History And Fiction

When Ensign Flandry, the hero, is a guest at a party hosted by Lord Hauksberg, the latter's concubine, Persis d'Io, wants to hear Flandry's account of his adventures among the Tigeries.

"He made the tale somewhat better than true: sufficient to drive Abrams into a coughing fit."
-Poul Anderson, Young Flandry (New York, 2010), p. 44.

Abrams is Chief of Intelligence on Starkad. Flandry adds that he has been:

"'...busy working with Commander Abrams.' In point of fact he had done the detail chores of data correlation on a considerably lower level." (ibid.)

So the Adventures of Dominic Flandry begin here already with Flandry's exaggerated account to Persis. Having just read what Flandry did for the Tigeries, we do not think that he needed to exaggerate - or was that Flandry's account that we read? Where does fiction end and fiction within the fiction begin?

According to Hloch's Introduction in The Earth Book Of Stormgate, The Man Who Counts is one of several historical novels featuring Nicholas van Rijn, apparently reasonably accurate although of uncertain origin. Van Rijn  lives in folk memory as hero or rogue on many planets. Flandry tells a story of van Rijn when posing as a storyteller on Unan Besar. Our only account of the Founder of the Terran Empire may be historical fiction.

We need to read Poul Anderson's History of Technic Civilization carefully in order to discern how much of the narrative comes to us from an omniscient narrator and how much from sources internal to the History. The latter could legitimately be contradicted by any later additions to the series.