Captain Flandry

I have never quite finished rethinking how best, publishorially speaking, to present Poul Anderson's History of Technic Civilization and therefore assessing how well Baen Books' The Technic Civilization Saga measures up, although I have become more sympathetic to Baen's approach (apart from the covers) than originally. Baen has four titles featuring Flandry:

Young Flandry
Captain Flandry: Defender Of The Terran Empire
Sir Dominic Flandry: The Last Knight Of Terra
Flandry's Legacy

Young Flandry is perfect both in its title and its contents: the three novels that were written and published to be a tripartite prequel to the already existing Flandry series. However, Flandry's Legacy is six works of which only the first two are set during Flandry's lifetime. The remaining four make no reference to Flandry and are set in successively later periods and therefore should, I think, form a separate, albeit shorter, volume.

That leaves us with twelve works that, after the introductory trilogy, are set during Flandry's lifetime. But the last three of these are all novels and form a perfect concluding trilogy featuring sons and daughters of characters introduced in the opening Ensign Flandry. Thus, these three could constitute an omnibus Children Of Empire - although, if Anderson had continued the History, then the very last of these novels, The Game Of Empire, would have opened a new sub-series about Flandry's daughter and her companions.

We are now down to nine works of which the first two do not include Flandry whereas the remaining seven comprise the already mentioned original Flandry series. I did think that therefore there should be an Outposts Of Empire volume and a Captain Flandry volume but these would be very dissimilar in length so maybe it is right that the first three Flandry short stories, which are in fact a continuous sequence, should be collected in (the proposed) Outposts...

In fact, Baen's Captain Flandry... equals my proposed Outposts... plus "A Message In Secret" but this splits up the diptych of "A Message In Secret" and "The Plague Of Masters" so I would put "A Message In Secret" in the next volume.