Kinds Of Series: TV; Fleming; Anderson

Arthur Conan Doyle invented the series as a new kind of serial to be published in a periodical in which each episode is a complete story with continuity provided by characters (Holmes, Watson), setting (Baker St, Victorian England) and genre (detective).

In a typical TV series, the episodes are interchangeable with few or no cross-references and consequently no required viewing order. They are like axes radiating from a common centre rather than like successive segments of a progressive sequence.

Ian Fleming and Poul Anderson write in sequence. Bond tells Viv Michel that the top man of SPECTRE escaped and got it going again. Aycharaych congratulates Flandry on l'affaire Nyanza.

Anderson added a Young Flandry prequel and Admiral Flandry sequels to his Captain Flandry series and began to tell us about Flandry's daughter whereas Fleming, like the increasingly inauthentic films, began to keep Bond impossibly young but then rewrote the continuity. Bond is unchanged at the end, now fighting neither SMERSH nor SPECTRE but the KGB and:

"For James Bond, the same view would always pall."

-Ian Fleming, The Man With The Golden Gun (New York, 1965), p. 158.

That is the concluding sentence of the posthumous novel and a fitting epitaph. 

Flandry gets Diana started on her career which, unfortunately, we do not read.