Story Setting
Smith is a spaceship pilot and smuggler who lives in an undisclosed future time when humanity has colonized the solar system.
The stories are set in a milieu common to science fiction stories of the pulp era. All of the planets of the system are able to support life and have their own civilizations. Many of the intelligent races living on the planets have comparatively primitive cultures. The relationship of the "planetary primitives" to the earth colonists is analogous to the situation of Native Americans, Africans and other indigenous people facing colonialism. Exceptions to this rule are the planets Mars and Venus which Moore depicts as having ancient and decadent cultures (which might stand for China and other ancient Asian cultures, as they seemed to Westerners at the time). This general milieu was shared by a number of other writers, including Moore's friends Edmond Hamilton and Leigh Brackett.
Read more about this topic: Northwest Smith
Famous quotes containing the words story and/or setting:
“One story recounts that a Tennessean, after a single day in the then almost impenetrable tangle of cypress, briars, and canebreaks, pestered by myriads of mosquitoes, and bogged in the heavy gumbo mud, declared: “Arkansas is not part of the world for which Jesus Christ died—I want none of it.””
—Administration in the State of Arka, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“When I consider the clouds stretched in stupendous masses across the sky, frowning with darkness or glowing with downy light, or gilded with the rays of the setting sun, like the battlements of a city in the heavens, their grandeur appears thrown away on the meanness of my employment; the drapery is altogether too rich for such poor acting. I am hardly worthy to be a suburban dweller outside those walls.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)