Now it Can Be Told

When we have read an account of important events, there must have been significant background events that we were not told about. If our hero was acting on orders from his head office, then what was the perspective from head office at the time? And what were the hero's support cast or antagonists doing while he was on-stage and they were off-? Thus, a skillful author can write a sequel, or even a prequel, on a "Now it can be told/This is what you were not told before" basis.

Poul Anderson does this to some extent in The Game Of Empire and John le Carre does it to an extraordinary degree in A Legacy Of Spies. Anderson asks: how might early pioneers have tried to prepare mankind for interstellar exploration and how might the corruption of the Josip reign have affected a morally upright human spaceship captain who regularly traded with the not-yet-decadent Merseians? The results are the Zacharians and the Magnusson Rebellion, the former collaborating with the latter. And Aycharaych, who disappeared two volumes ago, had been involved with Magnusson.

Le Carre projects one British political group back to a couple of decades before it was founded but that does not matter too much in fiction - at least not when the reference is merely a colorful background detail.

Le Carre also shares a theme with Anderson's A Circus Of Hells. Assessing another character who is a nasty piece of work, the hero concludes in effect, "He is a bastard but he is our bastard."