Setting
The setting is in the “near-future Earth.” The “near future” is an “imprecise term used to identify novels set just far enough in the future to allow for certain technological or social changes without being so different that it is necessary to explain that society to the reader.”
One character describes the near future in Doorways:
I am especially conscious of the difference between that earlier time and this present. It was a cumulative thing, the change. Space travel, cities under the sea, the advances in medicine—even our first contact with the aliens—all of these things occurred at different times and everything else seemed unchanged when they did. Petty pace.
Add air scooters and flycars and that completes the near future in Doorways.
The action takes place mostly in the United States at an unnamed university in an unnamed city near an unnamed ocean. However, the Australian desert, New York, a small unnamed town in the Alps, and a spacecraft in orbit are other locations in the narrative.
Read more about this topic: Doorways In The Sand
Famous quotes containing the word setting:
“We believe that Carlyle has, after all, more readers, and is better known to-day for this very originality of style, and that posterity will have reason to thank him for emancipating the language, in some measure, from the fetters which a merely conservative, aimless, and pedantic literary class had imposed upon it, and setting an example of greater freedom and naturalness.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Only in the problem play is there any real drama, because drama is no mere setting up of the camera to nature: it is the presentation in parable of the conflict between Man’s will and his environment: in a word, of problem.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“May we two stand,
When we are dead, beyond the setting suns,
A little from other shades apart,
With mingling hair, and play upon one lute.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)