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:
“it is finally as though that thing of monstrous interest
were happening in the sky
but the sun is setting and prevents you from seeing it”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“Dandyism is the last flicker of heroism in decadent ages.... Dandyism is a setting sun; like the declining star, it is magnificent, without heat and full of melancholy. But alas! the rising tide of democracy, which spreads everywhere and reduces everything to the same level, is daily carrying away these last champions of human pride, and submerging, in the waters of oblivion, the last traces of these remarkable myrmidons.”
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“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)