is not simply a restraint preventing escape. It identifies what she is.

That changes the emotional meaning of almost everything.

When a slave kneels, she is not merely sitting down. When she bares her throat for a collar, she is recognizing the relationship between herself and the person who controls it. When she calls somebody Master, the word has social reality behind it.

I explore this constantly through Gerard because he begins as someone from our world and gradually learns to read those signals instinctively.

One of my favorite examples is Ninga, a Shemite tavern slave. Gerard knows her because he once did something astonishingly minor by Hyperborean standards:

“Ninga liked me because I had asked her name once and never kicked her.”

The joke immediately tells us what kind of life Ninga has.

Gerard has barely done anything kind. Yet to Ninga, that small difference is enough to make him memorable.

That is where the kajira fantasy becomes much more interesting than bondage alone. The woman's entire frame of reference has changed.

The Collar Is the Central Symbol

If there is one object most closely associated with the Gorean kajira, it is surely the collar.

Chains can be temporary. Rope can be cut. A prisoner might be released.

The collar says slave.

This is why I use collars so heavily in Hyperborea. They do practical things, certainly, but their greatest importance is symbolic. A woman can be naked without being a slave. She can be tied without being a slave. Once the society locks its slave collar around her throat, everyone who sees her understands her place.

Ninga makes the point almost without words.

When Gerard reaches beneath the tavern table with the chain, she does not need instructions. She bares her throat. He attaches the iron ring to her collar.

Then the economic part arrives:

“With that, Ninga was paid for: mine to use for the day in any way I liked.”

This is what separates Gorean-style slave fiction from a modern BDSM scene.

Gerard has not persuaded Ninga to play at being his slave for an afternoon. The tavern already owns her. The payment temporarily transfers the right to use her. Everyone understands the arrangement because the institution exists independently of either participant.

For me, kajira fiction needs this surrounding structure. Otherwise, the collar becomes costume jewelry.

A Kajira Has Learned How to Behave as a Slave

This is another part of the Gorean image that matters enormously.

A kajira is not simply owned. She has been trained.

She knows how to present herself. She knows when to kneel. She learns how to serve. She becomes attentive to male approval and disapproval. Over time, the behavior can become so practiced that it appears effortless.

That difference between a raw captive and a trained slave is something I love writing about.

Gerard eventually employs Durumzar, a highly skilled slave trainer. Durumzar does not merely want obedience. Any terrified captive can eventually be made to obey a simple command. What he wants is a particular quality of obedience.

Explaining why trained slaves should be used as examples for newly captured women, he tells Gerard:

“She will show no grace, no beauty. There will be no eagerness, no joy.”

That is the difference.

The raw captive can be forced onto her knees. The trained girl makes kneeling look natural.

For a reader interested in the Gorean kajira, this is crucial. The fantasy is not only domination. It is transformation.

We watch a woman go from I refuse to I obey, and perhaps eventually to I want to please.

Those are very different stages.

The Best Slave Is Not Merely Obedient

Durumzar pushes the idea considerably further.

He is trying to teach Gerard that a technically obedient slave can still be a poor one. A woman who grudgingly performs every command with hatred in her eyes may be under control, but she has not become what a master actually wants.

Durumzar says:

“Such girls teach a higher quality of obedience - and the rewards that follow.”

Then comes the real lesson:

“They show how much better it is to love a master, than hate him.”

This is where the Gorean slave fantasy becomes psychological rather than merely physical.

The ideal kajira is attentive. She wants approval. She learns how her master likes to be served and becomes proud of doing it well.

That does not require her to begin that way.

Indeed, I think the journey is usually more interesting if she does not.

The woman who arrives already delighted by everything gives us no transformation to watch. The resistant woman can change by inches. Every new behavior then has meaning.

That is why Gerard's world distinguishes between raw captives, half-tamed girls and accomplished slaves.

“Half-Tamed” Is a Wonderful Stage

There is a Gerard slave called Kitten who captures this middle condition beautifully.

She obeys him.

Mostly.

She still glares at him. She is not eager to pretend that she enjoys everything. She has learned the practical reality of her situation without becoming one of Durumzar's shining examples of delighted submission.

Gerard demonstrates her behavior to Juskar and then says:

“That’s what a half-tamed girl is like.”

Juskar, considering the danger Kitten still radiates, wonders how Gerard remains alive.

Gerard's explanation is wonderfully simple:

“Because Kitten is a slave. A slave chooses life, no?”

And then the qualification:

“She obeys me - more or less.”

That “more or less” is where the character lives.

For me, a convincing Gorean-style slave girl should not become a robot once collared. Ownership changes her circumstances. Training changes her behavior. Neither automatically erases temperament.

Kitten is still Kitten.

She is simply Kitten in a collar.

Kajira Training Is About Creating a New Normal

This is one of the things Norman understood very well and one of the things I deliberately push harder in Hyperborea.

Human beings normalize astonishing things.

If every woman around a newly captured girl is struggling against her chains, the captive sees resistance as normal.

If every woman around her kneels beautifully, serves without hesitation and receives attention and rewards for doing so, she sees a different model.

Durumzar explicitly uses this.

He puts experienced girls beside raw ones because he wants the fresh captives to imitate them.

His description of accomplished submission is almost reverent:

“the devoted submission of beautiful woman is a lovely thing to witness.”

More importantly, he understands female imitation and status. The newly enslaved women remain concerned with beauty, belonging and how other women behave. So he gives them examples to copy.

This is an aspect of Gorean slave training fiction that I find far more interesting than endless punishment scenes.

Cultures reproduce themselves because people imitate what seems successful around them.

Slave culture should work the same way.

The Kajira Is an Erotic Ideal Inside Her Own World

One reason the kajira has remained such an enduring fantasy figure is that she is not merely low-status.

She is also intensely sexualized.

The two conditions reinforce one another.

Her beauty is displayed because she is owned. Her body becomes part of her value. Grace, posture and attentiveness all become things she can improve, and therefore things on which masters and other slaves judge her.

Durumzar tells Gerard that the raw girls in his training yard already know they are beautiful. They have built identities around that knowledge. Their enslavement does not erase it.

Instead, he teaches them a new definition of what their beauty is for.

That is a very Gorean idea.

The free woman possesses beauty.

The kajira presents it.

That presentation is where many of the familiar Gorean motifs come from: kneeling positions, exposed bodies, collars, slave jewelry, dances and carefully learned service.

The woman has become beautiful as a slave.

We Should Not Confuse the Kajira With a Passive Character

This is important to me because there is an easy mistake to make.

Submission is not the same as absence of personality.

Indeed, one of the most interesting things about writing slave girls is how much personality survives underneath imposed roles.

Ninga is meek.

Kitten is dangerous.

Belled Pet asks too many questions.

Layla becomes obsessed with her value to Gerard.

Emma, a woman taken from modern Copenhagen, treats the entire institution with furious contempt.

All are slaves. None feel interchangeable.

The differences matter because slave societies create their own forms of competition and status.

A woman can be proud of being more valuable than another slave. She can resent a rival for receiving her master's attention. She can become jealous of a new favorite. She can take pride in being better trained.

The formal hierarchy says all these women are property.

Human nature promptly creates twenty more hierarchies underneath it.

That is much more fun to write.

A Kajira Has Economic Value

This is another reason we cannot separate the kajira from the world around her.

In Gorean fiction, the slave girl is property.

Property has value.

That gives us markets, prices, traders and distinctions between kinds of women.

Hyperborea goes very far into this because Gerard eventually becomes deeply involved in the slave economy. He owns brothels, keeps a harem and operates a breedery. He thinks in terms of acquisition costs, sale prices and profitability because the society around him has taught him to do so.

Belled Pet gets a particularly harsh lesson in this when Gerard takes her into the Meat Chains.

She looks around at the enormous number of women and asks:

“How many girls are here?”

Gerard replies:

“Two hundred. Today, two hundred and one.”

She suddenly understands that she is not merely accompanying him through the district.

She has just become inventory.

That economic dimension is central to the slave-girl fantasy for me. The kajira's status should exist even when nobody is having sex.

A merchant can look at her and see an asset.

A trainer sees potential.

A master sees property.

Another slave may see competition.

One woman; several entirely different meanings.

The Slave Girl Exists Everywhere in the Gorean-Style World

This is where the kajira becomes part of worldbuilding rather than merely erotica.

She should appear in taverns, homes, markets and workplaces. She may serve wine, dance, translate, clean, carry messages or simply kneel beside her master while men talk.

Gerard eventually becomes wealthy enough to maintain a large villa.

One part is his museum and study. Slave women work there translating ancient texts because literate women are rare in Hyperborea.

The other part is his harem.

This matters because the same legal condition—female slavery—produces very different lives.

A slave can be valuable for beauty.

Another for literacy.

Another for entertainment.

Another because she is interesting enough that Gerard simply wants her around.

This is also why I resist reducing the kajira to “sex slave” as though the two phrases were perfectly interchangeable.

The erotic component is central to Gorean slavery, certainly, but the broader fantasy is ownership.

Ownership lets the woman be placed wherever the story needs her.

Harems Create Their Own Kajira Culture

Once a man owns more than one woman, things become more complicated very quickly.

Gerard learns this.

He likes beautiful women. He likes having a harem. Yet he also discovers there is a practical upper limit to how many women he wants under one roof.

His conclusion is wonderfully unromantic:

“Your harem will run you, and not vice versa.”

I like that line because it makes the fantasy more believable.

A harem is not merely a collection.

It is a community.

The women notice one another. They establish friendships and grudges. They compete for status. One may become a favorite and then lose that position. Another may resent how often somebody else is summoned.

That internal social world is exactly where a lot of good kajira stories can happen.

The master owns the harem, but ownership does not mean he controls every conversation occurring when he leaves the room.

The Kajira Can Measure Herself Through Her Master

Layla is one of my favorite examples of how thoroughly slave identity can alter a woman's emotional measurements.

At one point, she becomes distressed because Gerard's attention has moved elsewhere.

She is surrounded by other women who have been selected and used while she has not.

Then she notices something even worse: the brand on her thigh has faded.

To us, losing a slave brand ought to seem like an improvement.

Layla interprets it very differently.

She thinks Gerard does not even care enough to mark her again.

The narration describes how differently women in Gerard's breedery fantasize depending upon how long they have been there:

“Many of the breedery slaves day-dreamed. Those newer to their cage of escape. Those more accustomed of Master.”

That is an extremely compact description of adaptation.

The new slave dreams of getting away.

The accustomed slave dreams of the man who owns her.

Whether we call her a kajira, a slave girl or something else, that psychological movement is right at the heart of this kind of fiction.

The Kajira's Relationship With “Master” Is the Center

The word Master matters almost as much as the collar.

Again, not because the word itself possesses magic.

It matters because everyone involved knows what relationship it describes.

When Ninga sees Gerard in the tavern, her response is immediate:

“Master!”

Then:

“she bowed her head to the floorboards.”

There is no negotiation over what she should call him.

She knows what he is in relation to her.

This is why Gorean-style fiction can become intensely erotic without needing constant sexual action. A simple interaction can carry the whole hierarchy.

The master looks down.

The slave looks up.

He gives an instruction.

She obeys.

The reader supplies everything the relationship implies.

Yet the Master Can Become Emotionally Complicated Too

One of the most interesting things Gerard discovers is that treating women as property does not magically remove human attachment.

Belled Pet becomes a problem for him after the death of her father.

Juskar cannot understand why Gerard is debating whether to tell her.

His answer is blunt:

“Gerard, she is a slave!”

Gerard knows that.

Legally and socially, Juskar is correct.

Yet Gerard still hesitates.

He thinks about lying to her. He thinks about protecting her from grief. He considers what the news will do to her performance and value. Then he reduces the whole dilemma to the Hyperborean answer:

“She was, after all, just a slave.”

The line is powerful precisely because the surrounding pages demonstrate that the matter is not emotionally simple to Gerard at all.

This is where the kajira can become a character rather than a fetish object.

Ownership may be absolute while feelings remain inconveniently human.

The Kajira Also Changes the Man Who Owns Her

This is one reason I focus so much on Gerard.

His slave girls are not simply there to undergo transformations of their own. They help transform him.

Early Gerard still feels the assumptions of our world tugging at him.

Later Gerard has internalized much more of Hyperborea.

His old friend Fogrim notices the difference and tells him:

“You have come a long way from the man who once killed other slavers just to protect slaves.”

That sentence contains years of character development.

Gerard has not merely accumulated women.

He has learned to see them the way his adopted civilization does.

Not perfectly. Some old loyalties and attachments remain. Certain women can still get past the worldview he has constructed.

But increasingly, “slave” becomes a category that feels natural to him.

That is one of the things an outsider protagonist lets us explore that a native Hyperborean cannot.

We remember what these women would have meant to him before.

What Makes Kajira Fiction Different From Ordinary Harem Fantasy?

There is certainly overlap.

Both may contain one powerful man and multiple beautiful women.

But ordinary harem fantasy often revolves around relationships between women who remain fundamentally free partners.

Kajira fiction revolves around ownership.

That changes the emotional geometry.

The master does not need each woman to agree that he should remain master. His authority does not depend on maintaining a romantic consensus among the group.

The slave girls instead learn to navigate a hierarchy they cannot simply vote away.

That gives the stories a darker edge, but also a very distinctive one.

The question becomes less Who will the hero date? and more What kind of slave will this particular woman become?

For readers who love Gor, that is often precisely the attraction.

What Is the Difference Between a Kajira and My Hyperborean Slave Girls?

The honest answer is that they belong to different fictional worlds.

A kajira is Gorean.

Ninga, Belled Pet, Kitten and Layla are Hyperborean.

I do not want to blur that distinction because Hyperborea has its own cultures, economics, religions and history.

But the influence is obvious.

Like Gorean kajirae, my slave girls live inside civilizations where female slavery is ordinary. Collars communicate status. Training matters. Sexual submission and ownership are intertwined. A beautiful, well-trained slave can possess tremendous value while having almost no formal power.

Where I push things further is explicitness.

My books are Gorean-style erotica for men, not merely adventure novels containing slave girls. The things Gorean readers may imagine occurring beyond the page are much more likely to occur directly on mine.

And yet, I still want the adventure.

Gerard fights, travels, builds businesses, makes enemies and becomes politically powerful. The slave girls belong inside that story rather than replacing it.

That combination is exactly why terms such as kajira fiction, kajira erotica, Gorean kajira fiction, slave girl fantasy and Gorean fantasy erotica fit so naturally beside the Hyperborean books.

So, What Is a Kajira?

A kajira is the Gorean female slave: collared, owned, trained and socially recognized as belonging to a master.

But if we stop at that sentence, we miss why she matters.

The kajira is the point where many of Gor's central ideas meet. She makes power personal. She makes hierarchy erotic. She turns worldbuilding into something we can see in posture, speech and behavior.

Her collar tells us what kind of civilization we have entered.

Her training tells us what that civilization expects.

Her relationship with her master gives us the erotic heart of the fantasy.

That is why she has outgrown a single word from a single series and become an archetype readers actively seek in Gor-inspired fiction.

It is also why I keep returning to slave girls in Hyperborea.

I love the contrast between the raw captive and the accomplished slave; between the woman who dreams only of escape and the one devastated because her master has not noticed her today. I love the competition, attachment, pride, jealousy and transformation that grow inside the institution.

Most of all, I love what the kajira idea does to a fantasy world.

Once the collar is real, everything around it has to become real too: the markets, the training, the harems, the masters and the culture that considers all of them perfectly ordinary.

That is when the slave girl stops being a prop.

That is when she becomes the heart of Gorean fiction.

What to Read After Gor: Fantasy Books for John Norman Fans

What to Read After Gor: Fantasy Books for John Norman Fans

There is a particular problem that comes with finishing John Norman’s Gor books: what exactly are we supposed to read next?

It sounds like an easy question until we try to answer it. There are endless fantasy novels. There are sword-and-sorcery books, erotic novels, harem stories, BDSM fiction and modern adventure fantasy. Yet Gor occupies such a peculiar intersection of all these things that very little scratches exactly the same itch.

If you are a John Norman fan looking for books like Gor, I suspect you are not simply searching for another fantasy world with swords. We want dangerous men, strange civilizations, slave girls, hierarchy, adventure, masculine ambition and cultures that do not feel like the modern world wearing sandals. Many of us also want the sexual implications pushed considerably further than Norman was willing to put explicitly on the page.

That is the reader I had in mind when I began writing the Hyperborean books.

My Gerard stories are not Gor fan fiction and Hyperborea is not Gor under another name. The setting mixes Gorean influences with sword-and-sorcery, prehistoric Earth, Lovecraftian cosmic horror and explicit erotica for men. But if you have finished Gor and are wondering what to read after the Gor series, Gerard of Stone is where I would invite you to begin. That is also precisely the audience my wider body of work is built to reach: readers looking for Gor-inspired fantasy, explicit sword-and-sorcery, slave-girl fiction and male-oriented erotic adventure.

What Do We Actually Miss When We Finish Gor?

Before recommending anything, we should probably identify what we are trying to replace.

For me, one of Gor’s great strengths is that Norman understands a fantasy world must actually be different from our own. Its customs are not decorative. Its attitudes toward power, sex, status and slavery shape the people who live there.

We remember the kajirae because their slavery is embedded in the civilization. A collar matters because everybody knows what it means. A sword matters because violence remains close to the foundation of authority. A city feels strange because its people have assumptions that belong to their own culture rather than ours.

This is the quality I try hardest to preserve in Hyperborea.

Gerard does not arrive in a pseudo-medieval theme park. He arrives somewhere profoundly alien. Dura contains boats that would not look out of place on the Nile, prehistoric plants, giant insects, slave markets, temples devoted to beings we know from Lovecraft, and people snatched from wildly different periods of human history.

Very early in Collar and Cage, Gerard looks across the river toward ancient ruins and observes:

“We were not the first wave of humans here. Nor would we be the last.”

That is the premise opening underneath him. Hyperborea is prehistoric Earth, but human civilizations have been appearing and disappearing there for thousands of years because cosmic creatures keep stealing people from other periods and depositing them there.

If what you liked about Gor was the sensation of entering a fully separate civilization, that is the first thing I would want you to find again.

Start With Gerard Because He Is an Outsider Like Us

Gerard works particularly well as an entry point because he begins on our side of the divide.

He is not Hyperborean.

He knows what cars are. He knows what antibiotics are. He remembers the internet and modern employment. He has all the cultural baggage we have when he encounters this world.

That gives us someone to travel with.

In Collar and Cage, only four months have passed since his arrival. He was sick, confused and completely dependent upon strangers. Scar, a local ironmonger, took him in and Gerard repaid him with labor. He learned to run the forge, cast chains and collars, make weapons, and eventually introduced Scar to steel.

Already the modern man is changing.

Their friendship also tells us what kind of books these are. Scar greets him in the wonderfully Hyperborean fashion:

“Painful words from a man who carries my best blade at his side. Have great Dagon and Cthulhu cursed me with ingratitude instead?”

They are standing beside a forge in a Bronze-and-Iron-Age town three hundred million years in the past, casually invoking Lovecraftian gods while Gerard carries one of the first steel swords in the world.

That is fairly representative of what follows.

Gerard Does Not Stay the Outsider Forever

This is important to me.

An outsider protagonist becomes dull if he spends twenty books standing at the edge of the culture insisting that everyone else is doing civilization incorrectly.

Gerard adapts.

At first, he survives Hyperborea. Then he begins enjoying it. After that, he begins changing it.

The progression matters because we get to watch a fairly ordinary modern man acquire skills, confidence, property, slaves, friendships, political influence and finally military power. He does not arrive as Conan. Hyperborea makes him dangerous.

One small moment from his early slaving expedition captures the transition beautifully. Gerard realizes that, after months of tavern girls and adventures, he is about to own a woman himself. Yet the practical reality catches up with the fantasy:

“Where would I put her? What would I do with her (when not recreating)? What if—or I suppose when—she became pregnant?”

Then comes the wonderfully human question:

“How does one pick a girl that one keeps?”

For all the brutality of Hyperborea, this is still Gerard figuring things out as he goes.

That gradual transformation is one reason I think the series works particularly well for readers who enjoyed following Tarl Cabot into Gor.

Collar and Cage Is the Natural First Stop

If you are wondering what fantasy book to read after Gor, this is where I would start with my own work.

Collar and Cage gives you Gerard while the wonder of Hyperborea is still fresh.

Dura itself is one of my favorite parts of these early stories. It is not merely a backdrop. We walk through streets, markets, workshops, bounty houses and taverns with Gerard as he learns how everything functions.

He passes giant reptiles pulling carts. Slave girls work outside forges. Reed ships dock carrying oil, dried fish and women in wicker cages. Men gamble with dice made from human bones while children run through the streets.

Then, beyond the town, the Mist Wall is always there.

Gerard describes it from a distance:

“I could see a few lightning flashes over it; a quiet day in Hell.”

That is a very Hyperborean line. The cosmic horror is enormous, but the people who live beside it still have errands to run.

One of the captured women Gerard encounters is Orla, descended from Paleolithic Siberians. Gerard gives us her people’s history in six words:

“They had hunted mammoths. Then the gods hunted them.”

That is the setting in miniature. Humanity is simultaneously ancient, adaptable and completely outclassed by what exists around it.

Then Gerard Goes Slaving

This is where readers looking for Gorean-style fantasy will recognize another familiar pleasure.

The slave trade is not merely something Gerard observes. He gets involved.

An expedition into Landing Beast territory gives him his first real experience of organized slaving. The cosmic creatures called Landing Beasts arrive from outside ordinary reality carrying humans taken from different points in history. Their cargo is scattered over enormous landing zones, and Hyperborean slavers race to reach the women before monsters, rival groups or the environment kill them.

Gerard remembers that his own arrival happened the same way. The difference was his sex.

“I was lucky: I'm a man.”

He knows perfectly well what would have happened if he had been female. Now, instead of being cargo, he is joining the men going out to collect it.

This is the kind of moral and cultural transformation I enjoy writing because Gerard does not simply wake up one morning as a fully assimilated Hyperborean. His position changes incrementally. So does what seems possible to him.

Scar marks the occasion by giving him a present: a branding iron bearing Gerard's own mark.

“You are a slaver now, but what is a slaver without a branding iron?”

Then Scar explains that girls carrying that mark will show the world who trained them.

It is simultaneously a warm gesture between friends and something grotesque when viewed from Gerard's old civilization. Hyperborea allows both truths to occupy the same moment.

If You Read Gor for the Slave Girls, They Are Very Much Here

There is little point being coy about this.

Readers searching for books for fans of John Norman are often looking specifically for the kajira side of Gor. They want collars, ownership, slave markets, harems, training, female submission and the erotic hierarchy that Norman built so much of the series around.

The Gerard books go much further into those subjects.

Slavery in Hyperborea is economic, domestic, sexual and political. Women are captured, trained, bought and sold. Different forms of slavery develop around different kinds of work. A tavern girl occupies a different niche from a household slave, breeder or agricultural worker.

Even among slaves, social structures emerge.

Gerard notices one such miniature society and remarks:

“Even in a cage filled with girls, there is a hierarchy.”

That detail matters to me because a slave population should not stop being human simply because free people classify them as property. They make friendships, compete, become jealous, seek status and develop their own rules inside the rules imposed upon them.

This is one of the areas where my books move from being merely Gor-inspired fantasy into explicit Gorean-style erotica. Norman often gives us the architecture of sexual slavery. I am interested in living inside it.

Gerard Is Also Funny, Which Matters More Than You Might Think

Dark fantasy can become exhausting if everybody speaks as though they are carved onto the side of a barbarian temple.

Gerard is still a man from our world, and I deliberately let that remain visible.

Later, while everybody around him is trying to prepare for serious business, Gerard disappears into a blacksmith’s shed and begins hammering away at a new invention.

Fogrim and Juskar are losing patience.

Gerard's explanation for why he has once again become distracted is:

“All this adventuring is what my people call a ‘side hustle.’ Smithing is my thing.”

That is Gerard.

He can fight monsters, own slaves, become a war hero and involve himself in increasingly catastrophic political situations, but part of him remains the guy who gets absorbed in a project and forgets everyone is waiting outside.

If you enjoy the moments in sword-and-sorcery where swagger and danger sit beside absurdity, there is a lot of that here.

Sex Slaves of Hyperborea Shows Gerard Becoming Established

As Gerard's story continues, the setting changes around him.

The great Event devastates enormous portions of the world. Refugees pour into surviving regions. Trade patterns change. Dura expands. Slave prices collapse as enormous numbers of women arrive.

Gerard is no longer merely the outsider seeing strange things for the first time.

He has businesses.

He owns women.

He sits on Dura's Burgher Council.

He has opinions about infrastructure.

This is where his story begins acquiring a political dimension that, for me, makes the series much more interesting than a succession of erotic adventures.

Gerard discovers that winning a sword fight and winning a council vote require completely different talents.

Iskelda, one of Dura's most formidable political operators, explains his problem:

“You think like a rabble-rouser, but if you want power in this room, use gold, not words.”

Gerard does not take naturally to this lesson.

When a rival outmaneuvers him politically, Gerard's instinct is to reach for his sword—before realizing how useless it is:

“What would a sword have done? Damned foolishness. I had already been defeated most soundly.”

That is exactly the kind of expansion I want in a long-running adventure story. Gerard has become powerful enough that the world can now confront him with problems he cannot stab.

Power Becomes More Complicated as Gerard Gets More of It

This is where I think Gerard's journey really separates itself from a simple male wish-fulfillment progression.

He certainly gains power.

The problem is that power creates obligations.

Gerard becomes increasingly involved with Dura's refugee population. He does not always agree with how the established elites treat them, and he repeatedly interferes where sensible men tell him not to.

Fogrim gives him the pragmatic Hyperborean argument: these people are not his responsibility.

Gerard answers:

“All people are dangerous. You are right; just because they are neighbors doesn’t mean that they are community—but they’ll never become that if we treat them as enemies.”

Fogrim thinks this is naïve.

His solution is simpler:

“Everything is simple when you have a sword. You are better with that than you are with politics. It certainly made you happier.”

I love that exchange because both men have a point. Gerard is adapting to Hyperborea without becoming merely an interchangeable native. His modern assumptions sometimes make him foolish there, but they can also let him imagine possibilities the locals do not.

Gerard Eventually Becomes a Problem for Entire Governments

This is one of the pleasures of staying with the character.

The man who once needed Scar to give him shelter eventually becomes so politically dangerous that Dura's ruling class needs to find something useful for him to do elsewhere.

Iskelda summarizes the situation perfectly:

“He is a problem. The Council wants him to be a problem for other people.”

That may be my favorite description of late-stage Gerard.

The solution is wonderfully sword-and-sorcery: give him ships.

Not one ship, either.

Gerard is to lead a fleet down the River Black, restore Dura's influence, collect old tribute and attack settlements aligned with the Deep Ones.

He is told to raise:

“an army of adventurers, treasure seekers, and jilted lovers. Mercenaries, mad men, fanatics to the gods.”

That is exactly the kind of army Gerard should command.

The logic of Dura's new expansion is eventually condensed into one gloriously imperial sentence:

“Dura needs no empire, but it must have its provinces.”

Gerard understands perfectly well where sentences like that lead.

Ships move.

Men sharpen swords.

Someone else's grain, gold and women are about to change ownership.

This Is Where the Series Becomes Bigger Than One Man and His Harem

If you read Gor partly for the sense of a wider world beyond Tarl Cabot, this later Gerard material is where Hyperborea opens up.

Gerard begins dealing with river politics, rival religious factions, refugees, conquered settlements, war fleets and ancient alliances.

His reputation takes on a life independent of the man himself.

The stories people tell about Gerard become increasingly ridiculous. The local legend describes “Gerard the Lightning Shield” as a supernatural hero who has fought gods and possesses impossible powers:

“He killed ten men with one mighty slap, they say.”

Another claims to have seen him breathe fire.

The real Gerard is considerably less impressive and considerably more dangerous.

That gap between reputation and reality gives the later books a scale I enjoy. We have watched the myth being manufactured from incidents we actually experienced with him.

The Slave Girls Also Stop Being Mere Rewards

This is another reason I would suggest Gerard to a reader wondering what to read after Gor.

The relationships become complicated.

A Hyperborean may call a woman property and mean it entirely. That does not make her emotionally irrelevant.

Gerard loses a slave whose death affects him deeply. He goes alone to scatter her ashes. His friends understand that the act is unusual, but they do not mock him for it.

