"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.
Kaor, Paul!
ReplyDeleteAnd 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