later The Swords of Zinjaban. Balancing Fallon's mutually exclusive allegiances while continuing to work toward recovering his kingdom is a difficult undertaking, which he realizes could prove fatal–particularly when the Safq turns out to be hosting a secret project to reproduce Terran weaponry as a secret weapon for the war with Qaath. Then in the climactic battle the Qaathians unleash their own secret weapon, designed and built by the captive scientists. In the ensuing chaos Fallon figures the best thing to do is cut and run with the proceeds of his espionage, only to be undone by the fallout of a rare good deed, his earlier rescue of missionary Welcome Wagner. Anthony Fallon would reappear, reformed, in the later Krishna novel The Swords of Zinjaban as a Terran official. 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" and James Cambias's GURPS Planet Krishna (a 1997 gaming guide to the Viagens series authorized by de Camp), the action of The Virgin of Zesh takes place in the year 2168 AD., falling between The Bones of Zora and The Swords of Zinjaban, and making it the eleventh story set on Krishna in terms of chronology. Reception P. Schuyler Miller called the book "a back-handed sequel to 'The Queen of Zamba,'" noting that its hero "was the rather off-stage villain of the earlier book." He finds it "fun, but it would be a better book and even more fun except for the author's ingrown integrity," because of which "[t]he languages, titles and names of the various races are worked out to the last detail, with proper attention for dialect, and the resulting jawbreakers are pretty hard to remember, the translation into English is deliberately awkward-sounding, and there isn't quite enough zing in the book to be worth the trouble." Comparing it to Rogue Queen, which he considers "the masterpiece of the Viagens series," he notes that "[t]his isn't." Later,