The Voyages of The Fox II, Its Four Month Mission...

In Poul Anderson's The Star Fox, Gunnar Heim's privateer spaceship is called not the Star Fox but Fox II after Heim's Navy ship, the Star Fox. Between Parts Two and Three of the novel:

"'Four months of commerce raiding, eighteen Aleriona ships captured, and we haven't had to kill anybody yet.'"
-Poul Anderson, The Star Fox (London, 1968), p. 134.

- and now Heim begins to wind up the war. Thus, we have seen two stages of preparation - Fox II was bought and crewed in the Solar System, then armed on Staurn - for a campaign that has been waged between two Parts of the novel. As in his Technic History, Anderson begins a later story at a later date in order to advance the narrative.

This is all good stuff but it does mean that we have skipped over the campaign as such. Anderson excels at descriptions of space battles. Potentially, there are eighteen such episodes here. The privateer has kept busy, cruising without an overhaul and attacking approximately one Aleriona ship per week, so that there are no interesting planetary stopovers to report. Nevertheless, I think that something could be made of this untold part of the story, with some information also to be given about what is "meanwhile" happening back on Earth.

Heim, a widower, has a woman friend in the peace movement back on Earth and also wants to check on what has happened to another woman whom he had known on the Aleriona-occupied colony planet of New Europe so the reader looks forward to learning how these two relationships pan out.