Sex Slavery Fantasy Fuel: In Praise of John Norman

The difference between erotica and sexy non-erotica, I've discovered, is  this: erotica provides graphic descriptions of sex acts designed to get the reader off. Mainstream sexy fiction provides fantasy fuel only. No graphic descriptions of sex acts to get you off, but plenty of erotic events, briefly described and plenty of erotic situations that let the reader create their own graphic sexual fantasies, something we as yet don't have the technology to prevent, thank God.

And the person who did this better than ANYONE for the kink community is John Norman, whose Gor novels are, IMHO, works of genius, smoothly combining sex slavery fantasy fuel with science fantasy sword and sandal stories. He was the only one to see how smoothly and easily this could be done, and kind of still is, since nobody has really followed in his footsteps.

He clearly loved heroic fantasy and made solid heroic fantasy stories in his novels, but he also included sex slavery fantasy fuel like nobody else did, and that includes Filthy Philip Jose Farmer and Randy Andy Offutt!

(Norman does have a way of having his characters pause regularly to drone on and on and on about women's rightful place in natures as men's slaves, which has earned him a lot of enmity among feminists. My advice is, skip those parts when they start up, the books are much shorter and more fun to read without them. With them, they are almost unreadable. Makes all the difference in the world.)

When Norman's books debuted with Ballantine Books back in 1964, they were so heavily edited that no one really knew what he was up to. They got accepted as just the usual heroic fantasy Conan knock-offs, ho-hum. Norman got sick of this and moved to DAW books after publishing half a dozen or so books with Ballantine. Freed from the constraints of Ballantine Books, the books grew longer and more sex slavery fantasy fuel filled, and also a lot more popular. They're still going strong on Amazon with the most current book in the series being number 35, Quarry of Gor.

This was WAY before the explosion of erotic ebooks created kinky epics, it was before COMPUTERS, much less ebooks. It was practically prehistoric. Point is, Donald A. Wollheim, the head of DAW books, said that John Norman was outselling all is his other fantasy authors COMBINED sometime back in the 70s or 80s.

And there was a lot of evidence that Norman's readers were primarily female. It was really hard to get good numbers here, because of course, most books were being bought in bookstores, and the clerks had no incentive to keep track (though some DID report attempting to shame buyers of Gor novels).

Still, given what we know about the ebook market, it would make sense. Also, an insider at Linden Labs, the people who created the Second Life virtual world, where Gorean roleplay is and was a big thing, reported that about two thirds of Gorean roleplayers had female names on their credit cards.

So, there's that. And the reason I stress that so many Gor novel readers are female is to make the point that people who are trying to suppress books like the Gor novels and erotica in general are suppressing, not big nasty male proto-rapists, but women who like the submissive sex roleplay. (Some dom males like myself like them, too, but we're surprisingly sophisticated in our tastes, so there – neener-neener!)

Of the Gor novels, my favorite is Dancer of Gor. It is atypical, written from the POV of an Earth librarian captured by Goreans and trained to be a paga slut dancer. (Most Gor novels are written in omniscient POV, or first person, with a male protagonist.) It has a slave girl auction scene that is four chapters long and IMHO sets the standards for kinky slavegirl auction scenes, period. It also has a scene in which the protagonists' virginity is auctioned off by the paga tavern that owns her, to 17 lucky winners, who all get to fuck her that night while she's chained in an alcove and hooded so she can't see who fucks her first.

Fantasy fuel? You bet!