Juskar tells Fogrim:

“If he wants to celebrate a dead slave as if she was a friend, we would say not one word against him.”

Fogrim answers simply:

“When he is ready to speak of it, we will be there for him.”

There is a lot contained in that exchange. Gerard has absorbed an alien culture's view of women and slavery, but attachment has not disappeared. Nor has male friendship.

Those contradictions make the world feel more human to me.

There Is Much More Sex Than in Gor

For readers specifically looking for books like Gor with more explicit sex, yes, this is a major difference.

My books are erotica for men as well as fantasy adventures.

The sexual slavery, harem life, female submission and ownership themes are not merely implied. They are part of the actual narrative.

But I do not want sex to replace the adventure.

Gerard can spend one chapter dealing with slave girls and another fighting for his life. A sexual relationship can matter because of something that happened during a war. A slave market can be important to the economy of an entire region. A harem can become entangled with politics, inheritance and alliances.

That combination is exactly where I think the strongest opportunity exists for readers who love Gor but want something more explicit: Gorean-style fantasy erotica that remains actual fantasy. The source material describing my wider niche makes the same point, identifying the strongest overlap as Gor-inspired fiction, male-oriented erotica, sword-and-sorcery adventure, slave-girl fantasy and cosmic horror rather than generic erotica alone.

And There Is Cthulhu

I should probably mention this before you buy a book expecting Counter-Earth and wonder why the fish-men have arrived.

Hyperborea is a cosmic-horror setting.

The gods are not distant mythological abstractions. Dagon, Cthulhu, Azathoth and other entities or races associated with Lovecraftian horror are woven into the history of the world.

Some are worshipped.

Some manipulate human civilizations.

Some are fighting wars so ancient that entire human eras appear and vanish during them.

Landing Beasts cross space and time collecting people. The Mi-Go conduct experiments. The Deep Ones exert political influence. Strange ruins belong to species whose relationship to humanity is not always clear.

Yet people still open taverns and argue about sewer construction.

That mixture is very deliberate.

Cosmic horror becomes more effective to me when ordinary life continues underneath it.

So What Should You Read After Gor?

If you want another exact version of Gor, I cannot offer you that. I would not want to.

But if what you want is the experience behind the search—fantasy books for John Norman fans, male-oriented sword-and-sorcery, beautiful slave girls, explicit sex, strange cultures, masculine power and a protagonist gradually becoming at home in an alien civilization—then I wrote Gerard for readers like us.

Begin with Collar and Cage if you want to meet him close to the start: still modern enough to be surprised, already Hyperborean enough to enjoy what he is becoming.

Continue into Sex Slaves of Hyperborea as Dura grows around him and Gerard becomes an established slave owner, businessman and burgher rather than a wandering outsider.

Then follow the later books as his private adventures become public problems and the sword at his side eventually comes with ships, troops, political enemies and a reputation large enough to precede him.

Gerard eventually reaches a point where he can look at the madness around him and make a choice that could almost serve as the motto for the whole series:

“I didn’t choose to come to Hyperborea—but I could choose why I was here.”

That is the journey.

John Norman gave many of us a taste for fantasy worlds willing to be truly different from our own. What I wanted after Gor was something that kept the danger, the masculine adventure, the slave-girl fantasy and the obsessive worldbuilding, while going much further into explicit sex and much stranger places with the world itself.

If that is what you have been looking for too, then we have the same problem.

Fortunately, I wrote some books for it.

Gorean-Style Fiction: What Makes a Story Truly Feel Like Gor?

It is easy to make a fantasy story look a little like Gor.

Put swords in the hands of the men. Put collars around the women. Add a slave market, a few barbaric customs and perhaps a hero who prefers settling disagreements personally. If we are feeling particularly enthusiastic, we can throw in a tavern full of slave girls and have somebody called “Master” before the end of chapter one.

But that does not necessarily make the story feel Gorean.

For me, Gorean-style fiction is much more about the assumptions underneath the story than the furniture sitting on top of it. John Norman's Gor works because the world genuinely believes in itself. Its institutions connect to one another. Power matters. Sexual hierarchy matters. Slavery matters. The sword matters. Most importantly, the people who inhabit that world do not behave as if they have wandered out of twenty-first-century society wearing costumes.

That is the part of Gor that has influenced my Hyperborean books most strongly.

I have taken those ideas somewhere rather different. Hyperborea is prehistoric Earth. Lovecraft's gods and monsters are real. Human beings have been stolen from different periods of history and dumped into the same impossible world. My books are also much more sexually explicit than Norman's.

Yet when I ask myself whether something feels sufficiently Gorean, I am rarely asking whether there are enough collars in it. I am asking whether the world has the same confidence in its own rules.

That, I think, is where we should begin.

A Gorean-Style World Cannot Be the Modern World in Sandals

The first requirement is deceptively simple: the civilization must genuinely be different from ours.

Fantasy writers are often very good at changing technology while leaving psychology untouched. We get bronze weapons, horses and city walls, yet everyone has remarkably current opinions about individual rights, relationships, class and sexuality.

That is safe.

It is also rather boring.

The great pleasure of Gor is entering somewhere with different assumptions and then discovering the consequences of those assumptions. If slavery is normal, it should affect the economy. If personal violence is normal, it should affect manners. If women can be owned, that should affect everything from architecture and inheritance to taverns and warfare.

Hyperborea works the same way.

One of Gerard's encounters with Kovan the Longshoreman gives us a good example. Kovan is an Armanean refugee whose people are trying to re-establish some dignity and power after catastrophe. He explains his position to Gerard:

“For a man to stand with a straight back out here, he needs a hard fist, Gerard.”

That is not simply tough-guy dialogue. It tells us how political order works beyond the reliable protection of a strong state. Kovan's men need one another because strength creates security. Reputation matters because reputation can prevent violence before the sword ever leaves its sheath.

If we want Gor-inspired fantasy to feel convincing, ideas like this have to travel through the entire culture.

Power cannot be important only when the hero wants sex.

It must be important when someone wants land, safety, money, revenge or respect.

The Sword Has to Mean Something

There is another difference between a sword being present and a sword actually mattering.

We can give our hero an enormous blade because fantasy covers look better that way. But if every meaningful conflict is resolved by institutions that operate much like ours, then the sword remains a costume accessory.

In Gorean-style fiction, armed men possess personal agency.

That does not make them omnipotent. Quite the opposite. Other armed men possess agency too.

Gerard gets himself into trouble repeatedly because he is very good at direct action and much worse at understanding what follows afterward. He can defeat an enemy in a fight and still discover that the man's friends, relatives or political allies remain inconveniently alive.

That becomes especially clear when Gerard advances into Dura's politics. Iskelda, who understands political power far better than he does, repeatedly has to explain that being able to kill somebody is not the same as being able to control a city.

At one point, after Gerard has once again transformed a crisis through personal action and created a considerably larger political problem in the process, she greets him with:

“Gerard, my dear, beautiful idiot. What have you done? What have you done?”

Gerard's answer is absolutely characteristic:

“What none of you would do.”

There is the heroic impulse and the flaw in the same exchange. Gerard acts because other people hesitate. Sometimes that saves everyone. Sometimes it produces an entirely new disaster.

That is how I like masculine power in fantasy. It should be tremendously useful without becoming magical.

Gorean Fiction Needs Men Who Want Agency

This is one of the less discussed parts of what makes Gor attractive.

Gor is not only a fantasy about women submitting. It is also a fantasy about men acting.

That distinction matters.

A good Gorean-style male protagonist wants control over his own life. He wants to choose where he goes and what risks he takes. He may choose badly. He may fail. But he is not comfortable living according to a script written for him by somebody else.

One of the reasons Gerard connects so well with Juskar is that Juskar gradually discovers the same appetite.

Juskar was a farmer. Adventure gives him very little certainty and a considerable chance of dying horribly, yet when Gerard asks why he continues, Juskar answers:

“I have nothing. No land. No slaves. No coin. But I have more now after having met with you than I ever had as a farmer.”

Gerard points out that becoming a wandering vagabond is hardly a sensible life.

Juskar's answer is better:

“It is a better life than letting others decide what mine should be.”

That, to me, is fundamental to the masculine fantasy behind this genre.

The hero does not need to begin powerful.

In fact, I usually prefer that he doesn't.

What matters is that he values agency enough to go out and acquire power.

The Slave Girl Must Be Part of the Civilization

Of course, we cannot talk seriously about Gorean-style fiction without talking about slave girls.

For many readers, the kajira is the most immediately recognizable Gorean image. The collar, the kneeling position, the master/slave language and female submission have become inseparable from people's understanding of Gor.

But simply putting a woman in chains is not enough.

Her slavery should mean something to everyone around her.

This is one reason I spend so much time showing ordinary life in Hyperborea. Slave girls appear while men are eating, conducting business, plotting politics, traveling and entertaining guests. They work in brothels and harems, but they also carry water, translate texts, serve food and become part of the machinery through which households operate.

There is a wonderful observation from Iskelda when Gerard discovers that she knows considerably more than he expected about the secret plans of powerful men:

“Because you are a man, Gerard. When men plot, they keep the slave girls in the room to pour them wine.”

Then she adds:

“That is why I know this city's secrets and pour my own wine.”

That is the kind of detail I love. Slavery produces consequences even powerful men fail to notice. The slaves are considered unimportant, so men talk freely around them. Information therefore flows through the very women society has trained itself not to see.

That makes the institution feel real.

A Slave Economy Should Actually Be an Economy

This follows naturally.

If women are property, there will be prices. There will be cheap slaves and expensive ones, specialist traders, trainers, buyers, breeders, brothels and markets. Wars and disasters will alter supply. Fashion will alter demand.

The entire economy begins bending around the institution.

Gerard's own life makes this wonderfully clear. By the time he is established in Dura, he owns businesses, brothels, slaves and eventually a breedery. He thinks about women sexually, certainly, but he also thinks about them economically because Hyperborea has taught him to do so.

When he approaches his private breedery, the two warrior women guarding it tease him.

One asks:

“Come for your special whores?”

Gerard objects:

“They’re not whores.”

The guard replies that all slaves are whores.

Gerard's distinction is gloriously mercantile:

“Whores bring in the silver. These ones cost me gold.”

That exchange tells us more about the society than a page explaining that slavery is normal.

Everyone understands the categories.

Everyone understands the money.

Nobody stops to debate whether owning the women is acceptable.

They are arguing about accounting.

That is how a Gorean-style setting starts to feel lived in.

The Erotic Hierarchy Must Exist Outside the Sex Scenes

This is another point where I think some Gor-inspired fiction goes wrong.

If men and women occupy radically different sexual positions only during the explicit scenes, then we have BDSM erotica rather than a Gorean world.

There is nothing wrong with BDSM erotica. I write plenty of BDSM material myself.

But Gor is doing something different.

The erotic hierarchy extends into ordinary social space.

A woman may be kneeling while men discuss war. A man's slave may be sitting against his legs while he negotiates a business deal. A host might offer a guest food, drink and women in the same breath because hospitality itself has developed around the culture's assumptions.

Kovan does exactly that when Gerard visits his enormous yurt. They are discussing violence, Armanean dignity and political order. Kovan nevertheless pauses to ask:

“May I send for kumis and roasted eel? It is a cold night outside, Lightning Shield. Perhaps a couple of warm girls to rub your feet?”

The girls are neither the subject of the meeting nor irrelevant to it. They are simply part of how hospitality works.

That is much more Gorean to me than merely having a spectacularly explicit sex scene every fifty pages.

The fantasy permeates the environment.

The Women Need Personalities Precisely Because They Are Slaves

This matters enormously.

A slave girl who happily agrees with everything before anyone has done anything to her gives us very little drama.

I prefer difficult women.

Gerard does too.

Later in his career, when discussing a particularly troublesome captive, he says:

“I do prefer the snarling bitches over the pets.”

There is a reason. Resistance gives the relationship somewhere to go.

A proud woman can be humbled. An intelligent woman can calculate. A defiant woman can decide when obedience serves her interests. A frightened woman can learn confidence within the boundaries of her captivity. Women can compete for favor, form friendships, become jealous and develop their own hierarchies.

The slave population therefore becomes a society inside the larger society.

This is important because the women should not cease being people merely because the men around them cease regarding them as free ones.

Indeed, the contradiction makes them more interesting.

A slave girl can understand her owner perfectly while having very different feelings about what she understands.

One of Gerard's more thoughtful handlers, Durumzar, eventually reduces good management to something very simple:

“People will tell you everything, Gerard. You just have to learn to listen.”

That advice applies equally well to writing characters.

A Truly Gorean Story Should Not Be Embarrassed by Its Fantasy

This may be the hardest quality to imitate.

Norman is not embarrassed by Gor.

You can dislike his conclusions. You can argue with his philosophy. You can find passages outrageous. But the books themselves do not constantly glance over their shoulders to reassure the reader that the author understands how naughty everything is.

That confidence is important.

Gorean-style fiction becomes strangely lifeless when every erotic or hierarchical idea is immediately followed by an apology for having imagined it.

If we are writing a male fantasy, then we should write a male fantasy.

That does not mean every male character needs to be admirable. Gerard certainly isn't always. His decisions can be foolish, selfish, impulsive and destructive.

But the story permits him to enjoy his world.

It permits him to enjoy women.

It permits him to like power.

It permits the fantasy to function from the inside rather than constantly submitting itself for approval from somewhere outside the book.

This is one reason I enjoy Iskelda's exasperation with Gerard so much. After he insists on pursuing his own terms even while she is trying to save him politically, she finally snaps:

“You are a rutting animal. You belong in a cage, Gerard.”

His reaction?

“Now that’s a compliment!”

There is Gerard in two lines.

Gorean-Style Fiction Still Needs Adventure

This is where I think Gor overlaps beautifully with older sword-and-sorcery.

The hero cannot simply stay home.

We want roads, ships, ruins, wars, hostile cities, strange peoples and dangerous men. We want him to enter situations where status is uncertain and discover what he can make of himself.

Gerard's story expands in exactly that way.

He begins as an outsider. Then a swordsman. Then a slaver and businessman. He becomes entangled in Dura's politics. Eventually the city itself cannot quite decide whether he is an asset or a menace.

That is the trajectory I like.

The erotic rewards become more satisfying because they belong to a larger acquisition of power and status.

Likewise, the protagonist should have male relationships that matter independently of the women. Gerard's friendships with Fogrim and Juskar give the series much of its character.

They argue with him.

They mock him.

They rescue him.

They occasionally think he is an idiot.

And they still follow him into appallingly dangerous places.

Those relationships stop the story from becoming a procession of women orbiting an empty protagonist.

A masculine fantasy needs men in it too.

Male Friendship Gives the World Weight

The phrase “sword brother” matters in Hyperborea.

It is not merely somebody the hero drinks with.

These are men who have survived danger together and expect one another to act accordingly.

Juskar's decision to remain with Gerard is a good example. He does not stay because Gerard is rich; at that point Gerard hardly represents a secure investment. Juskar stays because the life they are building gives him something he did not have before.

That makes male friendship another form of power.

One man alone is dangerous.

Several men who trust one another are much more so.

That network eventually expands. Gerard attracts adventurers, soldiers, refugees, sailors and political followers. Personal relationships become institutions.

This is another quality I associate with good Gorean-style fiction: power accumulates socially.

The hero becomes important partly because other people decide that standing near him is preferable to standing against him.

That is far more satisfying than merely declaring him an “alpha male” in chapter one.

The Hero Should Change Enough to Frighten His Old Self

This may be my favorite part of the whole exercise.

Gerard should not finish Hyperborea as the same man who entered it.

If he does, the world has failed to matter.

His changing relationship with slavery is one obvious example, but the transformation goes much further. He becomes comfortable with violence. He acquires status. He begins thinking politically. He collects artifacts and maps. He accumulates dependents.

Most importantly, his frame of reference changes.

Things that would once have been extraordinary become ordinary.

His old friend Fogrim notices this.

When Fogrim questions Gerard's slave girls about changes in their master, one finally admits how long it has been since the Gerard Fogrim remembers behaved the same way:

“A year and three months ago.”

Fogrim asks:

“Is that when he changed?”

The answer is:

“Yes, Master.”

That little exchange is powerful because the transformation is not being explained by Gerard himself. Someone who knew him before can see that Hyperborea has gotten inside him.

For me, that is essential to outsider fantasy.

The outsider gives us entry.

Then the world consumes him.

Worldbuilding Has to Extend Beyond Slavery

This is also crucial.

Gorean-style fiction cannot survive on sex alone because Gor itself does not.

We need religion, economics, geography, warfare and politics.

Hyperborea gives me enormous room to play with those because the setting is deliberately impossible. Civilizations descended from people taken across human history coexist with prehistoric ecosystems and eldritch powers.

Religious differences actually matter.

Gerard and Juskar encounter a Mi-Go cult whose beliefs fit into a wider Hyperborean pattern: religions often contain nested levels of secret knowledge rather than the broad, direct access to divinity familiar to Gerard from the modern world.

Political structures vary too.

Dura has its Burgher Council. Elsewhere there are priest-kings, warbands and communities held together mostly by kinship and reciprocal violence.

Even municipal infrastructure becomes political.

Gerard tries to persuade Dura to build sewers and discovers that being correct is much less useful than he expected. After being procedurally blocked in council, Iskelda laughs:

“And so the great whoremonger and war veteran is silenced.”

That is one of my favorite things about Gerard. He can survive monsters and battles and still be defeated by committee procedure.

The contrast keeps the world alive.

The Strange World Should Have Ordinary People in It

Another thing I learned from the kind of fantasy I love is that weirdness works best against normality.

If every building is an eldritch temple and every character is a sorcerer king, nothing feels strange after a while.

Hyperborea therefore has laborers, shopkeepers, fishermen, farmers, bureaucrats, tavern owners and people worried about the price of tin.

They happen to inhabit a world where giant prehistoric fish swim under the docks and gods may actually be alien entities.

Gerard once listens anonymously while dockworkers debate his proposed sewer system. They have misunderstood almost everything about it. One believes Gerard wants Dura to construct altars to a god named Sewer who will protect them from evil spirits in excrement.

Then Gerard reveals himself.

The joke works because the men are not fantasy exposition machines. They are workers gossiping about something they only partly understand.

That is how a setting becomes somewhere rather than merely something.

The Erotic Fantasy and the Adventure Fantasy Should Strengthen Each Other

This is where all the pieces come together.

A Gorean-style story feels strongest when the sex and the adventure come from the same underlying rules.

The warrior possesses women partly because he has power.

He seeks power partly because power makes possible the life he wants.

Slave markets exist because warfare and raiding create captives.

Brothels exist because cities create concentrations of wealth.

Harems become status symbols because powerful men can afford both the women and the infrastructure required to keep them.

Nothing needs to feel bolted on.

That is what I aim for with Gerard.

His sexual life expands as his worldly position expands. The man who begins with very little eventually has a villa whose rooms contain maps, ancient manuscripts and artifacts from across Hyperborea—and another half devoted to his women.

Likewise, his responsibilities expand with his pleasures. More property means more people depending on him. More status means more political enemies. More fame means more strangers expecting things.

Power gives Gerard what he wants.

Then it gives him problems appropriate to a man who has what he wants.

That is much more interesting.

Gorean-Style Does Not Mean Copying Gor

This is worth saying clearly.

I do not think a story becomes more Gorean merely because we borrow Norman's terminology.

You can use the word kajira repeatedly and still create a world that feels nothing like Gor.

Likewise, we can write something with entirely different cultures, cosmology and history that nevertheless appeals strongly to the same reader.

That is what I am trying to do with Hyperborea.

My setting has no Priest-Kings of Gor. Instead, it has Landing Beasts, Great Old Ones, Deep Ones, ancient human civilizations and prehistoric ecology. Gerard is not Tarl Cabot. Dura is not Ar. Hyperborean slave culture has developed its own practices.

What I borrow is something deeper: the willingness to build a fantasy civilization around power and then actually let that premise change the people living inside it.

The guide to my wider writing identifies this same intersection very clearly: Gorean fiction and erotica mixed with male-dominant BDSM, sword-and-sorcery adventure, harem and slavery fantasy, and Lovecraftian cosmic horror.

That is influence rather than imitation.

So What Makes a Story Truly Feel Like Gor?

For me, it comes down to whether the whole world participates in the fantasy.

If the sword matters only during fights, something is missing. If slavery matters only during sex scenes, something is missing. If the hero is supposedly a dangerous adventurer but spends the entire novel reacting rather than acting, something is missing. If everyone in an ancient slave society somehow possesses exactly the assumptions of contemporary middle-class life, something is definitely missing.

Gorean-style fiction works when power, sex, culture and adventure all belong to the same world.

That is what I want when I read this kind of fantasy, and it is what I try to create in Hyperborea.

Gerard is useful because we can watch the process happen to him. He arrives carrying the assumptions of our world. He makes friends. He learns the sword. He acquires women and wealth. He gets involved in politics. He discovers that force solves some problems beautifully and creates others just as efficiently.

Eventually, the man who once belonged to our world becomes somebody Hyperborea understands much better than we do.

That is when the setting has succeeded.

And that is when, to me, a story truly begins to feel like Gor.

What Is a Kajira? The Slave Girl at the Heart of Gorean Fiction

If you have ever typed “books like Gor but more explicit” into a search box, I know almost exactly what you are looking for.

You probably do not merely want a fantasy novel containing more sex. There are plenty of those. You probably do not merely want BDSM erotica either. There is plenty of that as well.

What we want is the combination.

We want the dangerous, masculine adventure of John Norman’s Gor. We want swords, strange cities, slave markets, powerful men, beautiful women, collars, ownership and a civilization that genuinely operates according to rules very different from ours. But then, when the story reaches the erotic material that Gor so often circles around, we do not want the author to suddenly become shy.

We want to know what happens next.

That desire is a large part of why I write the Hyperborean books.

My fiction belongs in the territory where Gorean fantasy, explicit erotica for men, sword-and-sorcery, male-dominant BDSM, slave-girl fantasy, harem fiction and Lovecraftian cosmic horror all crash into one another. If you have finished John Norman and thought, Yes, but I wish someone would push this much further, then we are very much on the same page.

What Are We Actually Looking for When We Say “Books Like Gor”?

I think this question is worth answering properly, because “like Gor” can mean very different things.

Some readers love Gor primarily as planetary romance and sword-and-sandal fantasy. Some love the detailed worldbuilding. Others are fascinated by the kajirae, the slave markets, the rituals of kneeling and submission, and Norman’s fixation on male and female power.

For many of us, though, all those things belong together.

The appeal is not simply a naked slave girl. It is a naked slave girl in a world where her collar has social meaning.

It is not simply a man carrying a sword. It is a world where the sword gives him actual personal authority.

It is not simply sexual submission. It is a civilization structured around inequalities in power, where ownership, sex, violence, wealth and status constantly overlap.

That is the part of Gor I find most interesting, and it is the part I wanted to push hardest in my own work.

In Series 2, Gerard has two newly captured women kneeling before him. One is still very much full of resistance. When he puts the collar around her throat, the moment is very simple:

“Such a beauty,” I said. “Welcome to Hyperborea.”

Then:

“Click!”

I love that little click because it does so much work. The collar is not decoration. Something has changed. She has entered a new social category recognized by everyone around her.

That is the sort of thing I mean when I talk about Gor-inspired fantasy.

“More Explicit” Means More Than Showing More Sex

Obviously, yes, my books are considerably more sexually explicit than Gor.

I do not pretend otherwise.

But I think “more explicit” can mean something broader and more interesting than simply putting more anatomy on the page.

If we take the premise of the Gorean slave girl seriously, we eventually have to ask what her daily life actually looks like. What happens in a slave market? How is she bought? What happens once she is taken home? How does a harem function? How does a brothel function? What happens when a warrior band captures women after a battle? How does a free woman become a slave, and what does the transition do to her?

Once we start answering those questions rather than fading away from them, the whole world becomes more explicit.

That is the approach I take with Hyperborea.

Gerard eventually reflects on how different the sexual psychology of this world has become from his own:

“Hyperboreans are more sexual creatures than people of our time, and the bricks and mortar of their sex is not consent but power.”

That sentence describes the fictional world far better than simply calling it kinky.

Hyperborea is not our society wearing sandals.

It has had thousands of years to develop its own customs around slavery, sex, war and male power. I want us to see those customs working.

If We Want Gor With More Sex, We Still Need Gor’s Worldbuilding

This is where many attempts at “books like Gor” lose me.

If we remove the world and keep only the bondage, we no longer have anything much like Gor. We have BDSM erotica with antique furniture.

John Norman understood that the environment surrounding the fantasy is tremendously important.

A kajira exists inside a civilization.

So should my slave girls.

Hyperborea therefore has slave traders, slave camps, markets, breeders, brothels, warbands, harems, auction blocks, agricultural slaves and entire industries that have emerged around human ownership.

It also has ordinary men treating all of this as ordinary life.

That last part is crucial.

In Sex Slaves and Warlords, Gerard describes how a wealthy Hyperborean might construct a harem. These are not merely bedrooms with locks on them. There are architectural traditions built around the psychology of captivity:

“A slave harem is a closed-off structure. It is designed so a girl feels forever cut off from the rest of the world.”

The outside is blocked by earth baffles and high walls. Gardens, ponds and mazes replace it. Eventually:

“The harem becomes the slave's entire universe.”

That is the kind of worldbuilding I enjoy. If a civilization has maintained sexual slavery for ten thousand years, people are going to become very good at it. There will be techniques, traditions, competing theories, fashions and architecture.

The fantasy gets richer because somebody has actually thought through how this society works.

Gor Fans Usually Want Masculine Adventure Too

This may be the most important point.

If you are searching for books like Gor but more explicit, I doubt you want the hero to spend three hundred pages in one bedroom.

We want him to go somewhere.

We want dangerous roads, war, monsters, rival men, strange ruins and opportunities to become more than he was at the beginning.

The sex should belong to that adventure rather than replace it.

One of the earliest opportunities Gerard receives is from an older slaver preparing an expedition into Landing Beast country. The man makes a point that tells us slaving itself is an adventure profession:

“Slaving is long and tedious work. It has its pleasures, but many men must come together and work long and disciplined hours for weeks.”

Then comes the dangerous part. Slave camps near the Mist Wall can be attacked. That is why the expedition needs swordsmen.

Gerard is offered a share:

“Join us and serve well, and you will take home a share of the profit in gold and in slaves.”

His answer is immediate:

“When do we leave?”

That is the energy I want. The women are part of the reward, part of the economy and part of the adventure—but the hero still has to go out into an extremely dangerous world to get anything.

The Male Fantasy Works Better When the Hero Has to Earn Power

A protagonist who begins the story owning a palace, an army and fifty beautiful women can be entertaining.

Personally, I am much more interested in watching him become that man.

Gerard starts as an outsider.

Darius starts as an outsider.

They know our world. They carry our assumptions with them. Then Hyperborea begins stripping those assumptions away.

Gerard learns metallurgy. He fights. He makes money. He acquires slaves. Later he owns brothels, becomes politically important and finally becomes Warmaster.

The later books can therefore open with sentences such as:

“My biggest regret about becoming Warmaster was having to give up my slave breedery.”

There is an entire transformation hidden in that sentence.

This was once a modern man.

Now becoming military ruler of a city is irritating partly because it interferes with one of his favorite hobbies.

That change is part of the male power fantasy. He does not arrive fully formed as some barbarian king. The world gives him opportunities that our world did not, and step by step he becomes someone capable of taking them.

For readers who enjoy Tarl Cabot’s outsider status in Gor, I think this sort of character journey feels very familiar.

The Slave Market Should Feel Like a Market

One of my favorite things to write is a slave market because it allows us to see how thoroughly ownership has become normalized.

A real market is not solemn.

People haggle.

They become distracted.

They complain about positioning.

Someone else attracts all the customers.

Traders gossip.

Prices change.

You can spend the morning surrounded by extraordinary things and end up irritated because nobody has bought your stock.

There is a scene in Copy of Books ALL where Gerard arrives to find that the women he is trying to sell have attracted almost no interest because another seller has put six brightly decorated dancers on a makeshift stage and blocked the crowd.

Fogrim, thoroughly unimpressed, complains that he has accomplished nothing:

“The principal matter of the day has been a theft from the breeding pits last night.”

They discuss the missing women, their likely value and the modest bounty. Then Fogrim announces that he has something more important to attend to:

“the selling of vegetables.”

And he simply walks away from a market full of naked women.

That is what I mean by making the world normal to the people inside it.

