Lessons Learned

In his introductory novel, Ensign Flandry, Dominic Flandry has a mentor, Max Abrams. Flandry learns that human beings have a duty to act, that sometimes they do their best, a few times they succeed, and they dare not ask for more. Duties include resistance to aggression. On this basis, Flandry begins his career in Intelligence. He will succeed more than a few times.

In his introductory novel, Casino Royale, James Bond has no mentor and has already been working in Intelligence since before the War. Nevertheless, he now learns the lesson that will propel him through eleven more novels and two short story collections:

"He would go after the threat behind the spies, the threat that made them spy."
-Ian Fleming, Casino Royale (London, 1965), p. 189.

In an invented history, the Merseian threat can remain in place from Flandry's youth to his old age whereas Fleming, keeping each novel contemporary, had to acknowledge some real world changes. Thus, the focus shifted:

SMERSH under Beria (a historical figure);
SMERSH under G (a fictitious character);
SMERSH members joining Blofeld's SPECTRE after Krushchev has disbanded their organization.

Nevertheless, in his twelfth novel, Fleming, confessedly writing the same book over again, has reverted to the KGB under Semichastny (a historical figure). Flandry's equivalents of Beria etc are Brechdan Ironrede and Tachwyr the Dark. But Anderson also shows us Flandry aging and, beyond that, the rise and fall of civilizations, thus transcending Fleming's exclusive focus on the active career of a single individual whose earlier biography had to be revised to prevent him from reaching retirement during the series.

Flandry And Bond

Is Poul Anderson's Dominic Flandry a science fictional equivalent of Ian Fleming's James Bond? There are obvious parallels. However, having just reread the opening chapters of Casino Royale, I am more aware of several differences.

By contrast with Bond, Flandry functions almost as a private operator. After his induction into Intelligence by Max Abrams, he is shown as receiving orders from a superior on only four occasions:

from Kheraskov, once;
from Fenross, twice;
from Molitor, once.

Moreover, Molitor is the Emperor and gives Flandry a free hand. Flandry progresses from Ensign to Fleet Admiral whereas Bond remains a Commander.

Fleming presents a lot of details of the Intelligence network of which Bond is just one part:

M's Chief of Staff and private secretary share a room;

M receives a memorandum from Station S, with Appendix A on Le Chiffre from the Archivist and Appendix B on SMERSH, unsigned;

Section Q runs the Morgue, travel and equipment;

 

the head of Bond's department is called Clements;

 

Leningrad Section III gave Le Chiffre funds to finance a French trade union that will be a fifth column in the event of war (as a former trade unionist, I question whether any trade union would be able to receive and conceal Russian funds or to control its members as a fifth column but I do not know about circumstances in France in the early '50s);

 

Le Chiffre embezzled the funds to buy brothels, lost this investment because of changed laws and police raids and hopes to recoup the money through gambling (thus he combines every possible kind of evil!);

 

Bond bought his Bentley in 1933 and gained his 00 number by killing a Japanese cypher expert in New York and a Norwegian double agent in Stockholm;

 

while in France, he is controlled obliquely through Jamaica and we are told how this works;

 

he is helped by Mathis of the Deuxieme Bureau, Vesper Lynd of Station S and Leiter of the CIA;

there is probably another Secret Service agent reporting independently from Royale-les-Eaux.

All this sounds complicated, sordid and very different from the universe inhabited by Dominic Flandry.