"He looked into the glory which was space, sun after sun until suns grew so thick that they melted into the great argent flood of the Milky Way."
-Poul Anderson, "A Sun Invisible" IN Anderson, The Van Rijn Method (Riverdale, NY, 2009), pp. 263-315 AT VI, p. 306.
Checking whether Hank Davis had connected Dominic Flandry with Simon Templar, I found this passage:
"Poul Anderson originally conceived Flandry as a science fictional counterpart of Leslie Charteris' celebrated Simon Templar, better known as the Saint, but his hero soon began to look more like a science fictional counterpart of another iconic hero with an English accent, James Bond, though the resemblance is almost certainly a case of parallel evolution, since Flandry's early adventures appeared prior to the publication of Casino Royale (1953), with 007's debut."
Hank Davis, "Enter A Hero, Somewhat Flawed" IN Anderson, Young Flandry (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. vii-xi AT pp. ix-x.
(Roger Moore played both Templar and Bond just as Buster Crabbe played Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon and Tarzan.)
Did Anderson conceive Flandry as an sf Saint? The Saint is a private operator outside the law which Flandry is not.
Also in "A Sun Invisible," on p. 314, is yet another poem referring to ivory, apes and peacocks.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
And we see Dominic Flandry temporarily using a pseudonym with literary associations in A KNIGHT OF GHOSTS AND SHADOWS. While at Thursday Landing on the planet Diomedes, Flandry called himself "Ahab Whaling," a reference to the mad Captain Ahab, as he obsessively and irrationally pursued the White Whale in Herman Melville's novel MOBY DICK.
I like MOBY DICK and read it twice, so I'm glad Poul Anderson also seems to have read that massive book. I think MOBY DICK is tied with Mark Twain's THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN as to which of them should be the "Great American novel."
Sean
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