Anderson's The Enemy Stars was written as a one-off novel although it later acquired a short sequel, "The Ways of Love." In recent posts, this novel's references to the Blackett magnetic effect and to germanium recalled James Blish's Cities In Flight whereas its instantaneous teleportation recalled two works in Blish's Haertel Scholium. Summarizing both this Scholium and the same author's overlapping After Such Knowledge Trilogy led to a comparison with the relationships between Poul and Karen Anderson's The King Of Ys and Anderson's Technic History.
These diverse interconnections stemmed from rereading The Enemy Stars to which I must shortly return.
5 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I actually read A. Bertram Chandler's novel featuring "Dominic Flandry"! I use the double quote marks to indicate Chandler's Flandry was a disappointment, the character was almost NOTHING like the "real" Flandry, being inferior to the original in almost every way.
I was also put off by the totally implausible FTL drive used in the Grimes stories. It was nowhere as carefully thought out as the hyperdrive seen in the Technic series. Even the teleportation seen in THE ENEMY STARS and a few short stories by Anderson made more sense!
Sean
Sean,
The explanation is simple. That was an alternative Dominic Flandry!
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
True, I should have thought of that. But even an alternate "Dominic Flandry" should have SOMETHING recognizably in common with the original character and that character's universe. What I recall of this Grimes story is both of how unsatisfactory I found this "Dominic Flandry" and of how little his milieu had with the Technic background of the Polesotechnic League and the Terran Empire. That is, I would expect an alternate Terran Empire to be DIFFERENT, but also enough like the original that Chandler's version of Flandry would not look so out of place as I found him to be. Chandler's Flandry was not only disappointing and inferior, it did not fit in the alternate universe.
Sean
And Poul gave Chandler permission for using Flandry, too, by the way.
I like Chandler's works. They're much more pulpish than Poul's stuff, but they have a certain charm.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
Oh, I knew of how PA gave Chandler permission to use Dominic Flandy in one of his own works. I'm merely disappointed in how he used Flandry. For the reasons I've already given earlier.
Sean
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