If everyone constantly pauses to announce how decadent and shocking everything is, we never really believe in the civilization.

A Gorean-style world becomes convincing when its inhabitants are sometimes bored by things that would leave us staring.

“More Explicit” Also Means Following the Economics

Once women can actually be bought and sold, value becomes part of the story.

Not metaphorical value.

Price.

In the books, wars alter the supply of women. Refugees sell themselves or their daughters when food disappears. Slavers move captives along rivers. A huge influx can collapse prices. Brothels change buying habits because suddenly women who were once luxuries can be acquired cheaply.

The post-Event transformation of Dura is one of my favorite examples.

Refugees arrive first. They create new neighborhoods and new energy. Gerard observes:

“It is by such people that great cities are made.”

Then comes the next wave:

“Then, came the slaves.”

Ships arrive with women packed together. Slaver’s Town emerges as “a great sprawl of pits, pens, and auction blocks.” Prices fall, but still more women arrive.

The whole region changes.

Gerard's final reaction is not horror:

“For many it was filled with dread. For others, it smelled of gold.”

And then:

“It was a world I was more than ready for.”

That is much closer to the sort of adult Gorean-style fantasy I want to write. The erotic possibilities grow from economic and political events rather than dropping randomly from the ceiling.

We Can Let the Eroticism Exist Beside Ordinary Life

This is another reason I like writing longer fantasy stories rather than isolated erotic scenes.

We get contrast.

A man may be arranging military logistics while worrying about what has happened to his slave girls.

Fogrim is preparing for an attack when he turns to Gerard and says:

“Attend your slave girls. They have been days now with strange men.”

Gerard's reaction is wonderful:

“You think that’s the best use of my time right now?”

To Fogrim, yes, absolutely. Gerard is already armed and ready for battle. His women require attention.

The conversation then moves effortlessly between military preparation, reproduction, travel and slaves because, to these men, all of those things belong to the same life.

That seamlessness is something I think readers searching for books similar to Gor often want without necessarily putting it into words.

We do not want the erotic content to feel pasted onto the fantasy.

We want the fantasy world itself to be erotic.

And When the Sex Arrives, I Do Not Fade to Black

This is the obvious difference.

I write explicit erotica.

The sex is not coyly implied and then skipped.

That means a reader who enjoys the ownership fantasy, slave-girl submission, harem scenes and male dominance in Gor gets to follow those ideas beyond the point where traditional sword-and-sorcery usually stops.

But the explicitness matters most when the story has already done its work.

We know who the woman is.

We know how she came there.

We know what the collar means.

We know what the man has done to acquire the power he now has over her.

The sexual scene therefore carries all the weight of what happened before it.

That is why I prefer writing this material as explicit fantasy adventure for men, rather than as sex scenes loosely connected by plot.

The plot is part of the sex.

We Still Need Women Worth Capturing

This may sound obvious, but it makes an enormous difference.

Slave girls should have personalities.

A woman who submits instantly to everything because she is functionally an erotic prop gives the hero very little to overcome and gives us very little to become interested in.

The newer Darius stories make this especially clear.

Blue Eyes is resistant, proud and intelligent. She pays attention. She tests boundaries. She learns what Darius wants without necessarily believing any of it herself.

That makes her interesting.

It also means that every small concession matters.

Darius can understand enough of her language to manipulate circumstances more effectively than the other Red Fangs can. The result surprises them. Sargon sees him communicate with the captured Slavic women and eventually sends them to Darius's crusher because he believes Darius can break them.

Darius is rather less confident:

“I don’t know. I have never done anything like this before, Sargon. I have never broken captives into slaves.”

Sargon's answer is very Hyperborean:

“I will tell you how to do it. But you already know; every man does.”

That is not only a slavery scene. It is character development for Darius. He is being invited into another piece of the masculine culture he has joined.

Gor-Inspired Fiction Can Go Darker Than Gor

Once we stop treating slavery as a decorative fantasy word, the fiction inevitably becomes darker.

The woman cannot simply withdraw consent and go home.

She can be captured in war.

She can be sold.

She can escape and be recaptured.

She can be trained.

She can be punished.

That darkness is part of the particular fantasy I write.

But I think it works best when it is integrated into a broader world rather than presented as endless cruelty.

Hyperborea has friendships between men. It has business problems, political arguments, religious disputes, jokes, alcohol, exploration and absurdity.

Gerard may own a harem, but a harem also brings the sort of logistical problems anyone with too many dependents would recognize.

He explains:

“My harem was just ten girls; why would I need more?”

His reasoning is wonderfully practical. Too many women become work. He wants somewhere he can actually rest.

Then he comes home and hears someone having sex with one of them upstairs.

He rushes up with the nearest available weapon—a flower vase—and discovers his old friend Fogrim.

Fogrim greets him cheerfully:

“It is good to see you again and fuck your girls.”

That is male friendship in Hyperborea.

This Is Also Why the Humor Matters

I love dark material, but I do not want Hyperborea to become pompous.

Gor itself can be much funnier than people who only know it by reputation might expect.

Sword-and-sorcery has always benefited from swagger and absurdity too.

The contrast actually helps the darker material. If everyone spends every scene growling about domination, after a while none of it means anything.

My men can be dangerous while still being recognizably men.

They argue about water.

They complain about alcohol.

They get distracted by women.

They make catastrophically bad political choices.

Gerard can be Warmaster and still think the obvious priority aboard his flagship is finally building a distillery.

After tasting the first batch, he realizes that Hyperboreans have never encountered distilled spirits. His immediate thought is not merely pleasure but diplomacy: give warrior chiefs a few innocent-looking drinks and suddenly negotiations might become considerably easier.

That combination of practical cleverness, vice and opportunism is very much part of my idea of masculine adventure.

Then I Added Cthulhu, Because Gor Wasn't Strange Enough

This is where my books stop being merely Gorean-style and become very specifically Hyperborean.

The world is prehistoric Earth.

Humanity has been transplanted across time.

Landing Beasts bring captives from different periods of history.

Ancient civilizations have risen and fallen.

The Mist Wall hides a war between cosmic entities.

The Wakers of Azathoth can calmly announce:

“All this river will be ours. We will wake Azathoth, and he will end the world!”

That line appears in the same series where Gerard is worrying about harems, brothels and slave breeding.

I like the collision.

The human beings of Hyperborea behave as though their little struggles for wealth, women and political power are the most important things imaginable, while forces infinitely beyond them are moving in the background.

That gives the world scale.

A man can be enormously powerful compared with the slave kneeling beside him and still be almost nothing compared with what lives beyond the Mist Wall.

The New Darius Stories Push the Formula Further

Gerard becomes increasingly embedded in civilization. Darius lets me return to the rawer edge of the world.

He wanders into Landing Beast country.

He meets the Red Fangs.

He finds women newly arrived from other periods of Earth.

He sees the ancient remains of Shemite civilization.

He enters Eridu.

And he begins discovering what kind of man Hyperborea will make him.

At one point he encounters the alien organism called a spitter guarding newly arrived women. Sargon has a delightfully practical solution to the problem because the creature attacks men but not females.

Darius asks:

“Then what do we do?”

Sargon smiles:

“It spits not at females.”

That is all we need to know before the unfortunate captive blonde is brought forward to solve their problem.

This is what I like about the Darius material. The sexuality, slavery and adventure cannot really be separated. The women are prizes, tools, companions, labor and sources of conflict depending on the situation.

That is the kind of hard-edged world I think many readers mean when they ask for darker books like Gor.

So Where Should a Gor Fan Start?

If the thing you most want is the classic mixture of slave girls, ownership, markets and an outsider hero learning to thrive in Hyperborea, I would begin with Gerard's books in Copy of Books ALL.

Collar and Cage introduces an earlier Gerard, when he is still discovering Dura and becoming comfortable with what his new world permits him to do.

Sex Slaves of Hyperborea moves further into the economics and psychology of slavery, particularly after the Event changes Dura and floods the region with refugees and slaves.
If you want the world becoming larger—politics, warfare, leadership and the consequences of Gerard's rise—The Burning of Dura takes the story in that direction. The city is no longer merely somewhere Gerard lives. His decisions increasingly affect what happens to it.

Then Sex Slaves and Warlords gives us Gerard much further along: Warmaster, slave owner, harem keeper and a man for whom the outrageous parts of Hyperborea have long since become ordinary.

And if you want the rawer process of a modern outsider meeting the culture almost from the beginning again, the Darius books bring us back to the desert, the warbands and freshly captured Landing Beast women.

Books Like Gor — Except We Actually Go There

That is ultimately the promise.

If you love Gor because of the swords, slave girls, masculine power, strange societies and enormous amount of thought John Norman put into his world, I understand why ordinary fantasy erotica may not scratch the same itch.

We want more than sex.

We want more than fantasy.

We want the two to reinforce each other.

The woman is more interesting because her collar means something in this world. The man is more interesting because his sword and status explain why he can possess her. The city is more interesting because there are markets, temples, brothels, laws and economic systems surrounding both of them.

Then, when sex happens, I do not politely turn the camera toward the window.

That is what books like Gor but more explicit means to me.

It means keeping the masculine adventure rather than replacing it. It means keeping the slave-girl fantasy rather than apologizing for it. It means building a world capable of supporting both, then following the implications as far as the story wants to go.

There is a line Fogrim gives Gerard that I think captures the spirit of Hyperborea better than almost anything else:

“This world is yours, Gerard. Stop wasting your time and take it.”

That is the fantasy.

And if that sounds like the thing you were hoping to find after Gor, then we were looking for exactly the same books.

I just got tired of looking and started writing them.

Sword and Sorcery Erotica: When Sex Enters the Barbarian Fantasy

Sword and Sorcery Erotica: When Sex Enters the Barbarian Fantasy

There has always been sex lurking just offstage in sword-and-sorcery.

We know it is there.

The barbarian hero enters some decadent city with a sword at his hip and gold in his pouch. There are taverns, thieves, corrupt priests, slave markets, beautiful dancers, sinister sorcerers and inevitably some woman who looks as though she belongs on a Frank Frazetta cover. The hero drinks too much, kills somebody, acquires treasure, loses the treasure, acquires a woman and is chased out of the city before sunrise.

Then the story becomes strangely discreet.

We can describe a sword cutting through flesh. We can describe blood, monsters, sacrifice, torture and cities burning. But when the warrior finally gets the beautiful woman into bed, traditional fantasy often pulls the curtain across the doorway.

Sword and sorcery erotica asks a fairly obvious question: why?

Why should sex be the one physical appetite our barbarian fantasy suddenly refuses to show?

That question sits very close to the heart of my Hyperborean fiction. I write at the point where old-fashioned sword-and-sorcery adventure meets explicit erotica for men, Gorean fantasy, male dominance, harem and slave-girl fiction, and Lovecraftian cosmic horror. There is a very particular audience looking for exactly this combination: sword and sorcery with explicit sex, erotic adventure fantasy, Conan-style adult fantasy and stories where sex and violence inhabit the same unapologetically physical world.

If that is what you have been looking for, we are probably after the same thing.

Sword and Sorcery Was Already About Appetite

The classic sword-and-sorcery hero is not an ascetic.

That is part of his charm.

He wants gold. He wants victory. He wants wine. He wants freedom. He wants women. He wants to see what is over the next mountain, preferably after somebody has told him not to go there.

Robert E. Howard understood this instinctively. His heroes occupy the world physically. They are not merely observers moving through elaborate lore. They sweat, hunger, fight, desire and seize opportunities.

That physicality is one of the things I love most about the genre.

So when I write Gerard, sex does not feel like a foreign element being inserted into an adventure story. Sexual appetite belongs to the same man who likes danger, weapons, wealth and exploration.

Gerard's early life in Hyperborea captures that wonderfully. At the beginning of Sex Slaves of Hyperborea, he is literally tracking a runaway woman through a prehistoric jungle:

“I tracked her through the gloom.”

A few paragraphs later he gives us one of those wonderfully practical Hyperborean observations:

“You can tell a sex slave from how she walks - and squirms.”

That is the tone. The jungle matters. Tracking matters. The giant insects matter. The woman matters too. The adventure and erotic elements are happening simultaneously rather than taking turns.

What Happens When We Stop Fading to Black?

The most obvious answer is that the sex becomes explicit.

Yes.

My books are very much adult sword-and-sorcery. If Gerard takes a slave girl upstairs, I do not feel obliged to cut immediately to the next morning and tell you he slept well.

But explicitness becomes interesting only if the story has already given the sex something to mean.

Who is the woman?

How did she get there?

Who is the man?

Why does he have power over her?

What does their relationship mean in this particular society?

Those questions matter because they turn an explicit scene from an interruption into part of the story.

This is why I write so much about ownership, slave markets, brothels, training, harems and the economies surrounding them. If Gerard has a woman kneeling beside him, I want us to understand how she reached that position.

In Collar and Cage, he has just recaptured a runaway slave when she begs him not to return her to her owner. Gerard's answer is wonderfully unsentimental:

“What your master does with you is his business. My business with you is almost done.”

He is carrying her down a road through Carboniferous wilderness.

That is erotic fantasy, certainly, but it is also pure pulp adventure: a swordsman returning with captured prey through a dangerous landscape.

Gerard Is My Bridge Between the Genres

Gerard works especially well for me because he does not begin as a barbarian.

He comes from our world.

He remembers modern cities, modern work, modern sexual morality and modern expectations about what sort of life an ordinary man is supposed to have.

Then Hyperborea gets hold of him.

At first he learns simply to survive. Then he learns swordsmanship and blacksmithing. He begins working as a sell-sword. He acquires women. He makes money. He develops friendships with dangerous men. Eventually he owns businesses, enters politics and becomes important enough to help determine the fate of Dura.

That progression is essential.

If I had started Gerard as an enormous barbarian king seated on a throne with twenty naked women arranged around his feet, there would be nowhere for him to go.

I would rather watch him become that sort of man.

Even his early friendships establish exactly what kind of world he is entering. After Gerard returns to Dura with a captive woman over his shoulder, Scar greets him as a professional:

“I have detained you long enough. Go, collect your money, Sell-Sword.”

There is something enormously satisfying about the word sell-sword there.

Gerard has become a man who survives through weapons and nerve. The women and the money are not separate from that life. They are among the things the life makes possible.

The Adventure Must Work Even Without the Sex

This is important.

Sword and sorcery erotica cannot simply be ordinary pornography where somebody has placed a sword against the bedroom wall.

If we removed every explicit scene from the book, there should still be an adventure.

Gerard fights assassins, cultists, raiders and monsters. He crosses dangerous wilderness. He gets drawn into wars. He becomes involved with political factions that would cheerfully have him murdered. He travels through ancient ruins and encounters civilizations built upon the wreckage of earlier ones.

Eventually he becomes Warmaster of Dura and is handed a war fleet.

That is not erotic dressing.

It is the story.

After the Burning of Dura, Gerard looks at what his actions have helped unleash and tells us:

“I had become a butcher, and a great many people were going to die because of me.”

The conflict has become larger than one man's adventures. Humans and Deep Ones are moving toward another war, and Gerard is about to become one of the men directing it.

This is why I think erotic heroic fantasy and sword-and-sorcery fit together so naturally. The erotic reward matters more when the hero has risked something to obtain the life surrounding it.

Sex Should Belong to the Tavern, Not Just the Bedroom

One of my favorite things about writing Hyperborea is the tavern.

Traditional sword-and-sorcery understands the tavern perfectly. It is where adventurers gather, rumors circulate, strangers size each other up and somebody inevitably makes a mistake involving a knife.

So what happens if sexuality is just as integrated into that environment?

In Collar and Cage, Gerard enters a tavern where the dancing tables are so low that he takes time to explain their actual purpose:

“You couldn't put your legs under them. They were for standing on.”

Slave girls dance on top.

Around them men drink, gamble and talk. Serving women move between customers. Weapons remain within reach.

Gerard calls for Zana, a favorite Shang dancer. She climbs onto his table and asks:

“Shall I dance for you on my feet, Master, or would you prefer me on my knees?”

Gerard's answer:

“Surprise me.”

That exchange tells us exactly what kind of tavern this is.

Yet a tavern like this is not an erotic pocket universe. Violence can enter at any moment. Business can enter. Rumors of eldritch destruction can enter.

That is precisely why the eroticism feels like part of the fantasy world.

Sex Is Better When the World Does Not Stop for It

This is one of the things I am most interested in.

In a lot of erotic fantasy, we can feel the gears change when the sex scene begins.

The plot stops.

The characters temporarily cease worrying about the army approaching over the hill, the assassin looking for them or the treasure somebody has stolen.

Then the scene ends and the plot turns back on.

I prefer the two to remain entangled.

One of the most Hyperborean moments in Gerard's adventures happens just before a battle. Men are checking weapons. Fogrim is preparing to march. There may soon be killing.

Gerard, meanwhile, has responsibilities to the captive women traveling with them.

The practicalities of war and sex collide because there is no reason they would not. The men around Gerard are warriors and slave owners simultaneously. One role does not vanish when the other becomes inconvenient.

That is the world I want.

We should feel that these characters have complete lives rather than alternating between “adventure mode” and “erotica mode.”

Sword and Sorcery Erotica Needs a Dangerous World

Danger changes sexuality.

A great many things acquire value when they are scarce: food, shelter, protection, safety.

In a dangerous fantasy world, a powerful man can become attractive partly because power has obvious practical meaning.

Gerard can protect what belongs to him.

He can also lose it.

That distinction matters.

Hyperborea is not a comfortable male fantasy in which the protagonist automatically wins because the universe has recognized him as the hero. Gerard can be injured. Friends can die. Women can die. Cities can burn.

After a violent tavern attack in the Darius material, we see the same underlying principle from another modern outsider: even in a room full of slaves and sexuality, violence arrives without warning. Chairs overturn, wine jars smash and blades come out while terrified women scramble through the chaos.

I use Darius only secondarily here because Gerard remains the heart of my earlier Hyperborean books, but both men inhabit the same rule:

The sword is not decoration.

It is why the hero gets to have tomorrow.

The Barbarian Fantasy Is Also a Fantasy of Freedom

This is something people sometimes miss.

The appeal of Conan-style fantasy is not merely muscles and swords.

It is freedom from systems.

The hero can walk away.

He can enter a city, make money, lose it, offend powerful people and leave.

He may attach himself to causes, but he remains fundamentally active. He chooses.

Gerard has exactly this quality, even after he becomes more civilized than he ever intended.

He goes from being the outsider to becoming a businessman, burgher and eventually Warmaster, but part of him always remains the adventurer who would rather solve a problem personally than wait three weeks for a committee.

That temperament creates both his successes and his disasters.

It also connects directly to the erotic fantasy.

A man who wants agency for himself is naturally attracted to a world where greater personal power can produce greater personal rewards. Hyperborea offers him wealth, status and sexual possibilities on the same brutally simple terms: acquire the strength to keep them.

That is an old sword-and-sorcery idea.

I simply let the sexual implications stay on the page.

Barbarian Fantasy Has Always Connected Sex With Victory

Think about the old pulp imagery.

The victorious warrior.

The rescued princess.

The captured enemy queen.

The dancing girl at the feast.

The woman offered to the monster-slayer.

These ideas did not begin with modern erotica. They are woven through mythology, pulp fiction, historical fantasy and heroic legend.

What changes when we write sword and sorcery with explicit sex is that the sexual reward stops being purely symbolic.

Hyperborea is particularly direct about this because warfare creates slaves.

Victorious armies take women.

Raiders sell captives.

Warbands keep the girls they want and trade the rest.

Gerard eventually reaches a scale where warfare is no longer merely a personal duel. His orders can affect whole populations. After Dura begins its war along the River Black, enemy lands, wealth and women can all be treated as spoils of victory.

That is dark fantasy, certainly.

It is also entirely consistent with the underlying logic of old barbarian adventure.

I am merely refusing to pretend that conquest somehow stops at the treasury door.

The Victory Feast Should Feel Like a Victory Feast

This is where sword-and-sorcery erotica can be tremendously fun.

After danger, men celebrate.

They drink.

They boast.

They eat too much.

They seek women.

Why wouldn't they?

One of the Gerard stories gives us the Feast of the Great Eater after days of battle and tension:

“Tonight, let us praise our God, the Great Eater! Glory to Yog!”

Then comes the atmosphere:

“The night was filled with the sound of drumming, drunken singing, and the cries of slave girls.”

That is not a modern cocktail reception following the battle.

Bonfires burn through an olive grove. Men steal slave girls from one another's fires as a joke. Beer goes everywhere. Friends sit together. Women serve food and themselves. Religion, celebration, male camaraderie and sex blur together.

This is what I want from barbarian fantasy erotica.

The sexuality should become part of the culture's celebration of life after surviving death.

Male Friendship Matters Just as Much

Erotica for men becomes strangely empty when the male protagonist has no meaningful relationships with other men.

Gerard needs Fogrim and Juskar.

Not because they help him acquire women, but because they are his brothers.

They fight together.

They disagree.

They drink.

They insult each other.

They survive things together that nobody else could fully understand.

After one campaign, Gerard and Fogrim simply sit and share beer. Fogrim has recovered his son. Gerard tells him:

“I’m happy for you, Fogrim. Yours is a victory I can celebrate. To life.”

Fogrim answers:

“To life.”

And they pass the beer bowl around in silence.

I love scenes like that because they give the louder parts of the story weight.

If every scene is sex or combat, neither remains exciting.

Sometimes the warriors need to sit down.

The Women Need to Be Characters Too

This matters for exactly the same reason.

A fantasy filled with interchangeable beautiful women becomes surprisingly unsexy.

The women need differences.

Some are delighted by their circumstances. Some are furious. Some are frightened. Some adapt quickly. Some manipulate. Some compete. Some become emotionally attached. Others never do.

Gerard is particularly attracted to difficult women because they give him something to engage with.

A submissive slave who already knows exactly how to please him offers one sort of fantasy. A furious captive who would bite somebody's hand if they put it too close offers another.

The difference makes the world feel inhabited.

It also gives the erotic material narrative movement.

A relationship can change.

That is more interesting than a woman's personality disappearing the moment the hero notices her body.

Sex and Slavery Become Part of the Economy

The old sword-and-sorcery hero is often motivated by treasure.

Hyperborea gives treasure a particularly erotic dimension because women themselves possess monetary value.

Gerard learns very quickly that there is money in slaves.

Markets matter.

Brothels matter.

Training matters.

War changes prices.

An influx of refugees and captives changes who can afford women who once belonged only to elites.

Gerard is perfectly capable of admiring a woman while simultaneously calculating her value.

In Collar and Cage, officials discover that the runaway he has brought back is no longer a virgin and try to reduce his payment.

His response is:

“Have you looked at those legs? 15 gold.”

It is a Gerard line through and through.

Sex, beauty and money are all being processed through the same mind.

That is much more interesting to me than giving the hero an endless supply of women who appear from nowhere whenever the story requires one.

The Hero's Sexual Life Should Grow With His Power

Gerard does not begin with a harem.

That would spoil half the fun.

His material circumstances improve as he becomes more competent.

He goes from rented rooms and tavern girls to ownership. From ownership to businesses. From businesses to a villa and harem. From there into political power.

His sexual life therefore becomes one visible measurement of his rise.

This is something sword-and-sorcery has always understood about gold.

At the beginning, the hero is hungry.

Later, he has a purse heavy enough to order whatever he wants.

Then something goes wrong and he may lose the whole lot.

Sexual power can operate the same way.

A beautiful woman kneeling beside Gerard matters differently when we remember the man who once had almost nothing.

Then the Adventure Becomes War

Gerard's stories also let me expand the scale.

Personal sword fights eventually become politics.

Politics becomes war.

After the Burning of Dura, Gerard is sitting amid the aftermath of catastrophe. Smoke still rises from the city.

And what is he doing?

“I sat, waiting to see which slave girl I would be bidding on next.”

I adore that contrast.

The city has burned.

History is moving.

A war between humanity and Deep Ones is taking shape.

Gerard is still Gerard.

Then the Council gives him command of a fleet.

Now our sword-and-sorcery hero has become something larger: a warlord. Yet his basic appetites remain unchanged.

That continuity is important. He has not transformed into a bloodless statesman merely because the story has increased in scale.

This Is Where Sword-and-Sandals Joins Sword-and-Sorcery

My Hyperborean books sit between several traditions.

There is sword-and-sorcery in the wandering hero, monsters, ruins and personal violence.

There is sword-and-sandal fantasy in the ancient cities, slave markets, war fleets, temples, public spectacles and social hierarchy.

There is Gorean influence in the detailed cultures of slavery and female submission.

Then there is explicit erotica.

The useful thing is that none of these ingredients fight one another.

They reinforce each other.

The ancient world gives us social structures that suit the erotic fantasy. The sword-and-sorcery hero gives us the active male protagonist. The Gorean influence gives us a civilization that takes ownership seriously. Explicit erotica lets us follow the consequences.

This is precisely why phrases such as sword and sorcery erotica, sword and sorcery with explicit sex, Conan-style erotica, erotic sword-and-sandal fiction and fantasy erotica with warriors all point toward the same reader appetite.

And Then I Put Lovecraft Behind Everything

Because apparently swords, slave markets and explicit sex were not enough.

Hyperborea is also cosmic horror.

The old gods are not metaphorical.

The Mist Wall hides an ancient conflict between entities beyond humanity. Landing Beasts cross space and time. Deep Ones establish cults. The Mi-Go experiment. Human civilizations can become collateral damage in wars fought on scales they barely comprehend.

This adds something important to the barbarian fantasy.

Gerard can become extremely powerful.

He can own women, command men and eventually direct fleets.

But there is always something bigger.

That prevents power from becoming boring.

A man can be master of his little world while still living inside a universe capable of casually eating him.

Cosmic horror is therefore not an ornament I glued onto the sexual material. It keeps the adventure dangerous. It also gives Hyperborea its particular identity within dark fantasy erotica and Lovecraftian sword-and-sorcery.

Why Not Just Write Harem Fiction?

Because harem fiction and sword-and-sorcery erotica overlap, but they are not identical.

A harem story may focus primarily upon accumulation of romantic or sexual partners.

My Gerard stories are interested in something broader.

Women are certainly among the things Gerard acquires, but so are enemies, obligations, businesses, political influence, weapons, allies and eventually military command.

Sometimes gaining one costs him another.

That matters.

The fantasy is not simply “many women.”

It is the life of a man becoming increasingly powerful in a dangerous world—and enjoying what that power makes available.

Likewise, ordinary BDSM fiction does not quite describe what I am doing. The master/slave relationships exist inside a civilization rather than only between consenting modern partners.

The fantasy is structural.

That puts the books closer to Gorean-style adventure and old pulp masculinity than to contemporary romance.

The Explicit Sex Should Never Make Us Forget the Sword

That is probably the rule I care about most.

If the reader finishes a chapter and forgets there are monsters outside the city wall, I have pushed too far in one direction.

If the reader finishes the book wondering why I bothered describing slave girls at all when everything sexual happened offstage, I have pushed too far in the other.

I want both.

When Gerard goes into danger, I want us to care whether he survives.

When he returns from it, I want us to understand why he celebrates.

When he acquires power, I want us to see what he does with it.

When he gets the girl, I want the story to be willing to remain in the room.

That is sword and sorcery erotica to me.

Not fantasy plus random sex scenes.

Not pornography with a sword on the cover.

A single world in which violence, desire, wealth, ambition, friendship, conquest and sexual power all arise from the same dangerous way of life.

When Sex Enters the Barbarian Fantasy

The funny thing is that I am not convinced sex is really entering barbarian fantasy at all.

It was always there.

It was there in the dancing girls, rescued princesses, slave markets, decadent queens and barbarian appetites. It was there in the fantasy art. It was there between the lines of the old pulp adventures.

We simply stopped before following it all the way.

I don't stop.

That is the difference.

I want Gerard standing with blood on his sword and a woman waiting when he gets home. I want the tavern to contain both sex and the stranger who may try to kill him. I want victory celebrations where the men drink too much because they genuinely might have died yesterday. I want slave markets to exist because warfare and economics make them possible, not because somebody needed an erotic set piece.

Most importantly, I want us to feel that all these things belong together.

That is why I write Hyperborea as erotic adventure fantasy for men rather than separating the erotica from the adventure.

The sword makes the sex more dangerous.

The sex gives the victory something physical to celebrate.

The world gives both of them meaning.

And once we realize that, the question is no longer why anyone would combine sword-and-sorcery with explicit sex.

The stranger question is why we ever pretended they had nothing to do with one another.

