Sunday, 27 December 2020

Lines Of Descent

Lines of descent provide some, although by no means all, of the historical continuity in Poul Anderson's Technic History. See Falkayns And Flandry. Later Flandry period installments present:

two sons of Hans Molitor;
a son and a daughter of Dominic Flandry;
a daughter of Max Abrams;
a son of Dragoika -

- and the very last installment of the Technic History presents remote descendants of rebels exiled by Flandry.
 
The series is not a history of a single family or "people." Instead, its collective protagonist is the human race interacting with many other intelligence species - beginning on Ythri - and the history ends with those remote descendants who are no longer human.

3 comments:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

And I think we would have liked to have known more about Dominic Flandry's parents. All that we know is that he was the illegitimate son of a minor aristocrat and space captain and an opera singer/actress. And that his parents were conscientious about bringing up Dominic and making sure he got a good education. We don't even know the names of his parents!

We also see a grand daughter of Emperor Hans in "Warriors From Nowhere" and mention of how Emperor Gerhart's son Crown Prince Karl liked Flandry.

Finished THE REBEL WORLDS, thinking of rereading THE DAY OF THEIR RETURN next.

Happy New Year! Sean

paulshackley2017@gmail.com said...

Sean,

I could have mentioned Karl. "Warriors from Nowhere" was, of course, written much earlier so that character was only retroactively designated as Molitor's granddaughter.

Paul.

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

True, what you said about "Warriors From Nowhere," which Anderson later revised so it would better fit in to the Technic series. Ideally, if matters had turned out a bit better, Emperor Josip would have been firmly succeeded by an elderly cousin/heir presumptive with already adult grandchildren.

Happy New Year! Sean