"A Handful of Stars"

"A Handful of Stars" (Amazing, June 1959) was expanded as We Claim These Stars (Ace Books, New York, 1959). The title of the latter is followed by an exclamation mark on the title page although not on the cover. This longer version was collected as "Hunters of the Sky Cave" in Agent Of The Terran Empire (Chilton Books, Philadelphia, Penn, 1965) although I have the British edition published by Coronet Books, Sevenoaks, Kent, 1977. Finally, "Hunters of the Sky Cave" was again collected in Sir Dominic Flandry: The Last Knight Of Terra (Riverdale, NY, 2012).

The Ace Books cover describes this work as "A 'Flandry of Terra' novel." I know that a novel is defined by word-count. However, not being able to estimate the number of words in a book, I apply a rule-of-thumb that 100+ pages equals a novel. The expanded version of this story has over 100 pages in each of the three editions in my possession although the page-counts varies considerably:

in We Claim These Stars, 121;

in Agent Of The Terran Empire, 103;

in Sir Dominic Flandry..., 151.

So, by my criterion, it is a novel, although shorter than the five (or six) other works that we think of as Flandry novels by contrast with the two collections, Agent Of The Terran Empire and Flandry Of Terra.