Sword and Sorcery With Explicit Sex: What Is Actually Out There?

If you have ever gone looking for sword and sorcery with explicit sex, you may have discovered something peculiar.

The thing sounds as though it ought to be everywhere.

Sword-and-sorcery has always been full of sexual energy. We have dangerous men, slave markets, decadent cities, tavern dancers, barbarian queens, captured princesses, sorceresses, harems, war spoils and heroes whose appetites are rarely confined to food. Put a Frank Frazetta painting beside half the classic pulp tradition and nobody needs the sexual subtext explained.

Yet when we go looking for fantasy that keeps all of that and actually becomes sexually explicit, the shelf gets unexpectedly thin.

There is plenty of fantasy with sex in it. There is plenty of erotica in fantasy settings. There is modern harem fiction, BDSM fantasy, dark erotica, paranormal romance and an enormous amount of material broadly described as adult fantasy.

Those things are not necessarily what we are looking for.

If you and I are asking for sword-and-sorcery with explicit sex, we probably want something more specific: real adventure, real danger, an active male protagonist, strange civilizations, monsters, violence and a world that would still be worth exploring if every sex scene disappeared. We simply do not want the sex scenes to disappear.

That distinction is one of the reasons I began writing Hyperborea.

My books sit in an unusually narrow overlap between Gorean fiction, erotica for men, sword-and-sorcery and sword-and-sandal adventure, slave-girl and harem fantasy, male-dominant BDSM and Lovecraftian cosmic horror. It is exactly the combination identified again and again in the material surrounding my work: not merely fantasy erotica, but erotic adventure fantasy for men in which the swords and the sex belong to the same story.
So, what is actually out there?

The honest answer is that there are several neighboring genres. There are far fewer stories sitting exactly in the middle.

Traditional Sword-and-Sorcery Gets Us Most of the Way There

Let us start with the obvious ancestor.

If what we want is muscular adventure fantasy, classic sword-and-sorcery already supplies almost everything except the explicit sex.

The hero is active. He enters danger because danger is where opportunity lives. He is suspicious of kings, bureaucrats and institutions. Violence is personal. Wealth can disappear in an evening. Ancient ruins contain things that should have stayed buried. Women are beautiful, often dangerous, and rarely irrelevant.

That is very close to the atmosphere I want.

What traditional sword-and-sorcery usually does not do is follow its sexual appetite as far as its appetite for violence.

That always seemed strange to me.

We can show a sword entering a man's belly. We can describe what crawls out of a tomb after ten thousand years underground. We can burn a city, sacrifice prisoners and feed somebody to a monster.

Then the hero reaches the bedroom and suddenly everybody develops manners.

My own Gerard stories begin from the opposite assumption. The physicality is continuous.

Gerard eventually explains what the sword has done to him:

“I didn’t realize it then, but my sword didn’t just guard me against violent men: it enabled me to become one.”

And then he admits what that new life has given him:

“I killed evil men and enslaved beautiful girls, and I can now admit - most of all to myself - that I have enjoyed every moment of it.”

Those lines are important because the sex and the violence grow from the same transformation. Gerard has entered a world where personal power gives him possibilities our world denied him. He has not joined one genre when he draws his sword and another when a woman kneels beside him.

That is the combination I think many of us are really looking for.

Gor Is Probably the Obvious Bridge

If readers go hunting for fantasy adventure with explicit sex, John Norman's Gor inevitably appears somewhere in the conversation.

There is a reason.

Gor already understands the connection between masculine adventure, hierarchy and sexuality. Its slave girls are part of its civilizations. Collars, markets, masters and kajirae are not random erotic decorations. They belong to the world's social structure.

For many readers, Gor therefore comes extremely close to the desired thing.

The limitation is obvious: however sexually charged the series is, Norman generally does not write what we would now call graphic erotica.

That creates a reader who wants something very specific.

He does not want to lose Gor's worldbuilding in exchange for more explicit sex.

He wants Gor with the explicitness turned up.

The guide to the wider readership around my books identifies exactly this appetite. People are not merely looking for “fantasy erotica.” They are searching for things like Gor books with explicit sex, books like Gor but more explicit, sword and sorcery books like Gor, Gorean fiction with explicit sex, and sword and sorcery with explicit sex.
That tells us something useful.

The missing ingredient is not sex alone.

It is the combination.

Modern Harem Fantasy Is Nearby, But It Is Not Quite the Same Thing

There is also a much larger modern ecosystem of male-oriented harem fantasy.

This gets us closer in a different direction.

Harem fiction often gives us male protagonists, power progression, adventure, fantasy settings and explicit sexual relationships with multiple women. That is obviously adjacent to what we are talking about.

But the expectations can be quite different.

Much of modern harem fiction is still fundamentally relationship fiction. The women are partners in the hero's growing romantic group. The power fantasy may be strong, but ownership, slavery and the harsher social hierarchy associated with Gor are often absent or softened.

There is nothing wrong with that.

It is simply a different fantasy.

In my own books, Gerard's accumulation of women is tied directly to the accumulation of worldly power. His sexual life changes because his status changes. He goes from being a displaced outsider with almost nothing to a swordsman, slaver, businessman, harem owner, political figure and eventually Warmaster.

At one point he looks back over the transformation almost casually:

“Last came status. After my adventures, all I had wanted was a quiet life back in Dura, running a few slave brothels by the river.”

That is a very strange definition of settling down by our standards.

It is perfectly coherent by Gerard's.

For me, that is where adult harem fantasy becomes more interesting: not when the hero simply gathers girlfriends, but when his relationships with women express the kind of man he has become and the society he now inhabits.

Dark Erotica Gives Us the Explicitness, But Often Loses the Adventure

At the other end, there is plenty of dark BDSM erotica.

If what we want is male dominance, bondage, slavery fantasies, captivity, training and explicit sexual material, that territory is well supplied.

But again, something can be missing.

The sword.

The road.

The strange city.

The warband around the campfire.

The ruin nobody sensible would enter.

The enemy army appearing on the horizon while everyone is still trying to decide what the map actually says.

Erotica often concentrates upon the sexual relationship because that is what erotica is designed to do. But if our taste developed through Gor, Conan, sword-and-sandal adventure or older men's adventure fiction, we may want the erotic material to exist inside something larger.

I certainly do.

Gerard and Fogrim are a good example. Put them near an ancient ruin and Fogrim's personality becomes instantly clear:

“Let's see what's in there,” Fogrim cracked his knuckles.

Gerard watches him and thinks:

“His eyes gleamed - strange dark places with death, treasure, or both, I think were his element.”

That is sword-and-sorcery.

Minutes later, the adventure involves a slave girl, a quarrel between armed men and something enormous moving beneath the sand.

The erotic world has not disappeared because the monster arrived.

Neither has the monster politely waited for the erotic material to finish.

That is how I like the genres mixed.

The Adventure Has to Be Dangerous Enough to Matter

One of the easiest ways to weaken erotic adventure fantasy is to make the hero too safe.

If nothing can kill him, his victories lose weight.

Hyperborea is extremely generous to powerful men in some respects. It is also extremely eager to eat them.

In the desert, Gerard rushes toward Onska, a slave girl being abused by another man. Fogrim tries to stop him with a wonderfully Hyperborean argument:

“By Cthulhu, she's just a slave, Gerard! We'll steal you a better girl when we go back!”

Gerard ignores him.

Then the ground begins shaking.

What follows is not a metaphorical threat:

“The Chthonian burst forth. It had the body of a white snake, thick and tall as a tree.”

The creature erupts from the sand, men scatter, slaves scream and an entire sled team disappears into its attack.

That sequence captures the mixture I want better than a genre definition ever could.

There are beautiful women.

There are men arguing about ownership.

There are swords.

Then an eldritch worm the size of a tree comes out of the ground and starts eating everyone.

Welcome to Hyperborea.

This Is Why “Erotic Fantasy” Can Be Too Broad a Label

If somebody tells me a book is “erotic fantasy,” I still know almost nothing about it.

Is it romance with elves?

Paranormal erotica?

A supernatural BDSM story?

An erotic fairy-tale retelling?

A harem progression fantasy?

A dark captivity fantasy?

A sword-and-sorcery novel containing explicit sex?

All of those can legitimately wear the same label.

That is why I find phrases such as sword and sorcery erotica, explicit heroic fantasy, barbarian fantasy erotica and sword and sandal erotica much more useful for describing the particular thing we are discussing. They tell us the adventure structure matters just as much as the sexual content.

For my own books, I would add another condition:

The setting should continue functioning when nobody is having sex.

Dura has politics.

The River Black has trade.

The Event changes migration and food supplies.

Religions compete.

Armies move.

Gerard gets himself involved in council disputes.

Cities burn.

The sex exists inside all of that.

Gerard Is a Sword-and-Sorcery Hero Who Accidentally Becomes Respectable

This is one reason I keep returning to Gerard rather than writing an endless succession of wandering barbarians.

He changes scale.

At first, Gerard's problems are personal. Can he survive? Can he earn money? Can he avoid being killed by the next armed lunatic he meets?

Then he acquires friends and women.

Then businesses.

Then obligations.

Eventually, he becomes powerful enough that other people's political calculations have to include him.

The irony is that Gerard never entirely loses the wandering swordsman's instincts.

We see that wonderfully after one political confrontation. Juskar is horrified by Gerard's improvisation and points out that his latest action has no place in any sensible plan.

Fogrim translates:

“You are an idiot. That is what he is saying. I say the same.”

Gerard asks what they think he should do.

Juskar wants restraint.

Fogrim has another suggestion:

“I think you should take her and all the beauties you can shove into The Vulture and sail the Black. Raid and take whatever you like!”

That is the barbarian option.

Gerard does not always take it.

But part of him is permanently tempted.

That tension between civilization and personal freedom is old sword-and-sorcery territory, and I think it belongs beautifully beside erotica for men.

Explicit Sex Works Better When the Women Matter Outside the Sex

This is another important distinction between the sort of books I am talking about and disconnected erotic episodes.

A woman should be able to matter to the plot because she is intelligent, useful, dangerous, politically important or emotionally significant—not only because the hero wants her body.

Slavery actually gives me interesting ways to do this.

In one Gerard story, he needs information from inside an enemy cultist fortress. Haley is a slave, which makes her nearly invisible to free men. They are accustomed to women serving around them while they discuss important things.

So Gerard gives her an assignment:

“You will sneak into the cultist fortress, and find out whatever you can.”

His instructions are simple: behave exactly as the society expects a slave to behave, move when opportunity appears, and listen.

That is not a sex scene.

It comes from the same slave society that generates the erotic material, but now the institution has produced an espionage mechanism.

This is the sort of integration I want.

If we build the fantasy world properly, the sexual systems create plot possibilities.

The Sex Also Changes the Logistics of Adventure

This is one of the more amusing consequences of taking the premise seriously.

Suppose an adventuring party includes slaves.

They still need to travel.

They need food.

They need water.

They need to be transported through dangerous country.

They may become pregnant.

They may escape.

Other men may use them.

Suddenly the sexual fantasy has logistical consequences.

Before one battle, Gerard and Fogrim are preparing for war. Men are gathering weapons. The situation is urgent.

Fogrim nevertheless tells Gerard he needs to attend to his women because there is a reproductive problem that cannot simply wait until after the fighting.

That is exactly what I mean when I say sex should not feel pasted onto the adventure.

The women have bodies.

Bodies create consequences.

The war does not pause because those consequences are inconvenient.

A fantasy world becomes richer whenever one part of it causes trouble for another part.

Public Sexuality Changes the Atmosphere of the Whole World

Another reason traditional fantasy with a few sex scenes can feel different from actual sword-and-sorcery erotica is that explicit sexuality need not be confined to private rooms.

Hyperboreans certainly do not see why it should be.

In one Gerard passage, the narration says it plainly:

“Hyperboreans have no hangups about sex and are quite happy to rut in public.”

The important thing is what follows:

“Their slaves from modern Earth often aren’t, but that hardly matters.”

That cultural collision is exactly what the setting is designed to create.

A modern captive interprets public sexuality through one set of assumptions.

A Hyperborean master interprets the same event through another.

Neither is pretending.

That makes the sexuality part of the worldbuilding.

It also differentiates this kind of fiction from modern erotic romance, where the characters generally share our basic assumptions even when their private sex becomes extreme.

What I Want Is a World With Sexual Consequences

This may be the simplest way to put it.

If sex is explicit, the world should reflect that.

If powerful men routinely own many women, inheritance changes.

Household structure changes.

Politics changes.

Marriage changes.

War changes.

Gerard's breedery eventually becomes part of regional politics because children can create alliances.

The Borderlands lack strong kingdoms. Families and scattered communities therefore seek protection from successful men. Gerard's growing reputation makes his blood politically valuable.

The narration explains the underlying system:

“When one proved more successful by sword or cunning than his neighbors, they looked to him for support - pledging their own in turn.”

Then comes the distinctly Hyperborean mechanism: the successful man can produce children through his slave women and give those children into allied families to be adopted as heirs. Over a generation, biological kinship begins welding separate households into a clan.

That is sexual worldbuilding.

Not a sex scene.

Not a kink.

An institution emerging from the sexual assumptions of the setting.

For me, that is much more satisfying.

What About Conan-Style Erotica?

This is one of the obvious things people search for when they want this genre.

Usually, I think they mean something broader than literal Conan imitation.

They want a hard, male-centered heroic fantasy. They want physical danger. They want a protagonist who can act decisively rather than spending the book negotiating his feelings. They want beautiful women and sexual reward. They may also want the old pulp willingness to be excessive.

Hyperborea absolutely draws from that tradition.

But Gerard is not Conan.

He is much less naturally heroic. He is educated by a modern world that has not prepared him for the one he enters. He makes compromises. He learns. He acquires skills. Eventually he becomes dangerous enough that people begin inventing ridiculous stories about him.

That transformation is part of the pleasure.

The fantasy becomes: what if an ordinary modern man entered a world that rewarded traits our own civilization has little use for?

And what if he discovered he rather liked the rewards?

That is where the sword-and-sorcery element meets the male erotic fantasy.

What About Gorean Erotica?

This is probably the closest relative.

If the thing you most want is hierarchy, slave girls, ownership, collars and male dominance inside an adventure world, then Gorean erotica describes much of the same territory.

The distinction is mostly one of emphasis.

A Gorean-style story can concentrate heavily upon slavery and sexual hierarchy.

Sword-and-sorcery erotica can begin instead with adventure and allow the sexual systems to emerge from the kind of world being explored.

My books do both.

Gerard can spend time in slave markets and brothels, certainly. But he also fights Chthonians, gets involved with cultists, commands soldiers, crosses prehistoric wilderness and discovers conspiracies involving eldritch beings.

That wider adventure frame is essential to me.

The women should be part of what makes the world desirable.

The monsters should be part of what makes it dangerous.

We need both.

And What About Darius?

Darius belongs to the same world, but he lets me attack the formula from another direction.

Gerard becomes established relatively early. His story increasingly concerns status, business, politics and war.

Darius is closer to the raw wandering swordsman.

He travels through the Desert of the Ghouls. He encounters a young Shemite warband. He fights strange creatures and participates directly in capturing Landing Beast women.

The sex and slavery are even more immediate because Darius has fewer layers of civilization between himself and violence.

But Gerard remains, for me, the better example of what this genre can become over a long series.

He demonstrates that sword-and-sorcery with explicit sex does not need to stay small.

The wandering swordsman can become a businessman.

The businessman can become a political problem.

The political problem can become a warlord.

And the sexual life that began as part of his adventures can expand into institutions around him.

So What Is Actually Out There?

There are pieces of what we want scattered across several genres.

Traditional sword-and-sorcery gives us the adventure, physicality and masculine heroism but is usually sexually restrained.

Gor gives us the male-dominant worldbuilding, slave girls and sexual hierarchy but stops well short of modern explicit erotica.

Harem fantasy gives us male-centered fantasy and often explicit sex, but its relationship structures and genre expectations can be quite different from Gorean or barbarian fantasy.

Dark BDSM and slave erotica give us the explicitness and power dynamics, but often without the swords, monsters, journeys and larger adventure world.

That leaves a rather inviting gap.

It is the gap I write in.

The material describing the audience for my books identifies it particularly well: sword and sorcery erotica, explicit sword and sorcery, sword and sorcery with explicit sex, barbarian fantasy erotica, Conan-inspired erotic fantasy, erotic heroic fantasy, violent erotic fantasy and sex and sword fantasy.

Those phrases all describe slightly different doors into the same room.

What I Think the Genre Should Be

For me, the test is very simple.

Give me the story without the sex.

Is there still enough story to make me want to read it?

There should be.

Now give me the story without the sexual consequences of the world.

Does something important disappear?

That answer should also be yes.

That is the balance.

Gerard's sword matters because people really try to kill him. His women matter because slavery actually shapes his society. His money matters because it buys things he wants. His friendships matter because a man alone is much more vulnerable. His political power matters because eventually he can change the lives of thousands of people.

And the sex matters because Gerard is a physical, ambitious man living in a world where sexual power is one of the rewards of worldly power.

This is why one of his reflections sums up the entire project for me so well:

“How did I end up that way? Ha! How do any of us? But in the end, we all do.”

Gerard did not arrive in Hyperborea intending to become what he becomes.

That is precisely why following him is fun.

We Should Not Have to Choose Between the Sword and the Sex

That, ultimately, is the point.

If we love old-fashioned barbarian fantasy, we should not have to abandon adventure to get explicit sex.

If we enjoy erotica for men, we should not have to accept a fantasy world that exists solely to move the protagonist between bedrooms.

If we like Gor's slave girls and hierarchy, we should not have to lose the monsters, warbands, strange cities and pulp momentum.

We can have all of it.

We can have the ancient ruin that probably contains treasure and certainly contains something terrible.

We can have the sword brother who insists upon going inside anyway.

We can have the beautiful captive waiting back at camp.

We can have the cultists, the slave markets, the drunken tavern, the war fleet and the thing beneath the sand that is about to make everyone's plans irrelevant.

And when the hero finally returns alive, we do not have to fade to black.

That is what I mean by sword and sorcery with explicit sex.

What is actually out there? Quite a lot exists around the edges. Very little combines all the ingredients exactly the way some of us want them.

That is why I write Hyperborea.

I wanted the sword-and-sorcery adventure to remain a real adventure. I wanted the male fantasy to remain unapologetically male. I wanted the sexuality to grow naturally from power, culture and circumstance. I wanted the explicit scenes to happen in the same world as the monsters rather than in a sealed room where the plot could not reach them.

And, perhaps most importantly, I wanted us never to know for certain whether the next thing through the door would be a beautiful slave girl, an assassin—

or something with tentacles.

That seems much more fun.

What Is Gorean Fiction? A Guide to Gor-Inspired Fantasy

If you have come across the phrase Gorean fiction and wondered exactly what it means, the simple answer is this:

Gorean fiction is fantasy inspired by the world, themes, atmosphere and sexual power dynamics associated with John Norman’s Gor novels.

The longer answer is much more interesting.

Because when people say Gorean, they can mean several overlapping things. They may mean sword-and-sandal adventure. They may mean the slave girls of Gor—the kajirae. They may mean male dominance and female submission. They may mean elaborate cultures in which slavery is not merely possible but ordinary. They may mean warriors, cities, markets, collars, codes, hierarchy and an unapologetically masculine protagonist.

And sometimes what they really mean is:

“I liked Gor, but I wish somebody would take the sexual elements further.”

That is the particular corner of Gor-inspired fantasy in which I write. My Hyperborean books combine Gorean-style slave fantasy with sword-and-sorcery adventure, explicit erotica for men and Lovecraftian cosmic horror. The result is recognizably descended from the same family of fantasy as Gor without attempting to reproduce Norman’s world.

So let me explain what I think Gorean fiction actually is, what makes it different from ordinary fantasy erotica, and why readers are still looking for it.

Gorean Fiction Begins With John Norman’s Gor

You cannot really talk about Gorean fiction without John Norman.

The Gor novels created an extraordinarily distinctive fantasy world. Their influence comes partly from the adventures themselves, but perhaps even more from the fact that Norman did not merely place adventures against a vaguely exotic background. He created customs, hierarchies and institutions and then let those things affect almost everything his characters did.

That is enormously important.

A fictional world becomes interesting when its differences matter.

If everyone in your barbarian empire thinks exactly like somebody living in a comfortable Western city in the twenty-first century, then the swords and sandals are largely costume.

Gorean fantasy takes the opposite approach. Its attraction lies partly in entering a civilization that has profoundly different assumptions about sex, gender, violence, slavery and power.

That does not mean every book influenced by Gor must copy Gorean cities, terminology or characters.

Indeed, I would argue that the least interesting way to write Gor-inspired fiction would be simply to change the spelling of a few Gorean words and reconstruct the same world.

What matters is the underlying imaginative impulse.

Create a world that does not apologize for being different.

Then follow its premises.

Gorean Fantasy Is About Power

This, more than almost anything else, is what I associate with Gorean-style fiction.

Power matters.

Physical power. Sexual power. Social power. Economic power. Political power.

And those forms of power overlap.

One of the lines from my Darius stories that probably expresses my own approach best is:

“Over the weeks that followed, I learned a sword gave you power on Hyperborea - but not safety.”

That distinction fascinates me.

Having a sword does not make Darius invincible. It does, however, fundamentally alter his relationship with the world. He can impose consequences. People must take him seriously. Violence becomes one of the currencies through which status is negotiated.

Later, another character reduces the principle even further:

“On Hyperborea, power makes you rich.”

That is not merely a tough-sounding line. It explains the society.

Money matters in Hyperborea, of course. But money without the ability to defend it is simply something a stronger man can take. Laws matter, but beyond the cities there may be nobody to enforce them. Families and clans matter precisely because they can retaliate against those who harm their members.

Gorean fiction tends to understand something similar: hierarchy is not decorative. It is produced by differences in power.

The Sword Is More Than a Prop

This is one reason Gorean fiction overlaps so naturally with sword-and-sorcery.

The sword represents personal power.

I do not mean that every hero needs to be an unbeatable superman. I actually prefer protagonists who discover the limits of physical strength fairly quickly.

But a world in which men routinely carry lethal weapons creates a very different psychology from ours.

Darius learns this almost immediately.

He can kill a man.

He then discovers the dead man has relatives.

That is the kind of consequence I enjoy.

A sword gives an individual enormous immediate authority, while the society surrounding him determines how long he gets to enjoy it.

In Shem, for example, there is no continent-wide state capable of monopolizing violence. Revenge culture fills the vacuum. A killing therefore creates obligations extending through families and generations.

That makes the sword socially meaningful.

It is not something a fantasy character carries because fantasy heroes are expected to carry swords.

This is where I think Gorean-style fiction is at its best: masculine power exists, but it exists inside a world designed around it.

The Kajira Is Central to Gorean Fiction

Of course, we eventually have to talk about the slave girl.

For many readers, she is what the word Gorean immediately brings to mind.

The Gorean term kajira has become almost shorthand for a particular fantasy of female slavery and submission: the collared woman who belongs to a master, who kneels, serves and is trained to understand her position.

That imagery is one of Norman’s most lasting contributions to this corner of fantasy.

But what interests me is not simply putting a collar around a beautiful woman.

The collar has to mean something.

In a genuinely Gorean-style setting, slavery affects the woman’s legal position, her sexual position, her economic value, her relationship with free people and eventually even the way she sees herself.

It is a social identity.

This is very different from a modern BDSM scene in which two people temporarily adopt master-and-slave roles.

In Hyperborea, there is no safeword ending the civilization.

The world does not stop being what it is because a captive dislikes it.

That permanence changes the tone completely.

The books make this explicit even in mundane terminology. In Darius’s Shem, the language used for slaves has become agricultural language:

“For Hyperboreans, it is a correct livestock term, like heifer or hen. They speak of ‘one-bitch’ cages and ‘four-bitch’ plows.”

That tells you more about the civilization than a paragraph of exposition explaining that slavery is socially accepted.

The people do not think they are being shocking.

They are discussing equipment.

That normality is one of the things I most want from Gorean fiction.

A Gorean World Treats Slavery as an Institution

This leads to another distinction.

A lot of fantasy contains slaves.

Very little fantasy contains slavery.

There is a difference.

You can put a chained captive in a dungeon and still have a world in which slavery has no meaningful effect on anything outside that room.

A slave society should look different.

There should be traders, laws, prices, customs, markets, professions and infrastructure surrounding the institution.

Who catches slaves?

Who transports them?

Who trains them?

Who buys them?

How does ownership transfer?

What happens if someone damages another person's slave?

How does slavery interact with marriage, inheritance, warfare and economics?

Those questions are fascinating to me.

The Great Market of Dura, for example, exists because the slave trade becomes large enough that the city physically reorganizes itself around it:

“All these ships came to buy slaves and nothing else.”

Dura responds by converting an old fortified island into one enormous marketplace. Barges, village boats and even ancient galleys arrive because an entire commercial network has emerged.

That is what I mean by slavery being part of the setting rather than merely an erotic prop.

The fantasy gains weight because the reader can see the mechanisms underneath it.

Gorean Fiction Is Usually Male-Oriented Fantasy

This is another part of the genre that people sometimes dance around unnecessarily.

A great deal of Gorean-style fantasy is male fantasy.

It is written around desires that appeal particularly to heterosexual male readers: adventure, autonomy, beautiful women, hierarchy, sexual access, danger, dominance and the acquisition of status.

There is nothing mysterious about that.

Different fiction serves different fantasies.

The modern romance market has no difficulty understanding that a book can be shaped around female desire. Gorean fiction is one of the traditions in which male desire is permitted to structure the fantasy instead.

That is certainly true of my own work.

My books are deliberately erotica for men combined with adventure fantasy. The protagonists are active. They fight, travel, acquire wealth and status, get themselves into political disasters and encounter beautiful women along the way.

The sexual fantasy grows out of that same movement toward increasing power.

The SEO analysis of my existing writing put the niche rather neatly at the intersection of Gorean fiction, male-dominant BDSM, sword-and-sorcery, slave and harem fantasy, dark erotica and Lovecraftian horror. That is a fairly accurate description of what I have been building.

It Is Not Just BDSM With Swords

This distinction matters.

Someone looking for Gorean BDSM fiction may certainly find BDSM themes—bondage, collars, domination, submission, discipline and slave training.

But Gorean fiction and ordinary BDSM fiction do not necessarily produce the same experience.

BDSM stories are commonly centered on a relationship or scene.

Gorean-style fantasy is centered on a world.

A collar therefore does not merely symbolize dominance between two people. It can signify a legal condition recognized by everyone the characters meet.

A slave may be chained in a tavern, inspected in a market, assigned labor, sold to another owner or simply expected to kneel when a free person approaches.

No negotiation need occur each time because everyone understands the institution.

That is precisely what makes the fantasy powerful to readers who want something beyond contemporary dominance romance.

The domination is environmental.

The whole civilization participates in it.

The Best Gorean Fiction Makes the World Feel Normal to Its Inhabitants

This is perhaps my favorite principle.

When I write Hyperborea, I do not want every native constantly explaining how shocking Hyperborea is.

Why would they?

To them it is Tuesday.

One of Gerard's reflections on power captures exactly the effect I like:

“What I enjoy most of all is how normal you find it. That’s power, too.”

That is a key idea in my fiction.

A recently arrived woman may be horrified by something the locals consider ordinary. A man from our world may initially hesitate at customs that later stop attracting his attention.

The transformation of the outsider becomes part of the story.

This is also why I enjoy mixing Landing Beast captives from many different historical eras into Hyperborea. The contrast lets us see the civilization afresh.

A modern woman knows that women are not supposed to be property.

A Hyperborean-born woman may consider the collar unfortunate, desirable or simply inevitable depending upon her circumstances.

Put those two women beside one another and you have instant cultural conflict.

That conflict is much more interesting than merely telling readers that Hyperborea is different.

The Outsider Hero Is Almost Perfect for Gorean Fantasy

Gor famously uses the outsider perspective, and I think it is especially powerful for this sort of fiction.

My own protagonists often come from modern Earth for the same reason.

Darius is useful precisely because he knows our assumptions.

He knows what a modern city is.

He knows modern sex.

He knows modern law.

He remembers bureaucracies, jobs and ordinary life.

Then he gets dropped into a civilization that operates according to entirely different rules.

That gives the reader a bridge.

But the bridge should not remain unchanged forever.

The most interesting question is not simply, What does a modern man think of Hyperborea?

It is:

What does Hyperborea eventually make of the modern man?

