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.