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.

Legends In Their Own Lunchtimes

Some fictitious characters become celebrities and even legends in their fictional worlds. Poul Anderson's Nicholas van Rijn is quoted as a public figure while he is alive. Further, stories are still being told not only about van Rijn but also about his protege, David Falkayn, centuries after their deaths. Some of the stories about van Rijn are told by Dominic Flandry and, when the latter is getting old, a wandering Wodenite says that he has "'...encountered tales of Admiral Flandry's exploits...'" (Flandry's Legacy, p. 213)

In SM Stirling's Conquistador (New York, 2004), John Rolfe founds the Commonwealth of New Virginia in the North America of a parallel Earth and has a granddaughter called Adrienne. When Adrienne introduces herself to an Indian chief, the chief exclaims:

"'You're Johnny Deathwalker's kin?'" (p. 532) -

- then, after taking a closer look:

"'Yeah, that's what the legends say. Hair like an angry sunset, and eyes green like river rocks and colder than glacier ice.'" (ibid.)

A former colleague of James Bond wrote popular accounts of some of Bond's exploits but was not prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act because his accounts were so inaccurate.

Among James Blish's works:

The Night Shapes combines two Edgar Rice Burroughs themes: African adventure and living dinosaurs (Tarzan and The Land That Time Forgot). Its central character, Kit Kennedy, has a strange affinity not with apes but with snakes and is a living legend: Ktendi, Son of Wisdom, King of the Wassabi, Master of Serpents. One officious European, unaware that he is addressing the source of the legend, says:

“There’s no such thing as Ktendi…And, as for you, Mr Kennedy, why don’t you mind your own business?” <sup>2
- copied from here.</sup>

World Conquest Or World Government

Blogging while rereading makes for a close engagement with a text but also means that I sometimes make remarks that have to be revised. I said here that the Americanist Party was the collective villain of Poul Anderson's "Un-Man." In fact, this Party is the American front for an international collective villain called by its UN enemies "the gang." (The Psychotechnic League, p. 73)

When the world was young and dinosaurs walked the Earth, fictional evil organizations tried to conquer the world. James Bond fought SMERSH, the assassination wing of Russian Intelligence, while his dramatic offspring, UNCLE, fought THRUSH. The UN of UNCLE means "United Network," not "United Nations." However, UNCLE retains a UN feel:

HQ in New York;

its top two agents, Numbers One and Two of Section Two, an American and a Russian - logically, in the new film, former CIA and KGB, respectively.

In "Un-Man," Poul Anderson has UN (United Nations) agents called "Un-men." However, these "Men from the United Nations" oppose not would-be world conquerors but an international alliance of opponents of world government, comprising:

nationalists;
militarists;
industrialists;
financiers;
politicians;
labor leaders;
religionists;
cranks and fanatics, significantly including the Pilgrims (we saw one on Mars);
individuals or groups harmed by UN actions;
some governments;
subverted UN Councillors and employees.

Nationalists cooperate against international cooperation! The "labor leaders" are said to:

"'...want a return of the old strife which means power and profit for them.'" (p. 72)

As long as there are employers and employees, there is a role for trade unions to negotiate with the former on behalf of the latter but I am not sure how trade unions will cope when, because of automation, the majority are both unemployed and well provided for. Perhaps these labor leaders are against not only the tendency towards world government but also the UN-sponsored technology that will reach fruition, according to the Chronology, in the Second Industrial Revolution?

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.

A James Bond Novel?

Each new post might delve more deeply into a particular work by Poul Anderson, currently Mother Of Kings, or might instead veer in a different direction, as long as it is relevant - or sometimes irrelevant. Anderson contributed to many series created by other authors and also wrote an sf James Bond. (See comments.) Established authors have been writing James Bond novels. What might Anderson have done with Bond? Something high tech and sfnal while also recalling the War and the Cold War and revealing the hidden motivation behind SMERSH or SPECTRE?

This question is occasioned by just having seen the new Bond film, having not seen Bond for years. Of course, the films are different. This kind of prequel moves backwards but also sideways in time. We are supposed to be viewing earlier events but the action is still set in the present day! Blofeld has a Polish accent - correct - and we see him acquiring the facial scar that he had when we first saw him played by Donald Pleasance.

Of course, Anderson, if he had got involved, would have written a novel or a short story, not a film script.

Modern Myths

Manson Everard, who does detective work in the past, refers to Sherlock Holmes.

Malcolm Lockridge, who has been hired to help recover a treasure, refers to James Bond.

Jack Havig, who has the superpower of time travel, refers to Superman.

I am a fan of Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories, of Ian Fleming's James Bond novels and of Superman in some versions, e.g., when written by Alan Moore or in the Smallville TV series.

Holmes, Bond and Superman are modern myths by which I mean fictional characters who are universally known, even by those who have never read the original texts. Others are:

Dracula
Frankenstein
Alice in Wonderland
Rip van Winkle
Peter Pan
Tarzan
the Batman
the Time Traveler
the Invisible Man
the Man in the Iron Mask
the Three Musketeers
the Count of Monte Cristo
the Wizard of Oz

Usually, it is possible to describe a mythical character's distinguishing feature in a single phrase or sentence. I am sure that it would be possible to generate a list of a hundred, although some would need to be verified by opinion polls.

Anderson's characters are not on the list. Each of us appreciates the modern myths and also many less well known characters.