Darius's relationship with his new world becomes increasingly complicated. At one point, he describes a dead slave and catches himself:

“Slave? It is so hard to call her that - yet that's what she was. Lover? That word implies a power that she never had - and yet, she had so much power.”

That is far more interesting to me than a hero whose attitudes never move.

He has absorbed Hyperborea while remaining capable of emotions his adopted culture cannot quite categorize.

Gorean-inspired fantasy gives you enormous room to explore that transformation.

Gorean Fiction Needs Women With Personalities

Slave girls who behave like interchangeable furniture are not very interesting.

The entire master/slave dynamic becomes more powerful when the woman being dominated has a strong personality.

She may be vain.

Proud.

Clever.

Petulant.

Affectionate.

Competitive.

Jealous.

Terrified.

Calculating.

She may hate her master. She may love him. She may do both. She may understand that pleasing him improves her life without internally accepting the ideology surrounding her slavery.

Darius encounters exactly this problem with women brought from our world.

One of his slaves tells him:

“There, it is very different; we don’t have slavery, master. Women aren’t caged or bred.”

She has learned how she must behave to survive, but the narration immediately makes the distinction:

“The whore cages had taught her to be a fantastic slave. However, it had not made her want to be one.”

That gap—between behavior and belief—is where a great deal of my own Gorean-style fiction lives.

Submission can be physical before it is psychological.

Obedience can exist without acceptance.

And acceptance can develop in ways neither the master nor slave completely understands.

Characters become interesting when those stages do not line up neatly.

Gorean Fiction Is Also Worldbuilding Fiction

This part deserves more attention than it usually receives.

John Norman did not become influential merely by inventing attractive slave girls.

The deeper legacy of Gor is obsessive worldbuilding.

That is one reason Gorean readers can discuss the setting endlessly.

A good Gor-inspired world needs texture.

Not just kingdoms, but food.

Not just armies, but how those armies are raised.

Not just religions, but the little habits produced by religion.

Not just slaves, but what kind of collars they wear and why.

In Hyperborea I enjoy taking that impulse into absurd detail.

The Red Fangs, for example, are not generic fantasy bandits. They are a young male warband whose social function resembles ancient Männerbund institutions. They hunt, raid, capture women and accumulate resources before eventually becoming full adult members of their communities.

The institution persists because it works.

Likewise, Eridu is not merely “an ancient ruined city.” It is a colossal stepwell civilization created by people responding over centuries to environmental collapse.

The reader sees abandoned architecture, water systems, layers of settlement and ruins reused by later peoples.

This sort of detail makes the sexual fantasy more convincing because it exists inside somewhere that feels inhabited.

Gorean Fantasy Naturally Overlaps With Sword-and-Sorcery

If you like Gor, there is a good chance you also enjoy at least some Robert E. Howard.

The overlap is obvious.

Dangerous worlds.

Strong protagonists.

Decadent cities.

Ancient ruins.

Sorcerers.

Monsters.

Beautiful women.

Violence solved personally rather than through committee meetings.

That pulp adventure DNA belongs very comfortably beside Gorean themes.

My own work leans heavily into it.

Darius wanders across deserts with assassins after him. Gerard gets dragged into city politics and wars. Characters encounter monsters left behind by civilizations millions of years old.

And through all of this, personal force remains consequential.

Darius's world is summarized beautifully by his experience after killing the wrong man: he has a sword and therefore power, but he has no clan and therefore very little safety.

That is classic adventure-fantasy territory.

Gorean eroticism fits into it because the same world that rewards martial competence also produces systems of ownership and hierarchy.

My Version Adds Cosmic Horror

This is where my own Gor-inspired fantasy becomes decidedly less Gorean.

I love Lovecraft.

So Hyperborea is not simply another fantasy planet with slave markets.

Human civilization exists inside a cosmic ecosystem where humanity is nowhere near the top.

The apparent gods may be alien or extradimensional beings.

Landing Beasts cross space, time and stranger dimensions.

Ancient structures alter their movements.

Deep Ones breed with humans.

The Mi-Go conduct experiments.

Human civilizations rise, collapse and sometimes disappear because something incomprehensible wandered too close.

Darius reflects:

“Carboniferous Earth was only of significance in the Universe because the eldritch gods had made it a battlefield.”

I love that scale.

A master may have absolute control over the woman kneeling before him.

Then something comes over the horizon that regards both of them as raw material.

It keeps the setting dangerous.

No human hierarchy is the final hierarchy.

Gorean Erotica Goes Further Than Gorean Adventure

There is also a distinction between Gorean fiction generally and Gorean erotica.

A Gorean-style adventure novel may include collars, slavery and sexual dominance without becoming explicitly pornographic.

Gorean erotica deliberately makes the erotic material central.

That is where my own books sit.

I wanted the swords.

I wanted the strange cities.

I wanted dangerous men and beautiful slave girls.

But I also wanted the sexual implications of that world to occur on the page rather than constantly stopping at the bedroom door.

That is why terms such as explicit Gorean fiction, Gorean fantasy erotica, slave girl fantasy and sword-and-sorcery erotica all describe different parts of what I write.

The explicit material does not replace the adventure.

Ideally, each makes the other stronger.

The danger gives intensity to the sex.

The sexual relationships give personal stakes to the adventure.

Gorean Fiction Is Not the Same Thing as Gor Fan Fiction

I should also make this distinction clear.

Something can be Gor-inspired without being set on Gor.

That is how I describe Hyperborea.

It owes an obvious debt to John Norman's willingness to write unapologetically about masculine power, female slavery and civilizations that do not share modern assumptions.

But Hyperborea has its own cosmology, history, races, cultures and geography.

Its worldbuilding draws from prehistoric Earth, ancient Mesopotamia, sword-and-sorcery fiction, Lovecraftian horror and history.

Indeed, one of my book links rather cheerfully describes the series as “John Norman style” and “Gorean style” rather than pretending that the books actually belong to Norman's universe.

That is what I mean by Gor-inspired fantasy.

Influence, not imitation.

Why Do Readers Still Want Gorean Fiction?

Because very few writers are serving this particular appetite.

There is plenty of fantasy.

There is plenty of erotica.

There is plenty of BDSM romance.

There is even plenty of modern harem fiction.

But the exact combination Gorean readers often want is harder to find:

masculine adventure + deep fantasy worldbuilding + slave-girl fantasy + hierarchy + explicit male-oriented sexuality.

That combination is unusual.

Modern fantasy often gives readers brutal worlds but characters whose sexual and social assumptions remain thoroughly modern.

Modern erotica may provide domination but little adventure.

Harem fiction may provide multiple women but often avoids the darker slavery themes associated with Gor.

Gorean fiction occupies the uncomfortable, interesting gap between all of them.

The guide to my existing material identified precisely this as the strongest niche: readers searching not merely for erotica, but for things such as Gorean fiction, Gorean erotica, Gor-inspired fantasy, kajira fiction, books like Gor, sword-and-sorcery erotica and dark fantasy erotica for men.

That is a very particular reader.

I know him because I am writing for him.

What Makes Fiction Feel Truly Gorean?

For me, it comes down to a handful of principles.

First, power must matter.

Second, the world must genuinely differ from ours.

Third, slavery must be an institution rather than a costume.

Fourth, the women must be characters capable of responding differently to the same domination.

Fifth, the male protagonist should be able to act upon the world rather than merely observe it.

And finally, the writer should have the courage to follow the fantasy where it naturally leads.

I think that final point is one reason people remain interested in Norman.

Whether a reader loves Gor, hates it, or alternates between both reactions, the books have an identity.

They do not feel focus-grouped.

I want Gorean-inspired fiction to have that same confidence.

Where Hyperborea Takes the Idea

My Hyperborean books begin from Gorean DNA but take it somewhere much stranger.

There are slave markets and collars.

There are cages and harems.

There are swordsmen, warbands and barbarian customs.

There is explicit sex.

But there are also giant Carboniferous insects, Landing Beasts, ancient Sumerian-descended civilizations, ruined megastructures and Lovecraftian entities fighting wars that have lasted longer than humanity has existed.

Human beings have adapted to that world.

That is perhaps the most important part.

As Gerard's story expands into war, he reflects upon the civilization around him:

“These people, now my people, were built not just to survive this world, but to win.”

That is the kind of line that sums up what I want from fantasy.

The setting shapes the people.

The people shape their institutions.

The institutions shape the characters.

And eventually the outsider who entered believing himself fundamentally different begins to realize that the world has changed him too.

So, What Is Gorean Fiction?

Gorean fiction is fantasy inspired by John Norman's Gor novels, especially their combination of masculine adventure, hierarchy, detailed worldbuilding, female slavery and master/slave sexuality.

It may be set on Gor, but it does not have to be.

It may be explicit erotica, but it does not have to be.

It may borrow the imagery of the kajira, the collar and the slave market while creating an entirely new world around them.

What matters is the underlying spirit.

The sword matters.

The collar matters.

Power matters.

Culture matters.

And the fantasy is allowed to be a fantasy.

That is why I write the kind of books I do.

I wanted Gor-inspired fantasy that kept the worldbuilding and masculine adventure I enjoyed, then pushed harder into explicit erotica, dark slavery fantasy and the strange possibilities of the world itself.

So I built Hyperborea.

It is not Gor.

It was never meant to be.

But if you understand why a reader finishes a John Norman novel and starts searching for Gorean fiction, Gorean erotica, kajira fiction, books inspired by Gor, or simply something that delivers the same dangerous mixture of swords, slave girls and masculine adventure—

you understand exactly why Hyperborea exists.

Gorean Erotica: When Gor-Style Fantasy Becomes Explicit

If you are looking for books like Gor, I can probably guess what happened.

You discovered John Norman’s Gor novels. You liked the sword-and-sandal world, the unapologetically masculine heroes, the slave markets, the collars, the kajirae, the strange cultures and elaborate social rules. You liked that Norman was willing to imagine a fantasy civilization whose assumptions were radically different from our own.

And then, at some point, you wanted him to go further.

That is certainly one of the reasons I started writing my own Hyperborean fiction.

I love the particular territory where Gorean fiction, sword and sorcery, dark erotica, male adventure fantasy and slave-girl fantasy overlap. But my books push much harder on the erotic element than Gor ever did. They also throw in Robert E. Howard-style adventure, prehistoric Earth and a great deal of Lovecraftian cosmic horror.

The result is not Gor with the serial numbers filed off. Hyperborea is its own extremely strange place.

But if what you are searching for is Gor-style fantasy with explicit sex, you are very much the reader I write for.

What Do I Mean by “Books Like Gor”?

When people tell me they want books similar to John Norman’s Gor, they usually do not mean that they want another planet named Gor with slightly renamed cities.

They mean a particular kind of fantasy.

They want dangerous men with swords. They want civilizations rather than modern social attitudes wearing fantasy costumes. They want slavery to actually shape economics, warfare, sex, status and everyday life. They want beautiful women in collars to be part of the setting rather than an embarrassed footnote.

Most importantly, they want the protagonist to inhabit that world.

That distinction matters enormously to me.

In Sex Slaves of Hyperborea, for example, I introduce the world this way:

“Hyperborea. Hyborea. Boria. All names the people of Earth gave this time. A strip of eternity crowning so many forgotten eras. It would be forgotten, too.”

And then Gerard goes walking through a Devonian jungle after a runaway slave girl, beneath enormous cycads and through forests filled with giant insects.

At another point, after she has begun to believe she may actually escape him:

“I smiled; with confidence comes mistakes.”

That, to me, is part of what makes this kind of fiction work. The erotic power fantasy exists inside an adventure story. The slave girl does not exist in a featureless bedroom waiting for the next sex scene. She runs through an alien jungle. There are gigantic predatory roaches. Refugees flood cities after an asteroid winter. Gods are real—or at least real enough that arguing about whether they technically qualify as gods is unlikely to improve your day.

That is the sort of world I want to explore.

Gor Was Never Really Just About Sex

One reason the Gor books have survived for so long is that Gor is a world.

People remember the kajirae, certainly. But they also remember the cities, castes, warriors, Priest-Kings, customs, weapons, markets, taverns and codes. Norman spends tremendous amounts of time explaining how Goreans think.

That fascinated me.

If I were merely interested in writing explicit master/slave erotica, I could dispense with most of the worldbuilding. Instead, I keep doing precisely the opposite.

Hyperborea has currencies, religions, trade routes, ethnic groups, extinct civilizations, languages, legal customs, political institutions and technologies. It has cities such as Dura and dead cities whose ruins are older than the civilizations occupying them. It has slave breeding, slave markets and slave economies because slavery is embedded in the civilization rather than being a prop brought out when somebody gets horny.

And the characters themselves have absorbed those assumptions.

As Gerard observes:

“The Hyperborean slave girl thinks it is better to be protected by a man's sword than be its target. She is often right.”

That sentence is important.

A culture such as this should have reasons for surviving.

Hyperborea is phenomenally dangerous. Human beings are surrounded by eldritch predators, hostile tribes, monsters, slave raiders and civilizations quite capable of exterminating one another. A culture emphasizing protection, dominance, martial strength and ruthless hierarchy may be unpleasant by our standards while remaining extraordinarily well adapted to the environment that produced it.

That is much more interesting to me than simply declaring that everybody is horrible and going home.

The people living there do not know that they are characters in dark fantasy. They think they are normal.

Where My Books Go Further Than Gor

Here is the major difference for the reader searching for books like Gor but more explicit:

I actually show the sex.

Gor is intensely sexual without generally becoming sexually graphic. It circles around erotic slavery constantly. Women are collared, displayed, bought and sold; enormous significance is attached to kneeling positions, silks, brands, obedience and sexual submission.

But Norman usually stops before the point where modern explicit erotica begins.

I don't.

In my books, a slave market can lead directly into explicit use of the slave. Captivity, training, punishment and sexual submission are not separated from the sexual content. They are part of the sexual content.

That also changes the tone of the world.

One passage from the later Gerard books captures the feeling particularly well:

“There is no greater pleasure on Hyperborea than to lock the door, to know you will not be disturbed, and to sport with an afraid and excited slave girl.”

I don't fade away immediately afterward.

If you wanted the erotic premise of Gor explored as actual explicit fantasy, that difference is probably the most important thing I can tell you about my books.

Sword and Sorcery Still Comes First

There is, however, something I would emphasize.

The books are explicit, but I do not want them to become disconnected collections of sex scenes.

I love adventure fiction too much.

Men fight. Cities burn. Assassins come looking for Gerard. Armies march. Pirates raid. Political factions maneuver against one another. Cultists worship things that should not be worshipped. Expeditions disappear into places from which sensible people stay very far away.

The Burning of Dura begins with Gerard drinking wine while sections of the city burn.

He watches ships leaving, sees the glow of burning houses and wonders what the consequences of his actions will be.

Then comes one of my favorite little Gerard questions:

“Even in a city, could I live by the sword?”

That is a very Gorean question, even though Gerard is not Tarl Cabot.

What happens when a modern man is placed in a civilization where violence gives him possibilities that modern civilization deliberately removes?

What happens when carrying a sword isn't cosplay, symbolism or sport, but the final foundation beneath law?

And what happens when he discovers that he likes it?

That question is at the heart of Gerard's transformation.

My Heroes Are Modern Men Who Go Native

This is another feature that readers of Gor may recognize.

Tarl Cabot begins as an outsider.

So do my major Hyperborean protagonists.

Gerard was a man from our world. Darius was an administrative worker from Boston. Neither begins as some giant barbarian who has spent his entire life swinging an axe and collecting slave girls.

That is deliberate.

I want the reader to have one foot in the modern world when he enters Hyperborea.

Then I want to remove it.

Darius describes his old life in painfully ordinary terms: working long hours, coming home exhausted, consuming entertainment, trying to convince himself that next year he would somehow possess more freedom than he did this year.

Hyperborea strips that life away from him.

At one point his new existence comes down to a wonderfully simple possibility:

“I would lose my life or gain a city.”

A little later, fighting a native swordsman in an arena, his survival is helped by the higher oxygen concentration of prehistoric Earth.

I couldn't resist the line:

“The gods may have chosen Darius, but they hadn't chosen the oxygen concentration.”

This is what I enjoy doing: sword-and-sorcery brutality sitting beside biology, history and a slightly inappropriate joke.

The Slave Girls Are Characters, Not Furniture

For obvious reasons, the women are tremendously important in my books.

Yes, they are slaves.

Yes, the books eroticize their slavery.

But a slave who possesses no personality is boring.

The interesting part is what happens when a particular woman—with pride, fears, habits, intelligence, vanity and ideas about herself—is forced into a social role that treats all those things as secondary to the collar around her throat.

The current Darius material goes much further into this.

Blue Eyes, for example, does not simply transform from “free woman” to “happy slave” because the plot requires it. She resists. She calculates. She makes concessions without wanting to admit what those concessions mean.

After she begins trying to manipulate Darius within the rules he has imposed on her, he thinks:

“There had been no conscious surrendering to slavery. Yet, she’d made the same accommodation every naked female does on Hyperborea. She’d participated under my rules to gain favor for herself.”

That is the process I find interesting.

Submission is not a switch.

It happens in increments.

A woman obeys because she is forced. Then because obedience is safer. Then because obedience is rewarded. Then because she wants approval. Eventually, she may no longer be able to tell where coercion ended and desire began.

In a Gorean-style world, that transformation is almost as important as the collar itself.

There Are Cages. Quite a Lot of Cages.

I should probably be very clear about this part.

If what attracted you to Gor was the kajira fantasy—the female slave as owned, trained, displayed and sexually available property—my Hyperborean books take that idea considerably further.

Cages are not decorative.

Collars are not symbolic.

Slave markets are not merely places characters pass through on their way to the next adventure.

One Gerard scene opens in aisles of small cages:

“They were stacked one atop the other, each a cube 3 feet on its side. Crouching inside them were slave girls.”

The women watch him approaching with open collars and leash chains dragging across the floor.

Elsewhere, after a battle, captured women kneel in rows while the victorious men wait to claim them.

I rather liked the line:

“This was, in a sense, not too different from an execution. Life sentences were indeed being handed out.”

That is exactly how Hyperboreans think.

Slavery is permanent.

It reshapes identity. The slave can be renamed. Sold. Traded. Bred. Given away. Her status is not a bedroom game that ends when somebody unties the rope.

For readers looking for dark Gorean fiction or explicit kajira-style fantasy, this is probably one of the clearest connections between Norman's interests and mine.

And Then I Added Lovecraft

This is where Hyperborea takes a sharp turn away from Gor.

John Norman gave us Priest-Kings and Kurii.

I decided I wanted Cthulhu.

Not a metaphorical Cthulhu. Not a cult worshipping a fictional monster.

Cthulhu.

The Mist Wall encloses a vast region where cosmic entities are fighting a war humans barely comprehend. Landing Beasts travel through the Outer Dark collecting humans from different periods of Earth's history. Mi-Go, Deep Ones, Yithians and other eldritch beings exist alongside the human civilizations.

The prehistoric setting lets everything collide.

A Bronze Age slaver can capture a woman from the 21st century.

A girl from prehistoric Eastern Europe can kneel beside someone taken thousands of years in her future.

The Darius stories push this deeper into the history of Hyperborea itself.

Approaching an ancient Shemite pylon called the Tired Giant, Darius realizes the scale of what the earliest civilizations accomplished:

“The Tired Giant’s builders had cut into and remade the Universe itself. It still whispered the speech of the gods well enough to fool their servants.”

And then:

“It had kept the humans of Hyperborea from going extinct.”

That is the cosmic scale sitting behind the sexual fantasy.

Men are masters of their slave girls.

Humanity itself is most certainly not master of Hyperborea.

That Contradiction Is Deliberate

One thing I enjoy about the setting is its hierarchy of power.

A slave girl looks at her master and sees someone who possesses terrifying control over her life.

That man looks toward the Mist Wall and knows there are entities for whom he is scarcely more significant than an insect.

There is always something bigger.

That helps prevent the sexual power fantasy from making the world itself feel safe.

Gerard can swagger through a slave market. He can become rich. He can acquire political influence and military power. Yet beyond human civilization are forces that periodically erase civilizations altogether.

I use slavery, war, cosmic horror and prehistoric nature to keep reminding the characters that civilization exists on sufferance.

As one of the books puts it:

“Oblique words are the last defense against an unacceptable truth.”

Hyperboreans call the cosmic entities “gods” because the alternative vocabulary does not make their position much more comforting.

This also gives the books a tone that I do not find in many modern harem or BDSM fantasies. The protagonist may be enormously powerful in his immediate world while remaining very small in the universe.

I like that tension.

The World Is Often Horrible—and Frequently Funny

Gor can be surprisingly funny, particularly when Norman lets Tarl observe the absurdities around him.

I like doing the same thing.

Hyperborea is horrific enough that nobody could survive psychologically if everything were presented with solemn orchestral music playing in the background.

Darius encounters drug addiction, brutal courts and an extremely strange Shemite civilization. In contemplating the way cultures create explanations for their own dysfunctions, he concludes:

“It is the same with humans in all worlds and times. We create our own problems then despair as if innocent.”

Gerard, meanwhile, can walk through a world of gods, slaves and giant insects and still react like a man who remembers Facebook.

The humor makes the characters human.

It also makes the darkness darker.

If everyone constantly speaks like an evil overlord, nothing feels particularly evil. I would rather have characters gossip, drink, complain, joke and flirt while living inside a civilization that regards chaining women to tables as entirely ordinary.

Normality is what makes Hyperborea strange.

So Which Books Should a Gor Fan Start With?

If you are specifically looking for Gorean-style slave fantasy, Sex Slaves of Hyperborea is probably the most obvious place to begin.

The title is not being coy.

Gerard is established in Dura. Slavery is everywhere. The story deals directly with slave girls, brothels, cages, training, ownership and the strange social structures that emerge around them. Its opening chase also gives you a very quick taste of the wider Hyperborean setting: prehistoric jungle, enormous insects, eldritch history and the consequences of the Event.

Collar and Cage gives you an earlier Gerard: still closer to the outsider who arrived from our world, but already discovering what Hyperborea permits him to become. Its opening moves through Dura, past reed boats carrying wicker cages, ironmongers making collars and taverns filled with dancing slave girls. It is probably one of the clearest examples of the mixture I am aiming for—adventure fantasy in which the erotic slavery is embedded into ordinary civilization.

Then there is The Burning of Dura, where Gerard's world becomes larger and more political. The city itself begins to matter. Power has consequences. Violence that began as personal adventure starts affecting thousands of people.

And the newer Darius material takes us somewhere different again: back toward the wilderness, ancient Shem, Landing Beast country, the Red Fang warband, Eridu and the systematic breaking of newly captured slave women.

Darius looks upon the ancient land and thinks:

“We evolved in Pleistocene Africa, but Hyperborea is where we belong.”

That may be the direction the entire project has been moving toward.

Hyperborea is not simply where these characters have adventures.

It changes them until they belong there.

If You Wanted Gor to Be More Explicit, Welcome to Hyperborea

I understand why people still search for books like Gor decades after John Norman began writing them.

There really isn't much else quite like Gor.

Modern fantasy is full of assassins, barbarians, kings, monsters and supposedly brutal worlds. Yet very few writers are willing to follow an alien civilization's assumptions all the way through. Fewer still combine that sort of worldbuilding with explicit male-oriented erotic fantasy.

That is the particular corner I have happily occupied.

My books have swords.

They have slave markets, collars, cages, harems, training and female submission.

They have explicit sex.

They also have prehistoric monsters, ancient civilizations, warfare, politics, Landing Beasts and Lovecraftian entities treating the entire human species with approximately the respect Hyperborean men extend to the livestock in their pens.

And through all of it are men from our world discovering just how quickly supposedly permanent values can become negotiable when the world around them changes.

That is why I don't think of the Hyperborean stories simply as erotica with fantasy scenery attached.

They are dark erotic adventure fantasy for men.

They are sword-and-sorcery stories in which sex does not politely happen offstage.

They are slave-girl fantasies in which the civilization supporting the fantasy has actually been built.

And if you finished a stack of John Norman novels wishing somebody would take the swords, slave girls, masculine power and strange-world adventure of Gor and push the erotic side considerably further—

Well.

That is exactly why I wrote them.
Alice

Books Like Gor — But More Explicit

If you have read John Norman’s Gor novels and found yourself wishing the sexual side went rather further, then we probably understand each other.

That is the easiest way I can explain Gorean erotica.

Gor gives us swords, slave markets, collars, kajirae, masters, elaborate rituals of submission, male power, female beauty and an entire civilization built around assumptions radically different from our own. The eroticism is everywhere. It is baked into the setting.

But Gor is not, for the most part, explicit erotica.

That leaves a rather obvious temptation for those of us who love this particular kind of fantasy:

What happens if we keep the swords, the slave girls and the dangerous world—but actually show what happens next?

That is where my own Hyperborean books live.

They are Gor-inspired fantasy erotica for men: slave-girl fantasy, male dominance, sword-and-sorcery adventure, dark BDSM themes and explicit sex, all taking place in a prehistoric world where Lovecraft's monsters are real.

The particular reader I write for is therefore not merely looking for pornography with somebody holding a sword in the background.

We want the world.

We want the adventure.

We want the collars to actually mean something.

And yes, we want the sex too.

Gor Is Already Intensely Erotic

One of the interesting things about John Norman's Gor books is how sexual they can be without being straightforward explicit erotica.

A woman kneels.

A collar locks around her throat.

A man buys her.

She is trained to behave as a kajira.

Her body, posture, clothing, movements and expressions become subjects of enormous attention.

Gor creates sexual anticipation extraordinarily well because ownership itself becomes erotic.

The slave girl is not simply attractive.

She is his.

That is an enormously important distinction, and I think it explains why people continue searching for Gorean fiction, Gorean erotica, kajira fiction and books like Gor but more explicit.

We are not simply looking for sex.

If sex were all we wanted, there would hardly be a shortage.

What Gor offers is a fantasy architecture around sex: hierarchy, ritual, danger, beauty, possession and the constant reminder that men and women occupy very different places in this fictional world.

That is the part I wanted to preserve.

Then I wanted to take the bedroom door off its hinges.

What Changes When Gorean Fantasy Becomes Explicit?

Quite a lot, actually.

Once the sexual content becomes graphic rather than implied, the slave-girl fantasy becomes immediate.

The difference between saying that a tavern is filled with slave girls and actually showing us how such a tavern operates is enormous.

In Collar and Cage, Gerard enters a Hyperborean tavern and finds:

“On every table was a dancing slave girl. They were naked; tavern dancers are never clothed.”

That is the establishing shot.

But then we move closer.

The women have copper anklets that chime while they dance. Food and wine are arranged around their feet. Serving slaves kneel chained beside the tables. The men drink, talk, flirt, argue and use the women around them.

This is not a special BDSM dungeon hidden beneath the city.

This is the pub.

That distinction matters enormously to me.

Gorean-style erotica works best when the sexual hierarchy is simply part of ordinary life.

We Want a World Where the Erotic Fantasy Is Normal

This is probably one of the strongest connections between my Hyperborean fiction and Gor.

Nobody native to Hyperborea stops every five minutes to explain that the world is sexually extreme.

Why would they?

It isn't extreme to them.

Gerard walks through Dura carrying a bound girl over his shoulder. Nobody calls the police. Nobody demands an explanation. A blacksmith sees him and suggests they abandon the working day altogether:

“Perhaps we should broach a casket of wine and waste this day with beautiful women kneeling before us, our cocks in their mouths?”

That is simultaneously outrageous to us and perfectly conversational to them.

I love that contrast.

The sexual fantasy becomes much stronger when the fictional civilization takes it for granted.

A naked slave is not necessarily the center of attention. She may simply be bringing someone wine.

Men might be discussing trade, politics or an approaching war while a slave kneels beside them.

Sex does not replace ordinary life.

It has become part of ordinary life.

Gorean Erotica Is Not Just BDSM Erotica

This is where I think we should draw an important line.

There is plenty of excellent BDSM fiction that takes place in the modern world. A dominant man and submissive woman negotiate a relationship. They explore bondage, discipline, service and erotic control.

That can be enormously sexy.

But it is not quite the same fantasy as Gorean erotica.

The difference is the world around them.

A Gorean-style slave does not simply call a man Master because the two have chosen an erotic vocabulary.

She may actually belong to him according to the laws of the fictional civilization.

The collar is property documentation.

The cage is really a cage.

She may be sold.

She may be inspected.

She may be loaned, bred, traded, punished or commanded in front of other people who regard nothing unusual as having occurred.

That changes everything.

