Old And New

Ensign Flandry, CHAPTER SIX.

Starting with a blank page or a blank computer screen, an author can at any time begin to write a new story set in an old location: an ancient castle, town, city etc. Willingly suspending disbelief, we accept that this location is fictionally "old" although really new - freshly sprung from its creator's imagination like Athena from the brow of Zeus. In a future history series, an "old" location may be one that has already appeared in a previous instalment set generations or centuries earlier but may also be one that the author has just thought of and has slotted into the continuity. Poul Anderson does this on Starkad:

"...Dragoika lived in the ancient East Housing, on Shiv Alley itself." (p. 52)

We have never heard of Shiv Alley but are addressed as if we had. Its name is both meaningful and ominous. Dragoika lists her reasons for not moving away:

her mother lived there since Ujanka was founded;

Chupa feasted there;

its staircase ran with blood on the Day of the Gulch;

there are too many ghosts for her to abandon;

and too many belongings to move -

furs

carpets

furnishings

books

weapons

bronze vases

bronze candelabra

glass goblets

seashell souvenirs

plunder

We have not read about the founding of Ujanka (principal Kursovikian seaport, on Golden Bay), Dragoika's mother, Chupa or the Day of the Gulch but this Starkadian history parallels the Terran and other histories that we have read.

Ironic: Dragoika will have to leave not only Shiv Alley and Ujanka but Starkad as a matter of survival.

In the last Flandry period novel, The Game of Empire, Anderson adds substantial retroactive history about:

Maria Crowfeather's Dakotian ancestry on Atheia;

where the Starkadians are evacuated to;

previously undisclosed events during the lifetimes of Brechdan Ironrede and Aycharaych.

See Dakotia and Erik Magnusson.