According to the afterword published with the book, Larry Niven originally developed the story in order to channel his feelings of frustration relating to the 1992 Los Angeles riots.
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The Burning City is a fantasy novel of social and political allegory by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle set in an analogue of Southern California in an imaginary past shortly after the sinking of Atlantis about 14,000 years ago in the twilight of a civilization then struggling and now vanished for lack of a crucial natural, and essentially non-renewable resource upon which almost all of its economy and technology depended.
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Arshur the Magnificent, oblique reference to Rodney King: Arshur is clearly meant to sound like "Arthur," as in King Arthur so that as events unfold the reader would link King to Arshur.
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After the defeat of Troy in the Trojan War, the elderly Anchises was carried from the burning city by his son Aeneas, accompanied by Aeneas' wife Creusa, who died in the escape attempt, and small son Ascanius (the subject is depicted in several paintings, including a famous version by Federico Barocci in the Galleria Borghese in Rome.