In Darius's first encounter with owning a slave, the fantasy is distilled almost brutally:

“On Hyperborea we can be more than men.
On Hyperborea we can be masters.”

Those two lines tell you exactly where my work departs from ordinary contemporary BDSM fiction.

The fantasy isn't playing at slavery.

The fantasy asks us to imagine a world in which the condition is real.

The Collar Has to Matter

I think this is one reason Gorean readers care so much about collars.

A collar is simple.

It is just a piece of metal.

But what it means can be enormous.

When Darius receives his first slave, I spend time describing the collar itself: its iron loops, the leash fitting, the way multiple women can be chained into a coffle.

Then he actually picks it up.

The slave realizes what is coming.

Nabonidus tells him:

“She is ready.”

And Darius observes:

“Fear and anticipation. Humiliation and arousal. She was gunpowder waiting to go off.”

That is what interests me.

The erotic object works because of the meaning attached to it.

The collar changes the relationship between them.

Once it locks, she is no longer merely a captive standing beside him.

She is his slave.

Explicit Gorean Fiction Can Explore What Gor Suggests

This is where taking the material into explicit territory becomes interesting for me as a writer.

Gor spends enormous amounts of time around sexuality.

The kneeling.

The display.

The exposure.

The ownership.

The male gaze.

The anticipation of use.

Eventually, if we are writing explicit Gorean erotica, we have to stop circling the thing.

Sex happens.

And once we permit that, we can explore why the fantasy is erotic in the first place.

It is not simply because the woman is beautiful.

My characters can encounter beautiful free women. The distinctive erotic charge comes from power. The man decides. The woman is available.

The difference in status is absolute.

That is why a character like Kubaba in Darius's world can eagerly present herself and ask:

“Lugal likes?”

And Darius answers:

“Yes. It’s good to see a beautiful woman like you is a slave.”

The sentence is deliberately not it is good to see a beautiful woman.

Her slavery is part of what he finds beautiful.

This Is Erotica Written for Men

I am not coy about this.

My Hyperborean books are erotica for men.

More specifically, they sit in the overlap between male-oriented erotic fantasy and old-fashioned men's adventure fiction.

There are swords. There are monsters. Rival warbands. Assassins.

There are journeys through dead cities and deserts. Beautiful women. Explicit sex.

The protagonist generally acts upon the world rather than waiting for the world to happen to him.

That puts my books in a slightly strange position because modern erotica and modern fantasy often come from different traditions.

Erotica frequently prioritizes relationships.

Sword-and-sorcery prioritizes adventure.

I want both.

The reader should be able to enjoy a scene with a slave girl and then turn the page to find someone trying to cut the hero's head off.

Sometimes we don't even need to turn the page.

In Darius's story, a tavern full of sex slaves becomes the location of an assassination attempt. Darius releases the women from their cages to create chaos:

“Out!” I commanded. “Run!”

And then:

“The girls, as one, scrambled out of the cages and ran. They ran in all directions.”

Seconds later he is fighting swordsmen among overturned tables and shattered wine jars.

That combination—sex, slavery, danger and adventure happening in the same physical world—is what I mean by erotic sword-and-sorcery.

Gorean Erotica Needs Adventure or It Loses Something

This is important.

If we remove the adventure altogether, Gorean-style fiction risks becoming ordinary master/slave pornography with fantasy vocabulary.

There is nothing inherently wrong with that.

It simply isn't what I am trying to write.

I want our men to have reasons to carry those swords.

Darius joins the Red Fangs because they are operating in a desert where ghouls hunt humans. Landing Beasts fall from the sky carrying women stolen across time. Alien organisms defend the crash sites. Rival warbands compete over territory and captives.

When he meets the Red Fangs, Labasi welcomes him with:

“One hopes to learn your tale, while sharing beer, with women at our feet.”

And Darius replies:

“Well met, Labasi. I hope the beer is at least half as good as the women!”

There.

That is Hyperborea. Men become brothers. They fight monsters. They drink. Women kneel at their feet.

All of it belongs to the same masculine adventure fantasy.

The Slave Girls Need to Be People

This may sound paradoxical given what my fictional societies do to them, but I think it is essential.

A submissive woman with no personality is not interesting.

If she has no pride, nothing can humble her.

If she has no independence, surrender costs nothing.

If she never resists, domination has no dramatic movement.

One reason I enjoy writing characters such as Blue Eyes is precisely because she is difficult.

Darius recognizes that.

He tells Sargon:

“She is intelligent. She wants to survive. I have given her no other option than to do so through me.”

That is much more interesting than simply declaring her submissive.

She is adapting. She is looking for advantage She hates things she nevertheless learns to do.

She obeys without necessarily agreeing. The erotic story is therefore not only what does the master do to her?

It is also:

What does she become?

Explicit Slave-Girl Fantasy Lets Us Follow the Transformation

This is one of the places where the Darius books go considerably darker.

The crusher is designed specifically around breaking newly captured women into slaves.

Its opening tells us immediately what sort of chapter we have entered:

“Fear, arousal, and sex. That is how you make sex slaves.”

Then comes the simple line:

“I was the danger.”

I like the bluntness of it.

There is no attempt to pretend Darius is merely misunderstood.

This is dark erotic fantasy.

The women are frightened because he intends them to be frightened.

The erotic interest comes from watching their behavior, identity and relationship with him change under pressure.

That is one of the obvious possibilities available when Gor-style fantasy becomes explicit.

We can spend much more time on the actual process by which the freshly captured woman becomes the trained slave.

Not merely she was captured, and several chapters later she is a kajira.

We can stay with her through the middle.

The Middle Is Where the Interesting Things Happen

That middle stage fascinates me.

A newly captured woman may obey because she is afraid.

Then because she wants food. Then because she wants comfort. Then because she wants praise.

Then—much later—because she discovers she likes pleasing the man who owns her.

Those are not the same thing.

The distinction lets us write much more psychologically interesting slave-girl fiction.

In the crusher, a slave receives praise after doing something she resisted.

Darius watches the change:

“She looked up at me as she ate, this time with something else in her eyes. Relief mixing with pride.”

He praises her again.

She answers him.

And then:

“Then I saw her confusion at her own words.”

That is the moment I like.

Not the automatic obedience.

The confusion.

The woman realizes she has felt satisfaction at pleasing someone she believes she ought to hate.

Now we have somewhere to go.

Gorean Erotica Is About Ownership as Much as Sex

Sex without ownership would produce a different fantasy.

Ownership changes tiny gestures.

A man feeding a woman from his plate. A hand on her collar. A leash wound around his fist.

A command to kneel. A slave sleeping against her master after he has used her.

None of these needs to be an enormous event.

That is the point.

The repetition turns ownership into the texture of the relationship.

Darius puts his own view rather well when he talks about kindness toward a slave:

“The way I find I get the most out of a slave girl is a bit of kindness. Just a bit.”

The rest of the passage makes clear that this does not alter the power relationship. The woman remains owned and commanded.

But precisely because kindness is not guaranteed, it becomes precious.

That gives the master an additional kind of power: not merely the capacity to punish, but the capacity to reward.

And Yes, There Is Affection

One of the things that interests me about dark master/slave fiction is that human emotion refuses to remain tidy.

You can declare a woman property.

That does not mean the man becomes emotionally immune to her.

Darius discovers this painfully with one of his early slaves.

After her death he thinks:

“You don’t keep a woman chained to a post by her throat and feel nothing for her. It is not just the slaves with complicated feelings.”

I like that line very much because it complicates the power fantasy without undoing it.

The relationship remains unequal. But unequal does not mean emotionally empty. Masters can become attached. Slaves can become attached.

Possession itself can intensify attachment because the two lives become physically and emotionally entangled.

The interesting question is what those emotions look like inside a culture that does not regard the two people as equals.

That Is Different From Romance

This is another distinction worth making.

Gorean erotica does not have to become romance.

Affection can exist without equality.

Sex can exist without courtship.

Devotion can exist without the expectation that the relationship ends in marriage.

Indeed, the entire Gorean framework pushes against the modern romantic assumption that every important sexual relationship ultimately seeks equality between its participants.

My slave girls may adore their masters. That does not make them wives.

My masters may become deeply fond of particular girls. That does not necessarily make them free.

The whole erotic premise depends upon maintaining that asymmetry.

Darius says:

“It is good to make your slave girls love you.”

His reasoning is entirely practical and erotic. The devoted slave is more passionate, more emotionally invested, more eager to please.

This is not a proposal of marriage. It is an owner's preference.

We Also Get Harems

Once we accept actual ownership, harems become a natural extension.

A powerful man does not necessarily have one slave girl.

Why would he?

If slaves are property, then acquiring multiple beautiful women is no stranger than acquiring more horses, servants, land or weapons.

Indeed, wealth and sexuality become visibly connected.

The powerful man is surrounded by beautiful women because his ability to possess them demonstrates his success.

That is classic male fantasy.

And it is one of the reasons Gorean ideas overlap so naturally with modern harem fantasy for men.

But again, I prefer a darker version of the fantasy.

The women have different personalities.

They compete. They form friendships. Resent one another. Learn from older slaves. Some become favorites. Others fail.

The harem itself becomes a little society inside the larger one.

That gives us far more to write about than merely adding another woman to a bedroom.

Gorean Erotica Also Means Showing the Economy

One thing Norman understood very well is that a slave society produces a slave economy.

I think explicit Gorean-style fiction should follow that principle.

In Hyperborea, beautiful women have prices.

Brothels calculate earnings.

Traders move women between cities.

Warbands keep the captives they want and sell the rest.

Different kinds of slaves are valued differently.

Darius explains the profitability of tavern cage slaves very simply: a good one can earn several silver shekels per use, repeatedly, while beautiful women may themselves be bought for tens of shekels.

His conclusion:

“Thus, in a week, a cage whore has paid both her buying price, and the next one’s.”

That line is intentionally cold.

It makes the sexual institution economic.

The woman isn't simply present because the author wanted nudity in the tavern scene.

Someone bought her. Someone expects a return.

Explicitness Makes the World Harsher

This is perhaps unavoidable.

If we take Gor's underlying sexual slavery seriously and remove the euphemisms, the resulting fiction becomes darker.

There is no getting around that. Real ownership means loss of choice. Real captivity means cages. Real sexual slavery means forced sex.

The Hyperborean books deliberately go into that territory.

That is why I describe them as very dark erotica, not as mildly kinky fantasy romance. The themes include captivity, forced submission, conditioning, slave training and dubious or absent consent.

For the reader looking specifically for explicit Gorean fiction, that darkness is often part of the attraction.

We are asking the fantasy to stop cheating.

If the woman really is a slave, what does that actually mean?

Then we follow the answer.

But the Darkness Needs Contrast

A world containing nothing but cruelty becomes monotonous remarkably quickly.

That is why Hyperborea also has humor.

Men get drunk. They insult each other. Gossip. Make stupid decisions.

Gerard is transported three hundred million years into the past, becomes a swordsman, starts acquiring slave girls—and still retains the cultural scars of being from our century.

After winning a violent confrontation, he reassures a slave:

“Those guys were nothing; I used to be a Facebook group admin.”

That is much closer to how I want my stories to feel.

Dark, yes. But alive.

The comedy helps because it makes the characters feel like people rather than fetish mannequins delivering speeches about dominance.

Then There Are the Monsters

And this is where my version of Gorean-style erotica becomes especially strange.

Hyperborea is prehistoric Earth. Lovecraftian entities are real.

Landing Beasts move through space and time gathering human beings.

Ghouls live beneath deserts. Ancient civilizations built devices capable of altering the paths of cosmic creatures. The Mist Wall surrounds a battlefield of the gods.

Why add all of that to sex-slave fantasy?

Because I want adventure.

Also because power becomes more interesting when it is relative. A master may possess complete power over the woman kneeling at his feet. Then a creature arrives that considers both of them equally edible.

That keeps the world from becoming a simple wish-fulfillment terrarium where nothing truly threatens the hero.

Hyperborea gives our men tremendous privileges. It also kills them with considerable enthusiasm.

Gorean Erotica and Sword-and-Sorcery Belong Together

For me, these genres fit almost perfectly.

Sword-and-sorcery has always been physical. The hero lives through his body. He fights.

Drinks. Lusts. Travels.

He encounters strange peoples and stranger women. Gets rich. Then he loses the money and starts again.

Gorean erotica simply allows sexuality to occupy the same unapologetic space as violence.

If we can describe a sword going through someone's throat, we do not suddenly become delicate when the victorious warrior takes a woman to bed.

That seems a very natural combination to me.

And judging by how many people search for sword and sorcery with explicit sex, Gorean fantasy erotica, dark fantasy erotica for men and books like Gor but more explicit, I don't seem to be alone.

So What Is Gorean Erotica?

I would define it this way:

Gorean erotica is explicit erotic fantasy inspired by the sexual hierarchy, slave-girl imagery, masculine adventure and master/slave dynamics associated with John Norman's Gor novels.

It does not have to take place on Gor. It does not have to use Norman's terminology.

It does not even have to resemble Gor very closely on the surface. What matters is the fantasy beneath it. Men possess meaningful power. Beautiful women can become slaves. Collars represent real ownership. Sexual hierarchy is part of the culture.

And unlike traditional Gor, the sexual consequences are shown explicitly.

That last part is the important one.

This Is Why I Write Hyperborea

I wanted the thing many of us went looking for after Gor.

The slave girls. The swords. Masculine adventure. The hierarchy. Markets and cages.

The sense that the fictional civilization really means what it says.

But I also wanted more sex.

Not sex pasted onto the side of an adventure story. Not an adventure interrupted periodically for pornography. I wanted a world in which erotic power and worldly power naturally connect.

A warrior can capture women because he is dangerous. A wealthy man can own a harem because he can protect what he owns. A slave trader becomes powerful because beautiful women are valuable. A slave girl seeks a powerful master because the alternative may be considerably worse.

Sex, violence, economics and status all become parts of the same machine.

And then I put that machine three hundred million years in the past and surrounded it with Cthulhu.

Because why be restrained?

So if you love John Norman, if you have spent years looking for Gorean erotica, explicit Gorean fiction, kajira-style erotica, slave girl fantasy, or simply fantasy where men still carry swords and beautiful women still kneel at their feet, then yes:

We are looking for the same thing.

I just decided to write it.
Alice

Hataduri Theology: Xath the Spider God and the Slave Girls of Hyperborea

Religion on Hyperborea is not a matter of distant gods, abstract faith, or arguments over whether supernatural beings exist.

The gods are real.

They—or things powerful enough that the distinction hardly matters—walk the world, destroy cities, receive sacrifices, create monsters, and wage wars that can last for millions of years. Human civilizations survive beneath them as ants might build their nest on a battlefield.

Against that background, the religion of Hatadur is unusually coherent.

The Hataduri worship Xath, the Spider God. To understand Xath is to understand not simply what the Hataduri believe about divinity, but what they believe about civilization, men, women, slavery, warfare, breeding, punishment and social order.

In Hataduri theology, the world should resemble a spider's web.

At its center stands the male.

And inside that web belong the slave girls.

This makes Hatadur one of the more extreme cultures in Alice Sinclair's Hyperborean dark fantasy. Elsewhere, slavery is an institution. In Hatadur, female slavery has become something much closer to cosmology.

Sinclair makes that connection explicit through Jivashi, a Hataduri-born slave girl:

“Men are at the center. They are avatars of Xath the Spider God, himself! As a spider uses its legs, fangs, and webs to create order, so do men with their swords, whips, and cities. It is the natural order of things.”

And when Olivia asks what women are within this metaphor, Jivashi answers:

“Insects exist for spiders to consume. And so, women exist for men to consume. Men breed women, crossing, raising, and culling us, as they like. In this way, they mirror Xath’s beautiful and harmonious order. Women, like insects, belong wrapped and ready in men’s webs.”

Hataduri female slavery is therefore not an institution that religion merely excuses. It is one of the principal ways in which Hataduri society believes it reproduces the order of Xath.

Who Is Xath, the Spider God?

Xath is the central divine figure of Hataduri religion.

His symbol is the spider, and spider imagery appears throughout Hataduri religious life. The high priest Candrak, for example, is introduced wearing the grey robes of a Maha Purodan, with grey ash smeared across his forehead. His priestly staff makes his allegiance unmistakable:

“Beside him, propped against his chair, was a tall, black staff. It was topped with a bronze spider, each of its eight eyes was a black gem.”

But the spider is more than Xath's sacred animal.

It is the model of reality.

Jivashi describes Hatadur itself through that symbolism:

“We don’t have ‘free women’ running around like wild animals! Instead, our world is ordered and beautiful. Like the web of a spider. Do you think spider webs are beautiful, Barbarian?”

The metaphor then expands into a complete social theology. The spider does not merely sit inside the web. It makes the web, occupies its center, senses disturbances throughout it and consumes what becomes caught there.

The Hataduri man is imagined in the same way.

Sinclair's formulation is especially effective because Jivashi gives the spider and the man parallel instruments:

“As a spider uses its legs, fangs, and webs to create order, so do men with their swords, whips, and cities.”

The sword creates and protects masculine power.

The whip enforces masculine command.

The city extends that command outward until wilderness has been replaced by hierarchy, agriculture, law, slavery and civilization.

In the Hataduri worldview, these are not morally separate activities. They are all manifestations of the same thing:

order imposed upon chaos.

“Men Are at the Center”

The crucial Hataduri theological statement is remarkably simple:

“Men are at the center.”

That goes considerably further than merely saying Hatadur is patriarchal.

The Hataduri man is not simply politically superior to the woman. He occupies a different cosmological role.

He is the organizing creature.

He fights wars, builds cities, commands slaves, cultivates land and imposes structure upon the natural world. Hataduri men themselves are not completely free from obligation. Sinclair establishes an important symmetry between male and female duties, although not between their status:

“They didn’t have free women. Every girl in Hatadur, from birth till culling, was a slave. Every man, a soldier, or a bound to serve their city-state in some way.”

Men therefore belong to the city as servants of its order, but women belong to men as property within that order.

This helps explain the extraordinary confidence of Hataduri culture.

Repeatedly, its people describe themselves as the world's greatest or most civilized people. Vamad closes one meeting by telling his officers:

“Remember, we are the greatest people in the world.”

Jivashi makes almost the same boast from a slave's perspective:

“We Hataduri... are the most civilized people in the world.”

Their religion gives them an explanation for why.

Civilization is measured not by equality but by how comprehensively the world has been ordered.

A disciplined army is more civilized than a mob.

A cultivated field is more civilized than wilderness.

A chained work gang is more civilized than uncontrolled labor.

And, in exactly the same logic, an owned woman is more civilized than a free one.

The theological hierarchy therefore becomes:

Xath → men → city → women and resources under male control.

The closer the world resembles the ordered web, the closer society approaches the ideal represented by Xath.

What Does Hataduri Theology Say About Women?

If men occupy the position of spiders, women occupy the position of the creatures caught in their webs.

Sinclair does not leave this implication to the reader. Jivashi says it outright:

“Insects exist for spiders to consume. And so, women exist for men to consume.”

Within the fictional logic of Hatadur, the slave girl is therefore not a social accident.

She is not merely a prisoner who lost a war.

She is not even primarily an economic possession.

She occupies what Hataduri theology considers the proper female state.

Jivashi continues:

“Men breed women, crossing, raising, and culling us, as they like. In this way, they mirror Xath’s beautiful and harmonious order.”

That distinction is enormously important.

Many other Hyperborean cultures practice extensive female slavery. Yet they retain some conceptual distinction between woman and slave. A woman might be free or enslaved depending upon birth, capture, debt, war or circumstance.

Sinclair makes Olivia explicitly compare those systems:

“The Durans and Shemites saw her as a woman - though one worth not less or more than cattle. Yet, all the same, still a woman. One who, if she’d been free, they would have sat with, dined alongside, and been able to work with.”

Then comes the contrast:

“Not so the Hataduri. They didn’t have free women.”

Hatadur has collapsed the distinction between woman and slave almost completely.

Hatadur Has No Free Women

The books state the situation without ambiguity:

“Every girl in Hatadur, from birth till culling, was a slave.”

This is perhaps the most radical difference between Hatadur and the other slave-owning societies of Hyperborea.

The Durans and Shemites may treat an enslaved girl as livestock. Yet they still understand that free women exist.

The Hataduri do not organize society that way.

There is no lost golden age of female citizenship waiting within living memory. There is no ordinary respectable Hataduri woman whom a slave girl might imagine becoming.

Jivashi finds the concept itself bizarre:

“We don’t have ‘free women’ running around like wild animals!”

To her, female freedom is not civilization.

It resembles abandonment.

A woman outside male authority is, in the Hataduri worldview, comparable to something that has escaped its proper place in the web.

That is why the system can reproduce itself culturally as well as physically. A Hataduri-born slave girl does not necessarily begin with the same conceptual resistance as a newly captured woman from another period of human history.

Jivashi has been raised inside a civilization whose religion tells her that belonging to men is not simply inevitable.

It is “the natural order of things.”

Slave Breeding as Theology Made Flesh

Once that principle is understood, another major feature of Hatadur makes considerably more sense:

the Hataduri deliberately breed slave girls.

Sinclair introduces the scale of the system almost casually:

“It was amazing, Olivia thought, what men could achieve - with a thousand girls bred for slavery.”

The slave population is not treated as an undifferentiated mass. Hataduri females have been selectively bred into recognizable lines or breeds designed for different purposes.

Sundi Slave Girls

Sundi means beauty across many Hataduri dialects.

Sinclair explains Jivashi's breeding directly:

“Jivashi was of a Sundi breed. Sundi breeds were the most common and cheapest breeds. ‘Sundi’ was the word for beauty across most of the Hataduri dialects. Sundi girls had been bred for beauty above all else.”

That alone reveals something important about Hataduri values.

Beauty has been systematized.

Rather than simply capturing an attractive slave girl and admiring her, Hatadur has spent generations deliberately producing them.

Beauty has become husbandry.

Drupu Slave Girls

The Drupu are another established Hataduri slave breed, selected around physical utility rather than primarily beauty or reproduction.

The broader system makes the principle clear: Hatadur does not simply ask what work a particular woman can perform. It creates categories of women intended for particular forms of work.

The important theological point is the same as with the Sundi. The Hataduri are not merely adapting their economy to the female population available to them. They are adapting the female population itself to their desired social order.

Urvara Slave Girls

The Urvara are reproductive slaves.

Sinclair introduces Rangi this way:

“Rangi’s breed was an ‘Urvara.’ Urvara breeds were raised for childbearing and milk. They gave birth to larger, stronger infants.”

If Sundi represents aesthetic selection and the other working breeds represent labor selection, Urvara represents deliberate reproductive selection.

Together, the slave breeds show how thoroughly Hataduri society has transformed the female body into something planned across generations.

The slave is not merely owned in the present.

Her ancestry has been managed before her birth, and her descendants may be managed after it.

That is exactly what Jivashi describes as imitation of Xath:

“Men breed women, crossing, raising, and culling us, as they like.”

Pedigree, Breeding Marks and the Female Body

Hataduri breeding is sufficiently important that information about ancestry can literally be written onto a woman's body.

Suvarna, for example, carries “three breeding mark tattoos on her inner, left thigh.”

Another Hataduri slave serving Vamad and Candrak has even more elaborate identifying information:

“Tattooed in curling, Hataduri script under her left breast was her genealogy and her horoscope. On her left thigh was a brand shaped like an asterisk.”

This is where theology, bureaucracy and animal husbandry begin to merge.

A slave girl's body can record ancestry, breeding information and ownership.

The web of Xath is therefore not merely poetic language.

Hataduri civilization is obsessed with knowing where everything belongs.

Priests belong within the religious hierarchy.

Soldiers belong within the military hierarchy.

Farmers and bureaucrats belong within the civic hierarchy.

Slave girls belong within pedigrees, chains, work groups and breeding programs.

Everything has its strand.

Everything has its place.

Xath's Web Is Also a Web of Fate

The web symbolism extends beyond social hierarchy.

Hataduri priests speak of divine knowledge through the language of webs and strands.

During a political crisis, Vamad asks Candrak to find something hopeful within those strands. Candrak answers:

“The webs tell me only the plans of Xath that He intends me to learn, Janak. What his plan is here, though, I cannot say.”

Xath therefore appears to possess something resembling providence.

The web is simultaneously:

• cosmic order;

• social hierarchy;

• divine intention;

• and fate.

Humans live at intersections they cannot completely understand.

The priest's purpose is to interpret the pattern.

Yet Hataduri religion is not simple fatalism. When Candrak asks what happens if Xath keeps his plans hidden, Vamad answers:

“Then Xath be damned, we’ll make our own plans! Are we not descended from the greatest people in the world?”

That tension matters.

The Hataduri worship order, but they are themselves aggressive creators of order. They do not merely wait for fate.

They conquer, build, breed, cultivate and kill.

Their religion tells them that doing so is precisely what beings modeled upon Xath ought to do.

The Purodan and Maha Purodan: Priests of Xath

The Hataduri priesthood includes the Purodan, or priest, and the Maha Purodan, or high priest.

Candrak is the clearest example.

Sinclair introduces him as:

“a tall, thin man... bald, early cataracts dulled his eyes. He wore the grey robe of a ‘Maha Purodan’ or high priest. Grey ash had been smeared on his forehead.”

His religious authority is substantial.

Inside the temple, when even the experienced warrior Vamad is frightened, Candrak tells him:

“You will come to no harm while I am at your side, Janak... In this world I am the guide. I am the protector. Through me, Xath knows we are loyal. Do not insult his love with fear.”

This is worth noticing.

Xath is not presented merely as an abstract god of domination. His followers believe that he recognizes loyalty, gives protection and extends something they understand as divine “love.”

But Xath's love exists inside the same brutal cosmology as everything else.

Protection is for those properly situated within the web.

Sacrifice is part of maintaining or understanding that relationship.

The Temple of Xath

A Xathite temple resembles a spider nest.

Sinclair opens the temple scene with one of the simplest summaries of the religion's atmosphere:

“It was dark inside the temple: the spiders liked it that way.”

Inside:

“Breaking up the chamber were standing stones. Thick cobwebs hung between them.”

Living spiders move through those webs, while:

“Placed around the stones were sculptures of crawling, giant spiders cast in bronze.”

There are also earthenware pots covered with bronze meshes made to resemble spiderwebs, filled with wriggling insect grubs.

These creatures are not merely decorative.

Candrak tells Vamad:

“Do not be afraid. His children will not harm you. Not while I am here.”

The spiders are “His children.”

The boundary between sacred animal, divine manifestation and temple inhabitant is therefore deliberately uncertain.

At the center of this religious environment lies another important component of Hataduri theology:

sacrifice.

Slave Girls as Sacrifices to Xath

Human sacrifice is accepted within Hataduri religion.

After the Hataduri defeat a group of Marsh Tribals, Candrak treats the captives as useful religious material:

“Well, we have enough prisoners for the sacrifice.”

The most revealing ritual occurs inside Xath's temple.

Sinclair describes what Vamad sees:

“The torchlight fell upon a stone table at the end of the chamber. Lying upon it was a young woman... Her belly had been cut open. The skin had been stretched and pinned in place. Arranged around the body like loved ones around the deathbed, were the girls own organs. They gleamed, still wet. The slave's mouth was open. Inside, Vamad could see, were cobwebs.”

Candrak then treats the sacrificed woman's body as a medium of revelation:

“That the time of great challenge is still upon us,” said the Candrak, picking up a kidney. He held it up and stared at it like a jeweller studying a stone. “It will get worse. Much worse...”

Sacrifice therefore appears to combine several functions.

The victim is an offering.

Her body becomes a medium of divination.

The priest reads Xath's intentions through what has been revealed inside her.

And the spiders—the children of Xath—surround the rite.

For the slave girl, this follows the same theological principle already established by Jivashi.

The female body exists for use within masculine and divine order.

Most slave girls are used for labor, reproduction, domestic service or male pleasure.

Some are used in sacrifice.

The function changes.

The underlying status does not.

Is Xath the Only God?

No.

Hataduri theology clearly recognizes other gods.

When Vamad's expedition hunts a supernatural serpent, Candrak does not deny that the creature is divine. He says:

“It is a mighty god we’re hunting... Yet, Xath is mightier still. The men will see that Xath protects them. That the foes of Kazdan will not stand against us, for our work here is sacred.”

Later, when the expedition repeatedly fails to find the creature, Candrak turns even that into evidence of divine hierarchy:

“Because it will mean that this god fears us!... Let the men not fear any craven, Borderlander god... Wait and see. Xath has blessed you. He has blessed us all.”

