Sunday 29 December 2019

The Later Technic History

The Flandry and post-Flandry periods of Poul Anderson's Technic History add not two but five further periods to the eight pre-Flandry periods that we identified here.

By "the Captain Flandry series," I mean six installments beginning with "Tiger By The Tail" and culminating in "Hunters of the Sky Cave." Dominic Flandry first meets Aycharaych in the second installment and captures him in the sixth although there is then an exchange of prisoners which includes Aycharaych.

By "the Children of the Empire/Molitor Dynasty sequence," I mean the four works immediately following "Captain Flandry":

"Warriors from Nowhere"
A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows
A Stone In Heaven
The Game Of Empire

There are eight "Children" in just four works:

two sons and two grandchildren of Hans Molitor;
one son and one daughter of Dominic Flandry;
one son of Dragoika;
one daughter of Max Abrams. 

The Chives Tetralogy, so to call it, begins in "Hunters of the Sky Cave" and ends in A Stone In Heaven. Since Flandry's Shalmuan servant, Chives, is aged in Stone and not mentioned in Game, we deduce that he has died between volumes.

A new beginning, between the Flandry series and the Long Night, would have been a series featuring Flandry's daughter and Dragoika's son working for Emperor Karl but Anderson preferred to write other kinds of speculative fiction.

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

I have sometimes wondered why we see no mention of Chives in THE GAME OF EMPIRE when he was mentioned as being elderly in A STONE IN HEAVEN. The most probable reason being that Anderson forgot to mention how Chives had died by the time of GAME.

And I would have liked to have seen more of Diana Crowfeather/Flandry and Emperor Karl!

Ad astra and Happy New Year! Sean