Three By Four

My proposed seventeen volume edition of Poul Anderson's History of Technic Civilization would include three four-story collections:

Vol VI, Avalon And Empire
"Wingless"
"Rescue on Avalon"
"The Star Plunderer"
"Sargasso of Lost Starships"

Vol XII, Captain Flandry I
"Tiger by the Tail"
"Honorable Enemies"
"The Game of Glory"
"Hunters of the Sky Cave"

Vol XVII, After The Empire (or The Post-Imperial Age)
"A Tragedy of Errors"
"The Night Face"
"The Sharing of Flesh"
"Starfog"

These volumes are, respectively, pre-Flandry, Flandry and post-Flandry. Despite their obvious similarities, there are considerable differences between them.

Vol VI comprises a planet Avalon diptych and an early Terran Empire diptych. (To be more precise, the founding of the Empire is proclaimed at the end of "The Star Plunderer.") The two diptychs differ in length, content, target audience and dates of publication. The Empire stories are pulp sf, 1952, whereas the Avalon stories are juvenile sf, 1973. However, the four stories read in sequence present a perfect prelude to Vol VII, The People Of The Wind (1973), in which the Empire attacks Avalon.

The four stories in Vol XII have a continuing central character and present just one period of his career. Further, the second, third and fourth stories each explicitly refer back to the previous installment. Thus, this volume is a unified tetralogy. The following volume, Vol XIII, Captain Flandry II, would comprise the diptych, "A Message in Secret" and "A Plague of Masters," in which, again, the second installment is a direct sequel to the first.

The stories in Vol XVII, set in different centuries, are united mainly by the fact that the centuries in which they are set are all long after the Fall of the Empire, but there is also a similarity of content. In each, a human-crewed spaceship interacts with a planetary population that has long been isolated from the human mainstream - a Star Trek scenario, except that these populations are descendants of human colonists, not humanoid aliens.

In "The Sharing of Flesh," the Allied planets spaceship New Dawn, not the USS Enterprise, is in orbit around Lokon (see here). New Dawn crew members have descended in a boat, not by teleportation. The problem to be solved is why the Lokonese universally practice cannibalism. The computer, summarizing relevant data, mentions ceremonial cannibalism but does not refer to communion in which participants are believed to receive divine grace by consuming the body of their deity.

Jerusalem Catholicism still existed before the Empire fell but we are not told about any religions post-Empire.

The Captain Flandry Series II

I have argued that, of the seven works in (what I call) the Captain Flandry Series, four form a tetralogy:

"Tiger by the Tail" (1951)
"Honorable Enemies" (1951)
"The Game of Glory" (1958)
"Hunters of the Sky Cave " (1959)

that two form a diptych:

"A Message in Secret" (1959/1961)
"The Plague of Masters" (1960/1961)

and, further, that the tetralogy precedes the diptych, contrary to the order of the stories in Sandra Miesel's Chronology of Technic Civilization.

The anomaly is "The Warriors from Nowhere" (1954). On the one hand, it contains the Hooligan and Chives. On the other hand, it was written before "The Game of Glory," in which Flandry has not yet acquired either a private spaceship or a personal servant. However, Poul Anderson solves this conundrum. Retroactively, the story becomes a prelude to A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows, the opening novel of the Children of Empire Trilogy. In A Knight..., Hans Molitor has become Terran Emperor after a civil war and, we are to understand, the events of "The Warriors..." occurred during that war, when Hans had not yet defeated all of his rivals but was nevertheless already being served as Emperor by Flandry and others.

Thus, "The Warriors..." becomes the first of four works set during the Molitor dynasty and the entire Flandry series comprises:

the Young Flandry Trilogy;
a tetralogy;
a diptych;
the Molitor period.

The Captain Flandry Series

Poul Anderson's Dominic Flandry series begins with the Young Flandry Trilogy and ends with (what I call) the Children of Empire Trilogy. Between the two trilogies, there are:

two non-Flandry works, a short story and a novel;
the Captain Flandry series, seven works of different lengths, including two short novels.

I am currently rereading parts of the Captain Flandry series. Since "A Message in Secret" is set on Altai, I have begun adding notes about this fictitious planet to the Poul Anderson's Cosmic Environments blog, here.

Posting more on either blog will be delayed by activities in our timeline:

driving to Blackpool tomorrow morning to liaise with delegates to the Pensioners' Parliament;
walking to and from a sports center to use the gym or swimming pool;
preparing for a social gathering here this Friday evening.

Meanwhile, if not on line, I will be rereading Poul Anderson in my spare time. 

An Alternative History Of Dominic Flandry

Right at the end of the original version of Poul Anderson's earliest written Dominic Flandry story, "Tiger by the Tail," Flandry tells the queen of a conquered species:

"'I suppose the [Terran] Empire is decadent. But there's no reason why it can't some day have a renaissance. When the vigorous new peoples such as yours are guided by the ancient wisdom of Terra, the Galaxy may see its greatest glory.'"
-Agent Of The Terran Empire (London, 1977), p. 36.

