Young Flandry And Bond

Poul Anderson, having written about Captain Flandry, then backtracked and wrote about seventeen-year-old Ensign Flandry. Ian Fleming, having written about Commander Bond, did not backtrack but kept Bond's assignments about a year apart in sync with his book publications. However, in his fifth instalment, Bond remembers his skiing and rock-climbing seventeen-year-old self, imagines meeting that younger self and wonders what the two Bonds would make of each other but then dismisses such thoughts as a waste of time. Subsequently, someone else has been authorized to write Young Bond novels. We age and remember and novelists find different ways to express these universal experiences. 

The year 1956 returns to our attention when Fleming footnotes that it was in March of that year that he wrote a passage in which Bond speculates that Guy Burgess would be driven to make contact.