Earthmen have been meeting almosthuman beings on faraway planets at least since Edgar Rice Burroughs's "Barsoom" novels of adventures on Mars began appearing in 1912. Rogue Queen also owes much to the "sword-and-sorcery" subgenre of fantasy, typified by the Conan tales of Robert E. Howard, written in the 1930s. De Camp has written a biography, The Misfit Barbarian, about Howard and has written some Conan stories of his own.