This makes Hataduri religion look more henotheistic than strictly monotheistic.

Other gods exist.

Other peoples may worship them.

Some are terrifyingly powerful.

But Xath is the god of the Hataduri and is believed to stand above rival divine powers.

This fits particularly well within Hyperborea's combination of sword-and-sorcery and Lovecraftian cosmic horror. The question is rarely whether a god exists. The interesting questions are how powerful it is, what it wants, whether it can be appeased—and occasionally whether enough determined men can kill it.

The Hataduri do not react to another god by falling to their knees.

They organize a hunting expedition.

How Hataduri Religion Shapes Everyday Slavery

The strongest worldbuilding in Hatadur comes from the fact that its theology does not remain inside temples.

It appears everywhere.

When Olivia first observes the Hataduri agricultural system, she sees:

“a line of seven slave girls. All were Hataduri. All bred for slavery... Each slave was chained at the throat to next one’s collar. The slaver cracked his whip again and the girls hurried forward, backs bent down.”

Seven slaves form a standard Hataduri “chain length.”

Elsewhere, giant military machinery is moved by slave labor:

“The monster was immovable - except to be turned in its mounting by gangs of chained slaves.”

Slave girls can also be deliberately used as bait. During Vamad's battle plan, Olivia suddenly realizes:

“They used us as bait!”

Yet almost immediately her indoctrinated response follows:

“Of course they did. We helped our masters. I helped our masters!”

The expendability of slave girls can be still harsher. During construction of the ditch, seventy women work in chains. Thirteen are injured. Five can no longer continue.

Sinclair writes:

“Five stakes now lined the edge of the ditch. Each of the girls had been impaled on them and left for a day to motivate the others not to fail. The bodies had been taken down since. Now, only the skulls remained, mounted on top.”

The crucial point is not that the Hataduri perform a formal religious ritual every time they do something like this.

They do not need to.

Religion has already provided the conceptual architecture.

A Hataduri slave driver does not need to pray to Xath every time he cracks a whip.

The whip already belongs to Jivashi's theological formula:

“swords, whips, and cities.”

The city is theology made from stone.

The army is theology carrying spears.

The breeding program is theology written into flesh.

And the slave chain is theology made from iron.

The Most Important Hataduri Believer May Be a Slave Girl

Jivashi is particularly important because she shows that Hataduri theology is not merely propaganda spoken by male priests.

She believes it.

She tells Olivia:

“We Hataduri... are the most civilized people in the world.”

Why?

Because:

“We don’t have ‘free women’ running around like wild animals! Instead, our world is ordered and beautiful. Like the web of a spider.”
She regards masculine domination as natural.

She regards female breeding and culling as part of harmonious order.

She understands herself as belonging in the web.

That is a much more powerful form of worldbuilding than simply showing cruel masters.

A civilization becomes convincing when the people living at the bottom of its hierarchy possess a worldview explaining why that hierarchy exists.

This does not mean every Hataduri slave enjoys every master, every punishment or every task.

Jivashi herself understands when no answer is hers to demand. After repeatedly questioning the slave driver Gose, Sinclair writes:

“Jivashi understood then that an answer was not hers to have. She got down on her knees before Gose. She planted her palms down between her parted knees, and lowered her head. He had, after all, not yet ordered her to a task.”

Her theology does not remove coercion.

It gives coercion a place inside a larger picture of reality.

Olivia and Conversion to the Hataduri Worldview

Olivia provides the inverse perspective.

She was not born Hataduri.

Sinclair explicitly tells us:

“There was a time Olivia would have been horrified at women being kept as slaves. More so, at being bred for slavery, in a culture without free women.”

Yet prolonged exposure to Hataduri slavery—and especially to Jivashi's explanation of it—changes how she interprets herself.

After hearing the theology of the spider and the web, Olivia replies:

“I like being wrapped and ready for men.”

Then comes the transformation:

“Olivia, once of South London, once of Shem, once of Dura, decided then that she was blessed to be owned by Hataduri masters. One day, when their emergency was over, and there was rice and time to spare, she dreamed that the Janak would breed her. One day, Olivia hoped, she would find her place among the beautiful slave breeds.”

Whatever else is happening psychologically, this scene shows the ultimate success of Hataduri ideology.

The foreign slave stops thinking:

Why am I inside the web?

And begins wondering:

Where inside the web do I belong?

That is the final victory of any total social system.

It no longer needs merely to constrain the body.

It supplies the categories through which the captive understands herself.

Hatadur as Gorean-Style Dark Fantasy Worldbuilding

Hatadur is also important beyond the immediate plot because it brings together many of the elements that define Alice Sinclair's wider niche.

The site's SEO analysis identifies Sinclair's work as occupying the intersection of Gorean fiction, erotica for men, male-dominant BDSM, sword-and-sorcery and sword-and-sandal adventure, harem/slavery fantasy, very dark erotica and Lovecraftian or cosmic horror.

Hatadur brings nearly all of those elements together in one culture.

There is the Gorean-style concern with radically hierarchical relations between men and slave girls.

There is sword-and-sorcery in the militarized city-states, warrior expeditions, strange monsters and brutal frontier warfare.

There is BDSM fantasy in the omnipresence of collars, chains, whips and formalized female submission.

There is slave-girl and harem fantasy in the breeding lines and mass ownership of women.

And there is cosmic horror in the theology itself: Xath's living spiders inhabit his temples, his priests read fate through sacrificed bodies, and rival gods are physical enough to be hunted.

Sinclair captures that final element perfectly when Candrak tells Vamad:

“It is a mighty god we’re hunting... Yet, Xath is mightier still.”

This is what separates Hatadur from a generic fantasy slave society.

Its slavery has a metaphysics.

What Hataduri Theology Ultimately Believes

Reduce Hataduri theology to its simplest form and the structure looks like this:

Xath is the Spider God.

The spider creates order through the web.

Men are avatars of Xath.

As Jivashi says:

“Men are at the center.”

They create order through:

“their swords, whips, and cities.”

Women occupy the place of insects within that model.

“Women, like insects, belong wrapped and ready in men’s webs.”

The city-state is the great human web.

“Every girl in Hatadur, from birth till culling, was a slave. Every man, a soldier, or a bound to serve their city-state in some way.”

The priesthood reads its strands.

“The webs tell me only the plans of Xath that He intends me to learn.”

Other gods exist, but Xath is greater.

“It is a mighty god we’re hunting... Yet, Xath is mightier still.”

And from all of this emerges the central Hataduri conviction.

A woman does not become properly situated by escaping the web.

She becomes properly situated by finding her place within it.

That belief explains why Hatadur can simultaneously be disciplined, sophisticated, bureaucratic, militarily organized and extraordinarily cruel.

The cruelty is not regarded as the opposite of civilization.

To the Hataduri, it is often evidence that civilization is functioning.

Their fields are ordered.

Their armies are ordered.

Their cities are ordered.

Their slave breeds are ordered.

Their women are ordered.

Everything lies somewhere upon the strands.

And at the center of the web sits Man—holding the sword and the whip, building the city in imitation of the Spider God whose order he believes himself born to reproduce.

Frequently Asked Questions About Hataduri Theology

Who is Xath in Hyperborea?

Xath is the Spider God worshipped by the Hataduri. His religion associates the spider and its web with order, hierarchy and divine purpose. Jivashi gives the clearest summary:

“Men are at the center... They are avatars of Xath the Spider God, himself!”

Hataduri priests include Purodans and Maha Purodans, while spider imagery appears in temples and priestly objects.

Why do the Hataduri enslave women?

Hataduri theology treats female slavery as part of natural cosmic order. Jivashi says:

“Insects exist for spiders to consume. And so, women exist for men to consume.”

She immediately connects that principle to deliberate human breeding:

“Men breed women, crossing, raising, and culling us, as they like. In this way, they mirror Xath’s beautiful and harmonious order.”

Are there free women in Hatadur?

No.

Sinclair states it directly:

“They didn’t have free women. Every girl in Hatadur, from birth till culling, was a slave.”

Jivashi herself boasts:

“We don’t have ‘free women’ running around like wild animals!”

What are the Hataduri slave breeds?

Known examples include the beauty-bred Sundi and the reproductive Urvara, alongside other specialized working lines.

Sinclair says:

“‘Sundi’ was the word for beauty across most of the Hataduri dialects. Sundi girls had been bred for beauty above all else.”

And:

“Urvara breeds were raised for childbearing and milk. They gave birth to larger, stronger infants.”

Do Hataduri slave girls have pedigrees?

Yes. Sinclair describes one girl whose ancestry and astrological information are literally written onto her:

“Tattooed in curling, Hataduri script under her left breast was her genealogy and her horoscope.”

Other slaves bear breeding marks on their thighs.

Do the Hataduri practice human sacrifice?

Yes.

Candrak explicitly says after capturing Marsh Tribals:

“Well, we have enough prisoners for the sacrifice.”

Inside Xath's temple, Vamad encounters a sacrificed woman whose organs have been removed and arranged around her. Candrak examines them to divine the future.

Is Xath the only real god in Hataduri religion?

Apparently not.

Candrak calls another supernatural being:

“a mighty god”

but immediately insists:

“Yet, Xath is mightier still.”

Hataduri religion therefore appears closer to henotheism—the worship of one supreme patron god without denying other gods—than strict monotheism.

Why is Hatadur important to the Hyperborea setting?

Hatadur turns several of Hyperborea's recurring themes—male dominance, female slavery, warfare, breeding, cosmic horror and divine violence—into a single integrated worldview.

Jivashi summarizes that worldview better than any external description could:

“As a spider uses its legs, fangs, and webs to create order, so do men with their swords, whips, and cities.”

And:

“Women, like insects, belong wrapped and ready in men’s webs.”

That is Hatadur in miniature: Gorean-style dark fantasy, slave girl fantasy fiction, sword-and-sorcery, BDSM hierarchy and Lovecraftian theology bound together by the web of Xath.

Am Writing Again...

Just a little proof-of-life update!

After some difficult times, I got back into writing. I’m giving Gerard a bit of rest now while I work on someone else’s adventures over in Shem - and good many years after the events of Gerard’s stories.

I’ve posted the first chapters over in the Discord. Drop by!

I will never be allowed in the secret libraries of the Shemite kings. Yet, I know what’s written there of this land. That, a hundred centuries ago, it was as green and rich. As fertile as that great Crescent where (one) civilization started. The one these people’s Sumerian ancestors left. First, voyaging as brave colonists. Then, fleeing as refugees. 

Shem, as Iraq, was now a land of deserts. The cool rivers from its waters passed by lifeless, hot sands. Dig, and you’ll find the stone canals that killed this land. For millenia they brought salt from the mountains. A trace of a trace at a time. Such disasters couldn’t be noted in mere lifetimes. Young boys were toothless grandfathers once they suspected trouble. It was the accountants who realized. Their trade, after all, had invented writing. Yet, just as their forever-lost cousins in Sumeria, they couldn’t prevent this doom. They could only measure it; the death of Shem.

There are still marshes and jungles on this continent. Sun-browned slave girls pluck pomegranates, melons, and barley for their farmer masters. Along the coasts, old colonies have become the new capitals. Yet, this is still a land of settling sand. All will be covered in time as the palaces of their ancestors were - upon both worlds.

The noon sun burned down, bright. Horizon-to-horizon, bone-white dunes were its mirror. I shielded my eyes with my scarf. From the south a cooling, killing wind blew. I stopped to take some ghee from a brown leather pouch. I rubbed it over my cracking lips. The ghee smelled like stale butter, but would keep my skin from mummifying. 

I carried on down the black road. It stretched ahead of me, to the horizon. It was made from dark, granite stone shot with grey veins. Each block would have needed a cart lizard to haul it. There were millions of blocks. Each a different size - yet laid to fit 32-feet across, precisely. These ‘Black Roads’ ran for miles, straighter than any arrow’s flight. Many disappeared into the sand. Others into dark monoliths or jagged hills than none returned from. Along the rest, the peoples of Shem lived their lives. 

Am I a Shemite? No. Just like you, I’m an outsider. Indeed, I’m a most unremarkable man. I was an admin goon in a doctor’s office in Boston, Massachusetts. Some days, I’d be asked to “have the talk” with someone about their lacklustre insurance. Nowadays, I just kill people because I mean to. I’m much happier for it. I go by Darius of Harak now. Dary-oos is how Shemites from the western coastal cities pronounce it. Out here in the deserts, they say it right. 

“Darius. I’ve come to kill you.” 

There, just like that. 

More in the Discord!

My First Book in 2 Years is Out!

Two years and two days later, Sex Slaves and Warlords is now live.

36,000 out 150,000 New-Written Words

It is only 36,000 words (and there’s 3000 more in alternate scene content, on the website). However, it is just the first chunk of over 150,000 words I’ve written. The other chunks will follow (I’m hoping to release one book a month, for the next 4 months or so).

Did I need 2 years to write 150k words? Gods no. A good chunk of that was cleaning after the Great Amazon Book Blocking that killed two out three books and ended a series. Those books, in their uncensored and too-hot-for-Bezos entirety, are here and will remain here. I have no beef with Amazon over this. They have boundaries and I crossed them. In a (small) way it has been good for my writing — I now know where the line is. Instead of self-censoring, I can just put the super racy stuff on the website as alternate scenes.

Why did I write 150k words just to put out 30k for the first book? Well, because the books are better when I can manage them all as a single project. Things that happen in one book might need changes made in an earlier one. Ideas at the start may not be as interesting as ideas that emerge later — and would require re-writing.

The cost though, is that it takes a long time.

Also, its not done at 150k. I took stock at that point and figured nope; this thing is going to top out at 300k! I figured waiting till 2026 was a dumb idea and that I should start getting these books out without precious about them. Halfway through, there’s nothing much I think that will change. Not a good enough reason to keep these to myself.

Sharing it With Fellow Hyperboreans

Keeping it to myself is exactly how this has felt. So much has happened on Hyperborea! I have to fill you in on this.

As you may remember, Gerard picked a big fight. There’s been consequences, but he had a point. Dura is now at war with the Deep Ones (I’ve working towards this since 2021).

There’s other factions Gerard has to deal with. Shemite city-state of Starka is not pleased and they are moving to check Dura’s power. Their poweful ally, Marna, a city on the coastline of Shem, is getting involved. There is also the Hataduri farming garrison - a prelude, if unchecked, to further colonization. Last of course, there is are the Wakers of Azathoth:

““We are the Wakers of Azathoth. You are the first outsider to hear our name. Please accept that as the greatest compliment, Butcher. Our plans extend from the choking ruins of Armanea to Dura to Starka. All this river will be ours. We will wake Azathoth, and he will end the world! Thank you for your help, Butcher. We will speak again.””

Enjoy the read and thank you for coming with me on this journey. It has been wild!

Alice

Religion on Hyperborea

Picture credit: Lamington Pav

Working on the new book - 125k words and climbing. Will likely be broken up into 5-6 books and dumped on Amazon, each a week apart.

It’s hard to justify taking time to blog about Hyperborea when I’m trying to finish a (rather big!) book about it, first. However, a bit of luck today. Below is a section where Gerard is talking to the reader about faith on Hyperborea. It works fine as a blog post, so here it is!

of men and gods

The 21st Century world feared no gods.

Faith, as I remember it, was strong as ever there. However, it was not faith as our ancestors would know it. In our time, we looked to God for strength against the crushing might of our own, grim, cyberpunk world. We could only do that because our cyberpunk world had first crushed God.

For most of our species’ existence we’ve had no such gifts to reassure us. No great power over atoms, or to travel between worlds. There weren’t books, read from thin air, filled with the Universe’s secrets! For most humans there weren’t books, at all.

Imagine then how refreshing it is to be around such terrified people. They still know to keep asking that same cosmic question asked around the first Pleistocene fireplaces:

Our universe is much older than us.

It has, therefore, more evolved beings in it.

It follows that such beings would have more power than us.

So WTF do we do?

How do we understand our lives, against the backdrop of such creatures? Is not the universe theirs to shape, not ours? How do we engage them? Do we at all? How do we survive them? These are not philosophical questions for Hyperboreans.

There is a certain wisdom they have that comes from being a culture that has evolved to survive repeated extinction level events. Part of it is deep-rooted lore. It has passed between and across their civilizations and grown. In a priest’s tale to bored acolytes. A barbarian’s recounting around a fire. Glyphs rubbed clean and read from just unearthed ancient tablets. This lore has allowed humanity to survive deep in the cracks of this world. To survive, and then emerge from them, again and again.

Central to that lore is the idea of human triviality. We’re nothing compared with the entities feuding over this world. Do not irk them! Monoliths carved with lost languages now only tell us that their makers were obliterated. This is the absolute price humans may pay for their triviality.

Yet, there are lesser gods. Even beings not even that. Ones who hate us more because they are trivial as well.

Many of these can be resisted - as we did the Mi-Go at Aymund. This does not make these creatures any less terrifying. Not all who stand in their way can do so with an army. Yet, with such beings negotiation is possible. Land can be ceded, as were tundras of Athoph by the Zidon’s ancestors. Sacrifices can be made; Andromedas chained to rocks to feed sea monsters. The Hyperborean does not seem himself as negotiating, and neither would be. Instead, haggling with greater powers is called worship.

Worship is most effective. It does not even require understanding between parties. The Settites worship snakes; villagers leaving them milk and eggs at the night. The serpents learn to visit and when to do so. They bite children to complain if they are forgotten. Mud bricks are built over the spot and declared a shrine. Bricks become stones and the shrine turns to a venerated temple. Priests emerge; secondary parasites yet essential to the negotiation between species. They extract gold and daughters as their price as intermediaries. Inspired, they fund peasants to go forth and tame new land. Snakes appear; they are left milk and eggs. The cycle repeats.

Settite snake worship - all the way up to the Titanoboa monsters - is harmless enough. Worship is an easier way to tame Hyperborea’s monsters than understanding them. Worship becomes too high a price, however, with the advanced races. The Mi-Go cults in Darfur worked as a proxy state and army. The meddling of Yithian envoys is permitted just because they know the future. The Deep Ones, under Caral, had their own voting bloc on Dura’s council!

In the end, the proud Hyperboreans have always knelt for such creatures. Knowing the costs, they will kneel again. It is easy for us to scorn them. Many things are easy for those with power over atoms. They Hyperborean only knows the power of iron blades and whispered words. He witnesses their triviality every day, and with it, his own. The Hyperborean is afraid. He is afraid of the stars. That the sun may not rise. What if the earth opens up and destroys his whole village? Or a fire flashes across the night, banning the sun for a year, causing famines?

This is why he doesn’t pray as a 21st century person might. He is not looking for his gods to aid him in his life.

He is praying, desperately, for his god not to kill him.

This is the nature of faith on this world, where men may point to gods on the horizon.

Credit: Diamond Shark

Community: I started a Discord

Over the years I've talked to many readers. I've been delighted to find how thoughtful, respectful, and kind they are. We may as well have a community yes? Here you go:

As an incentive, in the Discord under the “Hyperborea” board, I have put up the first chaper (6000+ words) of Book 4 of the Sex Slaves series, Raiders and Sex Slaves :) .

Enjoy, and welcome aboard!

Hunters from the Outer Dark: The Landing Beasts

Landing Beasts are a parasitic race that have co-evolved with Humanity, like the ticks living on a stray dog's back. The blood they draw are human lives.

 A Landing Beast enters our universe like a shark breaking the surface of the water. Then, it snatches its prey, and disappears again.

 It's attack is never noticed - does an ant see the finger descending to crush it?  And then it is gone. Those left behind lament a disappearance not just from their lives, but their very universe. Their loved one, if they still live, could be light-years and millennia away from them. None are ever returned.

 The captured person is stored in a "capture sac" and enters suspended animation. Over time, like a rat swallowed by a snake, they are dissolved and absorbed.

From Wolves to Dogs

Landing Beasts are not the only Eldritch beings preying on humans. Even as we were noticed, the Landing Beasts were noticed as well. Through cultists, magic, and feeding pits, the elder races put Humanity to use as their sheep. Sheep need sheepdogs: the Landing Beasts were put to use as well.

 The elder races bred them to carry many humans at a time. To consume only a few. Seeking out the kind they most wanted and plucking them, like fruit off a tree.

 In time, breeds were created that could transport thousands of people and keep them suspended indefinitely. There are many more Landing Beasts cruising the Outer Dark than ever come to permanent rest on Earth. Like deep space asteroids they make their transits, loaded with capture sacs. In one may be a victim take in just seconds ago. In the next sac, one who has been held suspended for millions of years.

 The elder races bred the Landing Beasts into different species. The most notable are the Harvester Beasts, the War Beasts, and the Assassin Beast.

The Harvester Beast

The Harvester Beast is a colossal creature, easily as large a warehouse or a drydock for an ocean-going galley. Adapted instead for space, crashed on Earth it is as helpless as a beached whale. It flails and roars till it dies within a day or two.

The shock of entry into Earth's atmosphere rips capture sacs from the Harvester as it descends. Many are lost, turned up in the atmosphere of pulverised on impact. Many survive however; it is what they were bred for.

Beneath the Harvester's translucent skin the bulk of the capture sacs are visible. A sharp knife and a strong arm is all that's needed to cut down to them. Once a sack is torn loose it begins to liquify. In hours, all that is left is a wet stain in the soil - and a revealed human.

The human does not recover the days more, if they will recover at all. They wonder about, their senses dulled and their muscles weakened by fever. Like moths, they are drawn to bright light in the nights. In this state, "Landing Sickness" they are easy prey for hunters; animal, eldritch, or human. Most humans brought by the landing beasts are young women in excellent health. We can only assume the plans the elder races have for them are no better than those of the Hyperboreans.

The War Beast

The smallest of War Beasts is large as full-grown, bull, African elephant. It is protected by thick armored hide and doesn't fear fire. Under its back armor is a large cluster of capture sacs. The War Beast can survive the impact of crashing on Earth. If it is not killed and cut open it will go on to digest its captured humans.

A War Beast can also seize more. It hides in ponds, mud fields, or peat bogs, springing out to grab passing victims.

A War Beast's victims can be rescued as long as digestion has not begun. The catch is that the War Beast has to be killed, first.

Most War Beasts land well beyond the Mist Wall, into the battlefield of the gods. There, they do not enter into the (direct) affairs of Hyperboreans. Some, however, fall short. There in the muddy, cold, wastelands that surround the mist, they hunt humans, animals, and each other. It is a very unfortunate slaving party that follows a landing beast down to the earth and finds they have come across a War Beast.

The Assassin Beast

Assassin Beasts are sleek, agile, winged hunters. They are often described by Hyperboreans were seen the matter distance, as immense wasps or dragonflies.

The assassin beast comes for only one person. When it arrives on Hyperborea, it sheds its filled capture sac and departs, growing a new one. Some assassin's return to the outer dark. Others remain; spoiled by the easy pickings of Hyperborea. Over time, their ability to return to the outer dark atrophies. They become trapped on Earth, hiding deep in Mountainside caves to emerge and hunt at night. They are the terror of lost shepherds and runaway slaves.

The existence of the Assassin Beast suggests at least one elder race has an unusually deep interest in human affairs. Why would such beings breed a creature to pick out an individual human being across all the billions living through time, and bring them back Hyperborea to be released?

The Bounty of a Landing

Hyperboreans regard Harvester beasts that land short of the Mist Wall as gold spilling from the cupped claws of their gods. The crash site of the Harvester may have naked, disoriented young women in the thousands who may be led into cages just by the light of a burning torch waved in front of them.

The slavers who come for these riches range from solo adventurers to organised teams of hundreds of men. They watch for Landing Beast coming down at night, like shooting stars, and raced to make their claim.

The first slavers to reach a landing have the rights to it - if they can hold it. Faster, smaller groups will take as many girls as they can, bound and thrown over their horses, before larger, better armed groups arrive with cage carts, riding lizards, and mammoths. Opportunists will wait along the edges, avoiding conflict, waiting for those girls who slip too far away for their stronger rivals to bother with. Every corpse has it scavengers, and scavengers and their niches.

If a Harvester lands too close to the Mist Wall, only the bravest and most desperate will raid its carcass. This is because they may soon find other beings turning up - the very ones that summoned the Harvester in the first place.

Farmers do not tolerate pests.

The Summoning of Landing Beasts

Landing Beasts are summoned by eldritch entities to bring young, human females as food and breeding fodder to the Battleground of the Gods - a continent-sized warzone hidden behind in a perpetual mist wall.

However, some human cultures on Hyperborea have learned to summon landing beasts as well. Perhaps they do no more than distract the creatures off their courses. Perhaps they merely bait them, their arcane efforts no better than chum thrown to sharks. In the Shemite creation myth it was their ancient priests who populated Hyperborea by bringing Landing Beasts that carried every other culture.

Let us examine how such a creature may be summoned.

The Ritual  

Key to the ritual is the offering of a consecrated human life, almost always that of a slave girl.

The right slave is one with an appropriate horoscope. A slave horoscope is a calculated based on the day and the location a girl was enslaved. It may be kept on a tablet or scroll. However, it is commonly tattooed on, or under a breast, or above the base of the girl’s spine.

Readings vary between cultures but focus on a slave girl’s passion, obedience, and fertility. If a slave’s horoscope shows the strong presence of planets in all favorable zones or “houses,” she is deemed worthy as a sacrifice.

The sacrifice is conducted at an Outer Dark observatory. These are Stonehenge-like structures doubling as an astronomical calendars. The most sacred observatories are those built by races before the coming of Humanity. The ritual can only be performed at certain times of the year, according to the positions of the stars and planets.

Sacrifice-worthy girls will be kept just outside the observatory grounds. They are highly valued and kept under armed guard. Most often they are put on a controlled diet and made to serve only the most senior priests.

When the time comes, a girl is chosen, taken to the observatory’s altar and held down, a cultist holding each of her limbs.

A chant then begins in a pre-human language, the words of which are recorded on stone tablets that are only decipherable by the most maddened scholars.

The first chant is recited before the sacrifice and it is used to call forth the Landing Beast from the Outer Dark. It is (perhaps) best translated as follows:

"Yogsothoth, Great Lord, Hear my plea,

Great Hunter of the Outer Dark, Harken to my call,

By the blood of the sacrifice,

By the power of the stars, I summon thee,

Come forth from the void, and do my bidding."

The slave is then sacrificed. Her blood is used to draw patterns on the ground and the signs of whichever cosmic god the summoner invokes for protection.

The second chant is recited after the sacrifice, and it is used to bind the Landing Beast to the summoner's will. It goes as follows:

"Cthulhu, Lord of the Outer Dark, Hear my plea,

By the blood of the sacrifice,

By the power of the stars,

I bind thee, Great Hunter, To my will,

I command thee to do my bidding."

The summoner and the rest of party then watch to see if a shooting star appears. If successful, it will grow, as a landing beast enters into our universe and de-orbits. It will crash in the vicinity of the observatory - one reason such places are far away from large settlements. War Beasts and Assassin Beasts can then be given further instructions, with the Assassin Beasts being able to re-enter the Outer Dark and strike at the summoner’s command.

If the ritual has failed a landing beast will still come - but it will be enraged and attempt to kill the summoner and their party. An enraged Harvester is no threat; as long as it brings its captives to the summoner, the goal as been achieved. Assassin Beasts and War Beasts however are great dangers. They will kill those who sought to bind them, unless killed themselves.

It's worth noting that this is just one such ritual human summoners may use. Others have been developed throughout the history of Hyperborea. Different gods have been invoked and different chants recited. Some rituals call for the slaughter of multiple slaves. However, the core of the ritual remains the same.

Happy New Year! Writing Update on Book 4 of Sex Slaves of Hyperborea

Picture credit: Not Strooge

Hey there, and Happy New Year Hyperboreans!

Just wanted to give you an update.

Book 4 of Sex Slaves for Hyperborea is Going Strong

Picture credit: Noob Player

You’ve read three books that have been building up to what I have been waiting (for years now) to write. Gerard will be leaving Dura to go to war. He’s in trouble in Dura; he has Caral to find; and he’s realized wealth and power don’t give him the luxury of ignoring Hyperborea. He’s gone from playboy to player character. Game on.

The book is 29k words long already; 50% longer than Books 1 and 2. Let’s see what happens but I think it might beat Book 3 for length.

A Hyperborean Warband

I’m also keen to write a new series about a small, Hyperborean warband. It won’t start till I finish Book 4 (or even the entire Sex Slaves series!), but the idea won’t go away and its a definite next step on my own writing journey.

