Setting
The planet Krishna is de Camp's premier creation in the Sword and Planet genre, representing both a tribute to the Barsoom novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs and an attempt to "get it right", reconstructing the concept logically, without what he regarded as Burroughs' biological and technological absurdities. De Camp intended the stories as "pure entertainment in the form of light, humorous, swashbuckling, interplanetary adventure-romances - a sort of sophisticated Burroughs-type story, more carefully thought out than their prototypes."
As dated in the 1959 version of de Camp's essay "The Krishna Stories," the action of "Calories" takes place in the year 2122 AD., falling between the first part of "Finished" and Perpetual Motion, which would make it the second story set on Krishna in terms of chronology. However, internal evidence indicates that it actually falls between The Queen of Zamba and the second part of "Finished," the attempt to break the Viagens embargo on advanced technology in the former being mentioned as recent news, while the characters show no knowledge of the equally notorious assault on the ban in the latter. This would date the story between the years 2138 and 2140, presumably about 2139, making it the fourth story set on Krishna.
Read more about this topic: Calories (story)
Famous quotes containing the word setting:
““Oh, let’s go up the hill and scare ourselves,
As reckless as the best of them tonight,
By setting fire to all the brush we piled
With pitchy hands to wait for rain or snow....””
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“The doctrine of those who have denied that certainty could be attained at all, has some agreement with my way of proceeding at the first setting out; but they end in being infinitely separated and opposed. For the holders of that doctrine assert simply that nothing can be known; I also assert that not much can be known in nature by the way which is now in use. But then they go on to destroy the authority of the senses and understanding; whereas I proceed to devise helps for the same.”
—Francis Bacon (1560–1626)
“should some limb of the devil
Destroy the view by cutting down an ash
That shades the road, or setting up a cottage
Planned in a government office, shorten his life,
Manacle his soul upon the Red Sea bottom.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)