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