The stories would be in 3rd Person or close 3rd, and focus on the various men in warband and the slave girls they capture.

The difference from the Gerard-based stories are that:

1 - The Narrator, not Gerard, would be your window into the character’s minds.

So instead of:

“her face showed that mix of emotions any girl like her did, when whipped, forced to her knees, and ordered to my cock for the first time. I was about to take away any pretenses from her that she wasn’t mine.”

You’d see something like:

"Kalena glared at him. The bastard, she thought. How dare he? I will bite off his cock and spit it in his face! Even as she thought this, the heat between her legs grew even more. She looked down. How can I feel this way?

Her eyes went to the whip in his hands.

His knuckles around it whitened.

Terror sparked and shot up through her spine. Heart pounding in her ears, she opened her mouth and leaned forward. She closed her lips around his cock. It was hot, radiating. She tasted the salt of his sweat. She found herself smiling; then came the shame at that. She closed her eyes - the shame dulled.

The chain at her throat went taut as he pulled her close. His cock forced her tongue down, and pushed up against her tonsils.

“Serve, Slave,” he ordered. His voice sent another chill of terror up her spine, ending in excitement, her heart racing. “Serve ike a brothel cage whore. Or, I will put you back on the cross.”

Yes, Master, she thought, and began rocking her head back and forth.

2 - The POV / ‘Camera’ would follow the character with the greatest stake in a chapter

Picture credit: Shameful7

If the young blood warrior is fighting for a woman against an arrogant, smug, senior warrior, it will follow the young blood’s perspective. If (when!) a slave girl is being dragged to the branding table, it will be in her mind that we see the iron being prepared, her flesh bared, and then the marking.

3 - There will be more focus on character interactions

How does A feel about B? B about C? What teacher-student, elder-younger brother relationships drive the warband? What jealousies and grudges threaten it? There is also the ‘secret’ world of slave girl interactions. What do they do when the masters aren’t looking? What are their rivalries / sisterhoods like, and how far are they directed by their owners?

AI Art Generation

I’ve been learning how to us Stable Diffusion. The technology is changing so fast, every time I set at the computer to have another go, I do so as practically a complete newb.

However, it opens up great possibilities for presenting Hyperborea.

The women showed in this blogpost are not real. All these images were generated. Not by me, but hopefully I will soon be able to do generate comparable quality, soon. The catch is that this comes at the expense of writing time. Whenever possible, I prefer to be writing.

Picture credit: Noob Player

And that’s it. Back to work for me, and have a great year!

Alice

Born, Taught, and Guarded - The Three Natures of Hyperborean Slave Girls

Hyperboreans have many ways of categorizing their slave girls. Some are judged by the quality of the training. Others by their remaining productive years, or by how many times they’re master has pupped them. However, while these affect their value in the slave market, they do not necessarily impact how slave girls are treated.

What will, however, is a slave girls temperament. Her master will decide the rest of her life, based on it. In this update we will look at how Hyperborean sex slavery has been advanced by a study of a slave girl’s nature.

The Hard Cap - The Three Day Rule

The range of slave girl temperaments is limited by the strict and brutal application of a three day breaking rule. From the moment a captive girl is set to slave training, she has till the third day to both obey her master, and submit to him sexually.

A Hyperborean master has many tools with which to extract these concessions from her. He/She is also an expert at wielding them. Examples are sleep and food deprivation, punishment, degradation, and norming by example set by well-trained slaves.

However, if by the start of the third day she does not submit to slavery, the slave is considered untrainable, and destroyed.

This practice is one the oldest customs on Hyperborea. It goes back to the prehistory of all currently surviving Hyperborean cultures. It’s result is that all slaves in a Hyperborean woman's ancestry had submitted in under three days. Over the millennia, this has made for a strong bias among the Hyperborean-born towards sexual submissive genetics.

The Three Day Rule constrains slave girl natures. Let us examine those it permits.

“Born Slaves”

These are slave girls who are sexual submissives. They are the majority of Hyperborean-born slave girls. They are called "born slaves" as their craving for the collar is innate.

Born slaves have various hallmarks. Their early slavery is wrestling match between their intellect and their biological drive. Born slaves resist not just their masters, but also their desire to be slaves.

As such, a born slave scorns and puts down other born slaves. She sees them as worthless, despicable creatures. In doing so, she tries to reassure herself that she is somehow not the same as them.

Another hallmark is extensive rationalizing after sex. The born slave tries to excuse hersef for enjoying being fucked by her master. That it her master’s fault. That he has played a trick on her. That it cannot be helped.

The third telltale is that she feels guilty for enjoying her degradation.

Masters watch for the signs in their slaves. If identified, they then then use the born slave’s drives against her. The solution is to ignore her intellect altogether, and simply appeal to her desires. The born slave is degraded and used, repeatedly. This forces her to indulge her nature, without space to backslide.

This constant pressure prompts her to self-deceive. To find any way to excuse her submission - and enable it, further. Once achieved, the slave continues to use these justifications for the rest of her life, or one day realizes she is indeed a born slave, and accepts it.

When it comes to breeding slaves, Hyperboreans prefer breeding born slaves. Part of this is due to ingrained social wisdom. Hyperborean Patriarchy is founded on the abundant supply of sex slaves, the more submissive, the better.  

Another factor is economic. Most Hyperboreans are farmers or poor urbanites, protected (or perhaps extorted) by the region’s city state, priest king, or even just the warrior-who-lives-up-that-hill. Their obligation may be collected in coin; grain; military service; or in slave girls.

Here, the advantage of daughters comes to bear. They can be made for free; they help on a farm once they are old enough; and giving them away solves the problem of raising dowries to marry them off.

"Taught Slaves" 

Taught slaves are not sexual submissives. However, they make the intellectual decision to choose to submit to seg slavery, with everything that that entails. Taught slaves are a smaller group among Hyperborean-born slave girls. They are much larger proportion, however, among Landing Beast slaves.

Where the born slave is defined by her conflict between her drive and her intellect, for the taught slave it is the opposite. The taught slave has no desire to submit. She assesses her situation and behave accordingly.

The taught slave’s defining traits is often intelligence. She is receptive to punishments and incentives and changes her behavior accordingly. A master may notice that the girl is a quick study, and easy to manage. What's happening, however, is that the slave is looking for whatever leverage she can use to improve her situation.

A taught slave may also be manipulative. She will use deception, pandering, and even spy and inform on of the girls, to gain favor.

The taught slaves a planner. She is always thinking about ways to escape and what to do afterwards.

Her biggest tell is that she is obedient without being submissive. She does not show the kind of delight on her knees, that the born slave does. However, she is quicker to obey.

Her intelligence is her undoing. A master’s solution is to show her that her bondage will never end. They demonstrate that escapes are impossible by using trained slaves as provocateurs. They create "opportunities" for escape which are traps. They show that the re-captured slaves are always severely punished.

The larger environment is also presented. Are there people who will grab a runaway and carry her off, the moment she makes it of the premises? Are there dangerous animals beyond the farm stockade walls that would kill a runaway in less than a day?

The goal is to present the hopelessness of her situation. This coaxes her to accept what she already suspects - that slavery will be the rest of her life. On this realization, the taught slave will soon decide that she may as well get used to it.

As incentive, the master offers her a tiered existence. Slaves who buy in and commit to their slavery get better treatment than those who don’t. The taught slave chooses to buy in.

In doing so, she resets all expectations to that of a naked, chained, slave girl. This allows her to enjoy what rewards are to be had - and most important of all - to be perfectly content with them.

The taught slave will still escape if given a chance, and the possibility of real prospects, afterwards. As such, top girls are always kept in a chain, and never sent on unsupervised errands.

Hyperboreans breed taught slaves as a secondary preference.

"Guarded Slaves"

Guarded slaves do not want to submit, and cannot be convinced that they should, either. They learn to obey just as well as the others. However, they submit to acts and instances, not to lives of slavery.

The Hyperborean knows they has a guarded slave because she will obey without any enthusiasm. This must be tolerated because it is the only way a master can tell if a slave is guarded, or not. Once that has been determined, it is no longer tolerated. The slave girl is punished her she learns to emulate the behavior of a born slave, for her own protection.

The guarded slave is always looking for options to escape, even if they are poor. A master will keep her chained to a bed, a wall, or a grindstone, for the rest of her life, or risk losing her.

Guarded slaves are not bred. Instead, they are neutered through herbal treatments. These herbs have no side effects besides infertility.

Summary

In this way, Hyperborean masters breed primarily for sexual submissiveness, and secondarily for intelligence. They also select aggressively against resistance.

What resistance there is in the gene pool comes from Landing Beast slaves. Distance from Landing Beast zones dilutes this, however. Without renewal from such ‘foreign’ slaves, within 4-5 generations, there is no resistance left in a region’s gene pool. All females enslaved from them will be born slaves.

This correlates, to a degree, with Hyperborean cultures that have no freedom for women, whatsoever. This is the situation in many Hataduri and Zidonese city states, which are far from Landing Beast zones.

World Building: Dairy Girls - Milk and Sex Slavery in Hyperborea

The Power of Herbs

To the Hyperborean a slave girl is nothing more than livestock. As such, as an owner of livestock, it becomes his responsibility to make use of every part of her.

Her breasts are no exception.

Dairy slavery on Hyperborea is possible because of two herbs. Taken together, they give Hyperborean masters the control they need over the bodies of their slave girls.

The first is Milk Root. Milk Root is a yellow plant that, when consumed by a pregnant human female, induces lactation. Milk production can begin anywhere from hours to days later.

If a slave girl is fed Milk Root for several weeks straight, she will produce milk for months. However, she must be pregnant while she is being fed the herb.

The second herb is Mismating Spice. When consumed by a pregnant slave, the leaves cause the pregnancy to terminate. If consumed early there is no risk to the slave.

Mismating Spice is a necessary tool of any master who keeps young women caged in his bed-chamber. However, when used in conjunction with Milk Root, a slave can be made into a dairy slave.

Creating a Dairy Slave

The Hyperborean first breeds a slave girl. He then force-feeds her Milk Root for up to a month. This is called "priming." Once the priming period is over, he mismates her. The slave’s breasts will continue to produce milk for many months. Once she runs dry, the process is repeated.

Reasons

Food

Milk can be consumed directly, especially in marginal environments. Excess can be converted to cheese, and stored. 

Sweetener

 Human breast milk is very high in sugar; closer in flavor to melted ice cream than cow’s milk. Hyperborea is a world where neither honeybees nor sugarcane have yet evolved. Milk from slave girls is used for sweets and cakes.

 Alcohol

The high sugar content makes the milk excellent for fermentation to produce alcohol. The drink produced is closest to Central Asian "Kumis," a drink made from fermented mare’s milk.

Kumis has half the alcohol content of the average beer. Its taste, however, is very much an acquired one. Hyperboreans are quite used to it and consume it in large quantities. On long caravans and sea voyages, some slave girls will be ‘put to dairy’ to keep the men supplied with alcohol.

In harems, it is considered a point of pride among slave girls if they have been put to dairy to keep their master supplied with Kumis.

The Dairy Slave

The ideal dairy slave is a girl in peak fitness. Her master will keep her well-exercised, but not so much that lactic acid enters her milk, affecting the taste.

The size of a slave girl’s breasts is irrelevant to her milk production. All that matters is that she be in good health, and well-fed.

Dripping

A dairy slave is most full in the morning. This is also when, her breasts full, she is likely to drip milk from her nipples.

The release of milk is also connected to her oxytocin levels. Oxytocin is released in sex, and as such a dairy slave is likely to drip (or even spray) when her master is using her. Some slaves begin dripping merely in the presence of their master, or men, generally.

Hyperboreans regard dripping as a sign of good health. They find it amusing that slaves are often made uncomfortable by this bodily function they cannot control. Masters will fondle or or masturbate such girls to increase their dripping: it is just another dimension of power to exercise over their slaves, and to remind them of how powerless they are.

The Milking Bench

Dairy girls are typically put to a milking bench. This is a trestle table or raised bench on which a slave girl is forced to kneel. A bar is mounted on the bench at the height of the kneeling girl’s necks. Cuffs or chaining rings are fitted along the bars. The dairy slave kneels with the bar against the back of her neck. Her collar is chained to it. Then, her hands are raised and her wrists are cuffed, parallel with her neck. Secured thus, she cannot leave the bench, or otherwise interfere with her milking.  

The average milking bench takes 3 to 5 girls. Slaves mount the milking bench in the mornings. If a slave girl has been displeasing, she may be left on the bench for several hours, as punishment.

Dairy slaves are not allowed to drink milk except as a rare treat. As such, they are not permitted to milk themselves, or each other.

Slave Dairies

Dedicated dairies are rare on Hyperborea. Instead, harems and stables may have a few girls set aside to be ‘in milk.’ Dairies are less common in urban areas. They are ubiquitous, however on small, present-owned farms. Every farm girl will, at some point, be put to dairy.

In Book 2 of Sex Slaves of Hyperborea, Slaver and Sex Slaves, Gerard experiments with the idea of setting up a dairy. He is not fond of the taste of Kumis, but I expect the idea of keeping Kitten under a table, wrists chained to a ladle as she churn her own milk, may change his mind…

EXCERPT: Breeding a dairy slave

Gerard’s first time ever breeding a slave was in Dagon’s Price.

He comes across some girls set aside to be used as dairy slaves. Realizing what was in store for them, he takes matters (and one of them) into his own hands. He does this in secret. He has no knowledge of the procedures, and hardly expects to be offered a role.

However:

• he has never bred a slave before

• no one is watching
  

"It is milk root, Master," she pointed to the corner of the compound. There was an open wooden crate there with yellow, dried herbs inside. I went to the box: the smell was indeed coming from it.

Beside the box were four, small, cages. Curled up inside each of them, clutching at the wicker bars, was a slave girl. They studied me like deer watching a wolf.

By the cages was a 6' x 6' square of baked, clay tiles. Wooden posts had been rammed into the ground at each of its corners. Chained shackles had been fitted to them, and lay coiled on the ground.

"What is milk root, Slave?" I asked the Anatolian.

"I know only that it is a herb, Master," she said with her head down, "and that when fed to a slave after she has been bred, she will give milk within the day."

The caged slaves turned in their confines to try to see me better. One was a stunning Shang girl, with long, silk-black, perfectly straight hair. Her skin was gently tanned. She reminded me of Zana. Her breasts were large and well-formed, with brown aureoles and nipples.

I picked up a few grains of milk root (which was not a root) and studied them. They had an oily feel, and they smelled quite pungent.

"Have you eaten this?" I asked the caged girls.

"Yes, Master," they chorused.

"Why are you in cages, and not chained for milking?"

"We are waiting to be bred," said the Shang.

I pulled out my knife. There were gasps from some of the girls, and the caged ones tried to shrink back. The Shang stared at me; her eyes were large, dark, intelligent.

I went to her cage and cut away the leather thongs that tied it shut. I opened the cage door.

"Out."

The Shang crawled out on her hands and knees.

"There," I pointed to the brick square.

She crawled to the middle of it. I took one shackle, opened it, and fastened it around her ankle. Then I secured her other ankle, and then both her wrists. She knelt on her hands and knees.

I pulled down my pants, got down behind her, and got to work. Her body was thrown forward with each stroke, her hair tossing. She started to moan; I cupped one hand over her mouth.

When I ejaculated, I pulled her close against me. I held her like that for a few moments, she lowered her head down to the tiles and began panting. Then I stood and shook myself clean; semen dripped onto her back.

I uncuffed her wrists and ankles and led her by her hair to one of the milking shed.

"Kneel."

She knelt under a bar, the collar hanging down by her face.

I lifted her long, silk-soft hair out of the way, and pressed the collar against her warm, sweaty skin. It clicked as it locked. Then I took each of her wrists and shackled them as well.

"What do you say?" I said.

"Thank you, Master."

I left the stable.

Write Like a Gorean: The Gorean Protagonist

Let’s look at how to create a Gorean Style hero. For this first we’ll examine how Norman created his heroes (or rather anti-heroes), and from there the essential components to a successful and compelling Gorean main POV character.

The ‘Competent Man’

“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyse a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”

— Robert Heinlein, Time Enough for Love

A popular trope of early 20th century science fiction that still resonates, is that of the "competent man." The competent man is more than just a character who is competent; he is essentially superhuman. There is nothing he can't do, be it in a fight, solving a science problem, or coming up with needed trickery to overcome a numerically superior but arrogant foe. They tend to have world-changing ability that other characters in the setting somehow lack, either being nameless cannon fodder, or becoming supporting cast. John Carter of Mars, Flash Gordon, and Conan the barbarian are early examples.

Competent man Flash Gordon with supporting cast character, Dale Arden.

Compare these characters with the powerlessness of Wells’s unnamed protagonist in The War of the Worlds, and even Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit being distressed by just the idea of life without enough spare hankies. The "competent man" has changed little in the last hundred or so years - shirtless, impetuous Captain Kirk has resonates even today, and every first-person game revisits this powerful storytelling tool. There's nothing quite like having a single point of view character who the author can throw pretty much any crisis at, and who can be relied on to change the world by the end of the book.

Gor’s Tarl Cabot is very much a competent man hero. City states, powerful nobles, and even alien leaders are subject to his involvement in their affairs.

Is this then, a compulsory trope? Does a Gorean hero have to be a character whose exploits stress the reader's suspension of disbelief, or worse, their patience? Must he so suspiciously unrelatable? Must he even be a man?

I would argue no. All that matters in a Gorean story is that the world changes between the beginning and its end, and that someone hot is sexually dominated.

Personally, I like competent men characters. They are useful; appropriate to the "planetary romance" genre; and if you get into their heads and lay them bare for the reader they stop being cardboard cutouts. My competent men are all heterosexual men enjoying heterosexual and bisexual slave girls, but this is in no way important to the Gorean hero. John Norman would disagree with me, but that's because Gor means one thing to him (a serious prescription for how people should live), and something else entirely to the rest of us (sexy slave porn, yo!).

I am not interested (and do not support) a world where one group of people barbarizes another. However, violent, barbaric, adventure sex slave stories are hot as hell, and I can't get enough of them. To write like a Gorean, this is what you must be true to. As such, the gender of your "competent man," and the gender of his prey, are irrelevant. All that really matters is that he hunt, enslave, and sexually dominate his prey.

In coming years, we should expect to see Gay Gorean stories, gender fluid heroes, female Goreans with their own slave girls - and slave men - and other explorations as we wink at and beckon to our gender buddies across the spectrum to see what we have in our brown paper bag.

Anti-Heroism

The Gorean hero is no boy scout. Conan, more than Tarl Cabot, is the archetype here. Our hero needs to be more than happy to do full-on bad things - remember, he (or she) is a sex slaver. You cannot have a boy scout turn around and steal a a girl and keep her in a cage. It’s not compelling.

Connected with this is the general appeal of any anti-hero character: an exploration of being evil. Through the anti-hero’s actions, the reader can take vicarious delight in things they could never, or would never, do. It is the appeal of the Joker over Batman (screw Batman).

The trick to using an anti-hero and having the reader root for them, is quite simple. You have them stand against the "true" evil of the story or setting. For example, in The Pool of the Black One, Conan challenges and kills a pirate captain for no other reason than to become one in his stead. However, he still fights to save the rest of the crew from the monsters on the island. Accordingly, Tarl Cabot joins Ivar Forkbeard in in Tovarsland and enjoys the man's slave girls, but he risks all to joins the stand against the Kurii menace.

Contrasted against alien invaders who would see humanity exterminated, collaring, branding, and breeding captives becomes an act of humanism. The anti-hero’s actions can be condoned as part of the setting’s ‘Wheel of Life,’ underlined by the chattels own acceptance of their situation.

An Outsider

The hero of the Gorean tale is always a proxy for the reader. A Gorean world is always an interesting one. Here again is the influence of classical science fiction: the wonderful world of Barsoom, of Pellucidar, and other planetary romances. As an outsider, the Gorean protagonist can ask whatever questions he likes and go down any alley. Whatever wonders are mundane to the rest of that world, can be as interesting to him as they are to the reader.

The character does not need to be an outsider for this. It is nothing a first-person narrative can't do, just as well. However, what a general first-person narrative cannot accomplish unless it of is an outsider plopped into a Gorean world, is a stage-by-stage exploration of, and participation in, sex slavery. The reader, especially one who is just picking up a Gorean-style book for the first time, will want to take his or her time exploring what they can do in that world.

This could start as simply as staring at a sex slave without reservation. Imagine looking a beautiful woman up and down, as she walks past. Imagine doing so making no attempt to hide your action, from her, or anyone else. Even the idea of this is creepy and sleazy to us. However, in a Gorean world, it would be so common it wouldn’t be noteworthy to them - if they even realized they did (how often do you stop and realize that you’re breathing?).

An outsider though, would do this with the same nervousness, discomfort, and gleeful taboo interest, that the reader feels when they do it right along with him. The reader can feel the same strange sense of power the protagonist does, when he realizes that he can do it all he likes, and the slave girl expect this - and adjusts herself to better exhibit her body to him, well-trained meat that she is, when she notices his interest.

A good example of this is in Nomads of Gor where Tarl Cabot is asked to be a team player and collar Elizabeth Cardwell. Tarl is uncomfortable doing it - and yet he does it. We feel the same rush of power he does when he closes the collar around her throat. She asks him what that means between them and he says it is nothing, but it is in his power to decide. He could just as easily have told her it meant he saw her as a slave, to do with as he pleased. That he said otherwise is irrelevant. We collared her, right along with him.

Above all, a Gorean story is one where the reader may explore the taboo delight of sex slavery: something they have no access to, and if presented with it, would be horrified and not participate in (of this I'm certain. Reading teaches empathy, and incels do not read).

However, there are no hard and fast rules to writing. All that matters is that a writer understand the "rules" well enough that they know when to use or discard them to best effect.

Point of View

This is to do with how the Gorean protagonist is presented. Gorean fiction is cerebral - yes, you read that right. It is not just a man dragging a snarling and swearing beauty by a chain to the whipping post, it is also what goes through that man's head (or hers).

Leave aside the justifications and mental torture he may go through in order to excuse his own actions; he is also in a mental battle with his prey. How will he break her? Can she even be broken? They are sparring with each other in a game where he controls all the moves, but it is for her to decide if she will lose or not. What he is doing is essentially no different from breaking and taming a wild animal.

There is a lot of tension here: frankly, it is worth its own story with nothing else in the background. This story can be told from a third person perspective - which is fantastic for action scenes. However, third person is very limited when it comes to trying to get into a person's head.

I would go so far to say why bother with it for Gorean fiction, at all. That's just my opinion, though. Why don't you try this experiment and decide for yourself:

-Think of a short, one-on-one breaking scene between your Gorean protagonist, and his captive.

-Write it from first-person.

-Write it from third person.

In which do you empathize with and and root for the slaver? Is he likable? In which do you root for the slave girl? Do you find his experience vicariously hot, or do you find hers horrific?

Your reader needs to root for a character who enslaves people. Perspective is everything.

Changing the World

A good Gorean story is also a good story, period. Things need to change and people need to change. A free woman with proud aspirations ends up a degraded slave girl with expectations on par with an animal’s. Evil lords are confronted and defeated. A hero who hates himself for sleeping with a slave girl, becomes the proud cruel, and exacting owner of several. This is enough for any story.

However, I would argue that for the Gorean story, the Gorean protagonist needs to do more than change a few things around him. He also needs to change the world in some way, for the better. This can be as grand as foiling an invasion by the Kurii, or toppling an illegitimate claimant to a city’s throne. Whatever it is, it needs to have the degree of magnitude that anyone in that world would find impressive. There must be an element of Opera!

The operatic world changer is very much a competent man, and in changing the world our brutal sex slaver gets the free pass he needs to be received as an antihero, and not a villain. The reader identifies with the slaver, and you do want them to feel like monsters for it. Give them a heroic tale so they too can look upon a world changed for the better, a chained beauty kneeling obediently at their feet! She stops being a tragedy, and become a deserved trophy, instead. What is more Gorean than a beautiful slave girl as a trophy?

So there you have it. Put these elements together and you have a Gorean protagonist. Experiment with them, leaving out elements and adding new ones, to your delight and amusement. If you enjoy it, so will your readers!

***

Write Like a Gorean: What Is A Gorean Book?

When I was 16 years old, I came across a man selling old science fiction and fantasy paperbacks, in the middle of the street. I looked through his collection and found a book by one John Norman, Assassins of Gor. It seemed a hefty read and for less than a dollar, my 16-year-old self was quite happy to give it a try. What followed was a surprise awakening of my own, unrealized and already thoroughly suppressed, dominant sexuality. I realized I very much liked the idea of beautiful, naked slave girls crammed into cages, looking up at me with collars stamped with my name around their throats, and my brand on their lovely, bare thighs. I had, for better or worse, become a fan of all things Gor and Gorean.

Ever since, I’ve began writing Gorean style fiction. Just little stories here and there of beautiful, young women being captured, broken, and completely sexually dominated. It was just something I did on the side until a few years ago, when I began writing Gorean style fiction and putting it up on online.

Several years and 27 titles later, it has been my delight and privilege to write for the reading pleasure of many other fans of Gorean style writing. I get questions every so often about how I write these books, so I thought it about time that I wrote a little guide for authors who would like to try their hand at this, and for the enjoyment of Gorean readers, as well.

What follows here is the first of a series of articles on how to write Gorean style fiction. These are just my observations. There are no set rules, and the best work is an experimentation where the writer will follow their story, wherever it goes. Not everyone will follow, but some will, and they will appreciate that you shared it with them.

 What is a Gorean Book?

H. P. Lovecraft had such an impact on horror that he created a sub genre, Other writers, both his contemporaries and those who came after, emulated his work (with mixed results) produce Lovecraftian writing, themselves. It has been many decades since Arkham Press’s reprints of his work revitalized horror writing. Time enough that we now also refer to the sub genre as not only ‘Lovcraftian,’ but also ‘Cosmic Horror.’ There has been time and space enough for a generic label to emerge.

That generic label has yet to come to Gorean writing. How else does one describe John Norman’s erotic, Sword and Sandals fantasy writing? It has no antecedents (though Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert E Howard were casting about in the same room). It has very few successors. Until such a date that Gorean fiction has established itself securely across a range of authors and many works, it is best to call it simply, “Gorean.”

What, then, is a "Gorean" book?

A Gorean work is about completely dominating sex slavery, in a setting where that taboo has been completely normalized. It is a mental playground where a writer (and by invitation, a reader) is completely free to do anything they like, to the sexual conquests of their characters.

This complete freedom to explore, is important. The domination sexual kink is specifically about dominating sex slavery. It is not something a writer or readers can discuss with non-fans! It is the most guilty of taboos; a Gorean book must then serve as a an outlet for its exploration.

It may seem at first that Gorean books are really just about BDSM. However, while the two may look similar, BDSM it is very much a different creature. It refers to a specific and careful set of guidelines, knowledge, and safety practices between consenting adults that guarantees the power and safety of the submissive. It is "real world," and as such is tempered by the considerations and values of our time, as much as any other activity is. That is hardly the same thing as a sexual kink about completely dominating, sex slavery. There is no room for "real-world" examination of such a thing, and those drawn to Gorean stories would probably be quite disturbed by anyone who did tried it in real life, like a computer gamer on meeting an actual mass murderer. The Gorean kink can have practitioners but never those practiced upon.

As such, the three key components of a Gorean book, game, or other such creative output are:

• -Sex slavery.

• -The unfettered exercise of sexual domination.

• -A world where these two are completely normalized

Supporting these must be a setting where Gorean sex slavery makes sense, and storylines that must be about, or at least largely feature, completely dominating sex slavery.

 Why Write (or Read) Gorean Style Books At All?

Why play an open world video game where you can kill without any moral or otherwise meaningful consequences? Because it is deeply enjoyable. Playing Grand Theft Auto doesn't make you a murderer, or any more likely to be one. If anything, the opposite is true.

It is the same with Gorean writing. It is deeply enjoyable. It doesn't make you a slave-trading predator. Gorean works are fun, safe, sexual explorations that no one should get hung up about. The bulk of Amazon Kindle sales are by white, middle-American women reading stories about women cuckolding their husbands to have sex with billionaires, dinosaurs, or billionaire dinosaurs. There is nothing wrong with this. It is a sexual kink and perfectly natural. So, stop feeling bad about getting turned on at the idea of a beautiful young slave on their hands and knees at your feet, kissing them and calling you master. You are Gorean! Happy reading :-) .

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