Of course, anyone who says something like this might simply be mistaken. Thus, the author, if incorporating this story into a "future history," would be under no obligation to write a "renaissance" into later episodes of the history. Nevertheless, anyone reading "Tiger by the Tail" as a one-off story is inclined to accept that, other things being equal, some kind of renaissance leading to greater galactic glory does lie in the future of these characters.

When Anderson not only wrote an entire Flandry series but also did incorporate this series into a future history, he rationalized the history with a theory that did not allow for any later renaissance and Flandry's naively optimistic speech about vigor guided by wisdom was omitted from the text of the revised version of "Tiger by the Tail." Thus, potentially, we have here two alternative future histories of Dominic Flandry.

Anderson underlines the difference between the two futures with an addition to the revised text. When the queen remarks that the Empire is not so bad if it has men like Flandry in it, Flandry, in the revised version, thinks:

"No...it's worse off..."
-Captain Flandry (Riverdale, NY, 2010), p. 276.

This thought, which he diplomatically keeps to himself, does in fact reflect what the Technic Civilization History tells us about subsequent events in Flandry's life time and later.

Freehold

"'No dragons are flying- '"

(Poul Anderson, "Outpost of Empire" IN Captain Flandry: Defender of the Terran Empire, Riverdale NY, 2010, pp. 1-72 AT p. 1.)

This opening sentence is designed to make us think that we are reading a fantasy. The impression is intensified by references to "Mistress Jenith," "Gallows Wood," "The sweet, unhuman voice of the [winged and feathered] messenger...," and a character named "Wolf" (ibid.)

But then a reference to the Anglic language near the end of the page makes us realize that we might instead be in Poul Anderson's Technic Civilization History. Of course, we already know this if we are reading the story in The Technic Civilization Saga, Volume V, Captain Flandry. But, in order to appreciate the text on its own terms, we need to notice how it introduces the necessary background information to the reader. Thus, we should imagine, first, that we are reading the story on its original appearance in Galaxy magazine, 1967, and, secondly, that Galaxy gave no indication to the reader that the story was part of a series. (I do not know whether it did or not.)

The winged and feathered messenger was speaking "...bird language...," not Anglic, so it is indeed a bird. Presumably "dragon" is its idea of a flying vehicle since it is a settler city with a single skyscraper and a cathedral that is being spied on. So are the spies hostile natives? No, human colonists that have gone native or, at least, have blended with their environment. We must read on to learn more of the details.

Outposts Of Empire

Poul Anderson's "Outpost of Empire" and The Day Of Their Return, set between the Young Flandry Trilogy and the Captain Flandry series, each describe an outpost of the Terran Empire.

The first highlights a character that had been briefly introduced in the first Young Flandry novel, Ensign Flandry, and the second introduces a character who re-appears, briefly but significantly, in the first of the three later Flandry novels. Thus, these two intermediate works are woven into the web of future historical interconnections.

I think that the speech mostly without articles that I noticed in the character Peter Jowett is repeated in another character, Tatiana Thane, and thus might turn out to be a feature of Aenean Anglic. I am rereading the Chunderban Desai chapters of The Day Of Their Return because these are rich in imaginative details and present a parallel narrative to the more active adventures of Desai's adversary, Ivar Frederiksen.

Conclusions

 In The Technic Civilization Saga, Volume V, Captain Flandry: Defender Of The Terran Empire (New York, 2010) by Poul Anderson:

p. 238 is the last page of The Day Of Their Return;
p. 239 is blank;
p. 240 is a verse by Kipling;
p. 241 is the first page of "Tiger By The Tail."

This generates the impression that the verse is meant to precede or introduce the short story and therefore should have been included when I listed "Introductions" in earlier posts. However, checking The Day Of Their Return (London, 1978) confirms that the Kipling verse comes at the end of the novel where it makes more sense.

Although, as we have seen, many Anderson works have elaborate Introductions, they do not usually have corresponding conclusions, although The Rebel Worlds both begins and ends with the perspective of a Didonian composite intelligence while A Knight Of Ghosts and Shadows both begins and ends with an inhabitant of the planet Dennitza reflecting on the culminating event of the novel.

Introductions V

Of the three novels collected in The Technic Civilization Saga, Volume IV, Young Flandry, by Poul Anderson:

the first is introduced by excerpts from a space pilots' manual describing the planet Starkad;
the second is not introduced;
the third is introduced by an untitled, unattributed passage narrated by a Didonian composite intelligence.

Of the six works collected in Volume V, Captain Flandry: Defender of the Terran Empire:

one is preceded by Job iv, 12-16;
the others are not introduced.

Of the four works collected in Volume VI, Sir Dominic Flandry: The Last Knight of Terra:

one is introduced by an untitled, unattributed, italicized passage in which an inhabitant of the planet Dennitza reflects on the events of the novel;
the others are not introduced.

Of the six works collected in Volume VII, Flandry's Legacy:

two are introduced by Poul Anderson and one of these is also preceded by maps;
one is introduced by an italicized passage quoting the then King of England's remark to Sir Christopher Wren about St Paul's Cathedral;
the others are not introduced.