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 James Cambias's GURPS Planet Krishna (a 1997 gaming guide to the Viagens series authorized by de Camp), the action of The Hostage of Zir takes place in the year 2145 AD., falling between The Hand of Zei and The Prisoner of Zhamanak, and making it the seventh story set on Krishna in terms of chronology. Cambias's dating may be too early, however, as internal evidence in Zhamanak indicates that it occurs shortly after Hostage, while internal evidence in The Bones of Zora indicates that it occurs shortly after Zhamanak, with the events of "The Virgin of Zesh" happening between. As "Virgin" is securely dated to 2150, this could shift the dating of Hostage and Zhamanak as late as 2148 and 2149, respectively.
Read more about this topic: The Hostage Of Zir
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