Sharon Green and Her Kinky Sci-fi and Fantasy Novels

Sharon Green was a popular author in the 80’s and 90’s. Her Sci-fi and Fantasy books were published by well-known companies like Daw and Avon, and some of her romance came out through Harlequin.

I started out as a teenage fan but eventually we met online and became friendly. We had many conversations about the oddest topics over the years, but the last email I wrote to her bounced. I tried her back-up email and that bounced too. I figured we’d reconnect eventually, but a few months later I found out that she’d died.

I felt her loss harder than I would have expected, in a year (2022) filled with other losses and I still don’t really know what to say about her death. So let’s talk about her work instead.

If you search through my blog, you’ll see I’ve written about her before in some of my other posts about Sci-fi books. Here’s one: Scifi and Spanking Just Go Together, Ok?

I have always been really into Sci-fi and Fantasy books. I also love Horror and YA and will devour all of those genres. My bookcases are stuffed with thousands. Literally. I’m not exaggerating. 

My interest in regular romance stories, on the other hand, is pretty exclusive and revolves entirely around my love of spanking. The fact that when I was a teenager you could generally expect to find at least a hint of spanking in plenty of romance books, especially historicals, is the reason I started reading romance at all.

I would flip through in the bookstore, looking for those hints and if I found anything… the book came home with me. Johanna Lindsay, Kat Martin, and Virginia Henley were ‘must buys’ for years, because I could be sure there would be something in them—at least a threat.

But the more vanilla lines like Harlequin that typically didn’t have that? Not interested.

When it comes to other genres, I’ll read them with or without the spanking, but with Romance there needs to be kink, which is why I write what I do.

It’s rare that kink and Sci-fi or Fantasy intersect outside of romance, but when they do… I can’t get enough. (There is a big difference between romance and other genres with romance elements.)

I blame Heinlein for this. I read my first Heinlein book (Cat Who Walks Through Walls) when I was about nine and it opened up worlds to me. I know some people don’t like his work anymore, finding it chauvinistic or anti-feminist, but I never felt that way.

His female characters were clever, intelligent, brave, and constantly being threatened with spanking. They were often shown in leadership positions. They also tended to be shown as somewhat submissive to the men they loved, but since submission is kind of my whole thing… that worked for me.

I’ve written plenty about Heinlein’s books here on the blog, and you can search up his name to read them, but this isn’t about him today. He offered me something that appealed to me on multiple levels, and it was years before I was able to find another author who hit those notes just right.

That was Sharon Green.

And it’s not really a surprise. Sharon was also heavily influenced by Heinlein. We talked about him and his works more than a few times.

Sharon wrote in a wide range, but primarily Sci-fi and Fantasy, and those were the ones I found first on the shelves of Waldenbooks. I was in high school, I think, when I picked up my first book by her.

It was the 90’s and by then the flood of spankings in mainstream books had slowed to a trickle. Even Johanna Lindsey had started to tone it down in some of her books, but not before writing a Sci-fi romance, Warrior Woman, that had spanking as a main plot, and she did continue that series. So, at least we had that.

But other romance authors started to leave the spanks out entirely as it became less popular to feature a woman being punished, even if it would have been historically accurate for the time. Mostly that was due to a shift in society, and a change in cultural norms—and those were good changes, but it was sad for people like me who really loved reading about fictional spankings.

I dropped the romance genre when the spankings dried up, although I did keep going with Lindsey. She never totally stopped putting those punishment elements in her books when the rest did.

I hadn’t quite given up on most mainstream romance novels, when I stumbled over Sharon Green in the Sci-fi section. Outside of Heinlein, finding spanking in Sci-fi had been pretty rare for me, so I latched onto her books gleefully, but they got increasingly harder to find.

I think Sharon’s mainstream career was starting to wind down at that point. Fewer new books by her were coming out, and the older backlist I was working my way through were falling out of print.

I didn’t know it at the time, but the elements I loved the most had partly been the cause for that. Publishers no longer wanted books with spankings. So at the same time they started disappearing from romance, her Sci-fi publishers were paring them out.

As a result her books, with their frequent, and surprisingly graphic at times, spankings had were facing rejection. She had a newer series that continued (The Blending Series), but it lacked those discipline overtones. They were still good, of course. Sharon was a wonderful author, and I was happy to read anything she put out.

But the older sci-fi with those hot spankings was what I wanted more of. I spent years trolling used bookstores for the out-of-print editions of the older books until I had a complete collection of her traditionally published books.

