The Readers' Perspective

Readers of fiction have a privileged position. We can read the characters' inner thoughts and summarized biographies. We know the superhero's secret identity. When our hero's enemies meet to plot his downfall, we are there.

Tachwyr the Dark, Hand of the Vach Dathyr and successor of Brechdan Ironrede as Protector of the Roidhun's Grand Council, addresses Council members on multiple screens:

"'The hour is upon us.'"
-Poul Anderson, Flandry's Legacy (New York, 2012), p. 264.

They include:

Odhar the Curt;
Alwis Longtail;
Gwyanafon of Brightwater  -

- harmless sounding names!

Ian Fleming convened a meeting of all the Russian Intelligence chiefs to authorize the execution of the man Bond. When that had failed, Fleming gave us several more villain's meetings:

Goldfinger's Hoods' Congress;
a meeting of SPECTRE, chaired by Blofeld;
a meeting of SPECTRE, chaired by Largo;
the Man With The Golden Gun's Group.

Bond, a spy, managed to eavesdrop on two of these! Nevertheless, readers are usually able to see and hear much that is unknown to the hero - unless he is the first person narrator of the entire text.

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, Bond And Two Others

Here I compare James Bond/007 to two nameless characters: the Prisoner has a number, No 6, and V is a number, 5, an accidental numerical sequence. Now we can add Dominic Flandry to the list although we are not told his code number.

(i) 007 endlessly, eternally, engages external enemies of freedom.

(ii) The Prisoner (maybe) frees himself by realizing that the ultimate enemy is internal, No 1 = I.

(iii) V, with help from others, (maybe) frees society: people who have become internally free will no longer allow themselves to be externally enslaved.

(iv) Flandry does not seek any internal or anarchic liberation but does recognize that his society is flawed whereas Bond does not.

007, No 6 and V form a conceptual sequence. It is good to find Flandry's place somewhere between 007 and V.

Bond And Flandry

Two sexually active secret agents enjoying the good life while killing agents of a foreign/alien dictatorship and other enemies of freedom: these are the obvious similarities between James Bond and Dominic Flandry. Also, Flandry gets neither of the women that he really wants. Bond proposes twice and even marries briefly once but both women wind up dead.

Flandry fights Merseians and their agents of other species, Aycharaych, A'u and Magnusson. Bond has four kinds of adversaries:

Russian Intelligence outfits including, until Kruschev disbands it, SMERSH;
Nazis left over from the War;
North American gangsters;
the independent European organization, SPECTRE, and its founder, Blofeld.

As each enemy is eliminated, the next springs up and this cycle could be prolonged indefinitely. However, whereas Bond never reflects on the society that he protects from the various villains, Flandry learns that Technic Civilization has made wrong choices, has become decadent and will almost certainly be destroyed by its internal contradictions even if not by any of its external opponents. Further, this civilization follows a historical pattern. Thus, Anderson and Flandry see further and deeper than Fleming or Bond.

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.

Cold

In James Blish's Cities In Flight future history, the "Cold Peace" of 2022 means that the Cold War has ceased to be a war because, in this timeline, the US has become a bureaucratic state and has merged with the USSR.

In Poul Anderson's Psychotechnic future history, the "Cold Victory" of 2180 means that a victory has been won but that the contested issues remain unresolved.

In CS Lewis' Ransom Trilogy, Volume III, "the cold marriages" occur when Selenities lie with warm, moving images of each other.

In Ian Fleming's Moonraker, when James Bond makes love to three married women with "cold passion," I have no idea what Fleming means by this.

So there you have it. Four authors play with language by inserting the adjective, "cold," where we do not expect it. If there was a Cold War in the twentieth century, can there be a Cold Peace in the twenty first century or a Cold Victory in the twenty second? Maybe time will tell.

In real history, World Wars I and II were followed not by World War III but by nuclear deterrence, therefore Cold War, then by only one super power, therefore War on Terror. War, not Peace, endures - and Blish's "Cold Peace" would be a 1984 nightmare - indeed, "thought police" are mentioned.

Heroes And Villains

Four classic pairs:

Holmes and Moriarty;
Bond and Blofeld; (and here)
Dominic Flandry and Aycharaych;
Athelstane King and Count Ignatieff.

Holmes, Moriarty, Bond and Blofeld are universally known, the two sf pairs less so. My point is that King and Ignatieff are worthy of inclusion on this list.

King gradually learns that he has a major adversary:

Ibrahim Khan reveals that a tall white fakir wearing an eye-patch paid him to kill King;
King learns that, a generation earlier, a fakir with one blue eye and one brown eye had preached jihad and killed his, King's, father;
when King meets an adversary with an eye-patch turned up above a blue left eye, that man introduces himself as Count Vladimir Obromovich Ignatieff and they immediately try to kill each other;
Ignatieff is indeed evil, a Devil-worshiping cannibal.

Literary Links

Ian Fleming:

wrote some scripts for a proposed TV series to be set in Jamaica, then adapted the scripts as the novel, Dr No;

wrote three scripts for a proposed James Bond TV series, then adapted these scripts as short stories;

co-wrote a treatment for an original James Bond film, Thunderball, then novelized the treatment;

created, we are told, the flamboyant name of the central character of a TV series in which an international intelligence organization, the United Network Command for Law Enforcement, resists attempts at world domination by an evil organization combining features of Bond's SMERSH and SPECTRE.

The evil organization of the U.N.C.L.E. TV series either made use of or was controlled by (accounts differ) an "Ultimate Computer." (This phrase re-occurred as the title of a Star Trek episode.)

One of the original U.N.C.L.E. novels reveals that:

the villainous organization had been founded at a meeting in a late nineteenth century London hotel by the successors of a criminal mastermind called "the Professor";

the organization's familiar name was originally an acronym for a cumbersome phrase beginning "The Technological Hierarchy..."

This gives us one definite and another possible link to the works of Poul Anderson. The definite link is Holmesianism: creative references to Sherlock Holmes in other works of fiction. Anderson refers directly or indirectly to Holmes many times. For example, when a Time Patrolman mentions "Altamont," this refers to Holmes just as "the Professor" in the U.N.C.L.E. novel refers to Moriarty.

The other possible link is that, in Anderson's The Long Way Home, the Solar System is a "Technate" run by a computer, the Technon. However, the only connection here is the old idea of a computer running things. Although there are, genetically created, slaves in the Technate, there are also free Commoners whereas the Hierarchy would have enslaved the entire world population although, arguably, this would have made it difficult to maintain an advanced technology.

A world dictatorship without any external competitor would be a horrific despotism, which is perhaps what is described in 1984, where the three States only pretend to be at war. In fact, a member of the Hierarchy shows the U.N.C.L.E. Director that crucial line in 1984, "The object of power is power."

Anderson, like every comprehensive sf writer, shows us some future dictatorships as warnings, futures we don't want.