Shining and Player PianoShining is a horror novel written by Stephen King in 1977 and Player Piano is a science fiction novel written by Kurt Vonnegut in 1952. The events of The Shining take place after the War of Vietnam and the events of Player Piano take place after a fictional Third World War. These books are two completely different genres, horror and science fiction, but with some similarities. While they have some small similarities regarding setting, the differences between time and place are pronounced. Vonnegut sets his novel in a future where people are, or at least are, replaced by machines, while King sets his novel in an isolated hotel in the mountains. But these two settings have something in common, they are disturbing. The settings chosen by the authors are important because they are essential to the plot and create the atmosphere. King set The Shining after the Vietnam War, 1975, at the Overlook Hotel located in the Colorado Rockies. The novel is not set in the hotel during peak periods, when there were people coming in and out, but in the hotel during the autumn and winter when it snowed and it was isolated. The only means of communication and transportation at that time was "the hotel's two-way radio... even a snowmobile in the equipment storage room" (King 11). The setting is the perfect place to build a horror story. Furthermore, the Overlook Hotel is not just any hotel. It is an old hotel with a long history that includes, but is not limited to, violence, numerous unusual deaths, and supernatural things. “The Overlook had a whole bunch of them. First the suicide, then the mafia, and then?” (King 245). The Overlook Hotel was also "the site of a triple gun homicide," which refers to a shooting...... middle of paper ......t 14). Additionally, the time period in which the story takes place is post-Second Industrial Revolution, which means even more advanced machines. The place where all this is happening is in Ilium, New York. At first this doesn't mean much because the name Ilium is not as well known as the other name, Troy. Troy is “an ancient city in northwestern Asia Minor near the Dardanelles, it is the legendary site of the Trojan War and was captured and destroyed by Greek forces c. 1200 BC” (American Heritage Dictionary Troy). In the city of Troy there was a war called the Trojan Way which was "a 10-year war between the Greeks and Trojans, provoked by the abduction of Helen by Paris and ending with the destruction of Troy" (Trojan War Merriam-Webster) . . When the novel introduces that events are happening in the city of Ilium, New York, it gives the reader a clue as to what will happen..