The world is a weird place. Years later we ended up working for the same publisher at the same time. I was mostly doing magazine illustrations for C.F. Publications then, and I found out she had taken one of her mainstream sci-fi series and brought the unpublished sequels to C.F. to publish.

It happened to be my favorite series. When I say these books were shockingly kinky for mainstream…. Whew.

The Diana Santee series rocked my world, but there were only two books published before they cut off abruptly. If you read the second book, I think you’ll see why a mainstream publisher chose not to continue with it. I think the series deserves a whole article of its own, so I’m going to make a note of it for later.

At any rate, she’d taken things to new levels in this particular series, and bearing in mind her new publisher focused specifically on spanking, she’d increased the scenes for her new audience. I was thrilled. And I also now had a way to contact her.

I got her email and dashed off an excited fan letter, not really expecting her to reply, but she did. So, I asked if I could interview her for an article. She agreed and I think I got like three questions in before we were talking about spanking and kink.

Just so you know, these are not secrets I’m telling. Dead or not, secrets should stay that way. These were questions I asked as part of interviewing her and the interview was published online back in the day several times.

Sharon had never actually experienced any kink. She fantasized about it, but there were two things stopping her. She told me she was a black belt, and she had a concern that if she got into a situation where she started to feel panic… she might accidentally hurt anyone she was playing with.

And two, her trust was pretty low. She couldn’t really picture trusting someone enough to let them tie her up, or do anything else to her. I, on the other hand, had dived into real life play as soon as I was old enough, so I was happy to tell her about some of my experiences. We ended up talking about it a lot in the early conversations.

I was even able to have some small influence in her professional life, and I’m kind of proud of that.

After I posted my interview, I was contacted by Janet Hardy, with Verdant Publishing. Janet is well known for her non-fiction books on kink and sexuality, for those who don’t know. After reading my interview, Janet was interested in speaking to Sharon about republishing some of her out-of-print books that had a decent amount of spanking in them.

Sharon was interested, so I hooked them up. And Janet did republish a number of Sharon’s books through her company. But she also worked out a deal for Sharon to write a book that focused more on spanking directly.

Remember, most of Sharon’s books had spankings in them, but they were mainstream, so the spankings weren’t always frequent or detailed.

This would be a book that focused more on spanking itself. Kinky fun would be the main plot. Haughty Spirit happened because of that connection. It wasn’t my favorite to read, because I really did love her more plot-oriented books… but it was good. And I was happy to have been part of getting some of her older books reprinted as well.

She continued to publish my favorite series of hers through C.F. Publications, and I swear each book got kinkier as they went along. For the time they were extremely spicy, though this was before the kinky romance market opened up.

The first two, published for mainstream, were salacious, but with an actual spanko audience, one who loved discipline, she really went all out.

Eventually she also tried self-publishing on Amazon, and that satisfied her. She was no longer interested in submitting work to publishers once she could do it herself. She told me she enjoyed having full control. To be honest, I also think she had felt a little betrayed that she had to take certain elements out of her sci-fi in order to keep getting them published by the larger companies, who then still didn’t seem entirely happy.

She finished the second Blending series in 2002 and I don’t believe she ever bothered to submit anything to a publisher again—except for C.F. Publications. She knew their audience and CF has always given their authors pretty much total freedom over what they write so she was comfortable there.

She always told me she intended to finish the Diana Santee series. Every once in a while, she would mention she was working on ideas to wrap up the story. It’s not going to happen now and that’s a really sad thought.

There’s something so painful about an author leaving a story unfinished forever. But most of her books are available on Amazon in E-book form now, and I think they are well worth reading. If you’re looking specifically for kink content, then you’ll definitely want the Diana Santee series.

If you enjoyed Gor by John Norman, then you might like the Jalav series which I think is much better writing than Gor and from a woman’s perspective.  It was meant to be something of a satire of the Gor series, but I didn’t get that when I read it to be honest.

And another personal favorite of mine is the Terrilian series, which, I won’t lie, I kind of think might have loosely inspired Johanna Lindsey’s Warrior Woman series which started three years after Sharon finished the last book. We’ll never known, but I love to think that Sharon’s books might have encouraged other stories out there.

I’m sad that she’s gone, but I’m so grateful for all the books she left behind. I still reread them every couple of years. If you give them a try, please remember that most of the books were Sci-fi/Fantasy first and plot heavy. Romance is usually a side plot and not the main focus.

I’d love to hear from people who have read her books or decide to give them a try after reading this.