The Significance Of The Starkad Incident

The Starkad affair was more than an early adventure of Dominic Flandry. In fact, it was sufficiently significant to be cited at least twice later. Uldwyr tells Desai that, since force has failed at Starkad and Jihannath, he expects the Roidhunate to try something craftier, like the Terran use of the joint commission on Talwin, maybe in Sector Alpha Crucis which has had a recent insurrection and is near the Domain of Ythri:

"'...which has had better relations with us than with you -...'"

-Poul Anderson, The Day Of Their Return IN Anderson, Captain Flandry: Defender Of The Terran Empire (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 74-240 AT 3, p. 84.

 

Here, Uldwyr obliquely refers to the contents of the four preceding Technic History novels:

 

The People Of The Wind - war between Terra and Ythri;

Ensign Flandry - Flandry on Starkad;

A Circus Of Hells - Flandry on Talwin;

The Rebel Worlds - Flandry defeats that insurrection while the empires fight at Jihannath.

 

Magnusson tells Flandry that the Starkad affair caused inter-imperial relations to deteriorate entirely but fails to add that the Roidhunate's cynical manipulation of the Starkadian inter-species conflict was the sole cause of the deterioration.