The Dominic Flandry Series: Its Essence And Its Visualization

"The world-weary sought consolation in vice or spiritual obsessions. Few even thought of resisting the Empire's inevitable fall. A nineteenth century historian's verdict on Byzantium is equally applicable to the Terran Empire: 'It is a tale of what had reached its zenith, of what was past its best strength, a tale of decadence postponed with skill and energy, and yet only postponed.'

"Matters were far otherwise with Terra's fierce young rival, the Roidhunate of Merseia."

-Sandra Miesel, "Afterword: The Price of Buying Time" IN Poul Anderson, A Stone In Heaven (Ace Books, New York, 1979), pp. 237-251 AT p. 243.

 

A summary worthy of quotation. We know of the vices but what were the spiritual obsessions?

 

I found another illustration. This montage of Ramnuans, Miriam Abrams, Dominic Flandry, a planet and its moon serves as the frontispiece of the illustrated A Stone In Heaven.

 

A profusely illustrated text is midway between a prose-only narrative and a graphic novel. The latter medium is a substantial comic strip comprising sequential art story telling with dialogue in speech balloons, a visual adaptation comparable to but different from a film. The illustrated A Stone In Heaven is just a first step in this direction.

Other Agents

This blog regards Poul Anderson's Dominic Flandry and Ian Fleming's James Bond as two major fictional secret agents. However, for anyone who is interested, there are many others. The concluding two pages of my copy of The Man With The Golden Gun (see image) advertise:

Peter Ward by David St. John;

Joaquin Hawkes by Bill S. Ballinger;

Johnny Fedora by Desmond Cory;

Charles Russell by William Haggard;

Mark Hood by James Dark;

David Denning by Don Von Elsner;

Jason Love by James Leasor -

 

- and the following titles whose protagonists are not named here:

 

On Hazardous Duty by David St. John;

The Antagonists by William Haggard;

Cobra Venom by John B. West;

Call For The Dead by John Le Carre;

The High Wire by William Haggard.

 

We know that Call For The Dead introduces George Smiley and we, or at least I, saw David Niven playing Jason Love. Also, since a Johnny Fedora novel is shown to have the alternative title, Hammerhead, that is something that I have encountered.

 

Anyone else?

Addendum: Rereading this post in June 2025, I realize that I have got that wrong somehow about Hammerhead but this hardly matters now.

Fourteen Years Ago

A Stone In Heaven, III.

Because Flandry is to meet a Duke, Chives has laid out his "'...formal uniform and decorations...'" (p. 40) Flandry no longer cares how he dresses:

"...had not since a lady died on Dennitza, fourteen years ago..." (p. 42)

A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows, and The Technic Civilization Saga, Volume VI, end when Flandry tells his murdered fiancee's uncle, the Gospodar of Dennitza, that he will not remain on Dennitza but will instead return to Terra because:

"'I have my own people.'"

-Poul Anderson, A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows IN Anderson, Sir Dominic Flandry: The Last Knight Of Terra (Riverdale, NY, 2012), pp. 339-606 AT XX, p. 605.

 

That was a good ending for a novel, for an omnibus volume and for the Captain Flandry series and would also have been an appropriate ending the entire fictional biography of Dominic Flandry on a par with:

 

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

 

- which comes right at the end of Ian Fleming's posthumously published The Man With The Golden Gun (New York, 1965).

However, we are pleased to read about Flandry fourteen years after the events on Dennitza and Chereion.

Captain Flandry

The biggest anomaly in Baen Books' seven-volume The Technic Civilization Saga is that Volume V, Captain Flandry: Defender Of The Terran Empire, collects:

a short story and an entire novel that are not about Dominic Flandry;

four of the shorter Captain Flandry installments -

- whereas Volume VI, Sir Dominic Flandry: The Last Knight Of Terra, collects:

the remaining three shorter Captain Flandry installments;

A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows, the last episode before Captain Flandry does at last accept promotion to Admiral.

Flandry has been knighted in "The Game of Glory," the sixth installment in Volume V.

The short story and novel that begin Volume V are sequels to the first three Flandry novels which are collected as Volume III, Young Flandry. See here. Therefore, these two sequels should either be included in Volume III or, if that were to be too voluminous, published separately. Then, Captain Flandry could be gathered together as a single volume.

Apart from that, I have become quite happy with the way Baen Books have divided up the Technic History, even cramming eleven installments into Volume I, The Van Rijn Method.

Graphic Chives

Poul Anderson, A Stone In Heaven (Ace Books, New York, 1979), III.

I have switched from reading A Stone In Heaven in Flandry's Legacy (see here) to reading the Ace Books edition (see above) in order to appreciate the interior illustrations (see image). I might have found some other examples by googling before but cannot find them now.

The attached image faces p. 40 where Chives is described:

short;

green;

hairless;

long-tailed;

wrinkled;

skinny;

stiff;

wearing only a kilt;

serving coffee.

According to the text, the retracted outer wall reveals the roof garden where:

"A Cynthian yaoti perched bright-plumed on a bough of a blossoming orange tree..." (p. 43)

After reading this illustrated edition, we want to see:

full color images;

a graphic novel adaptation;

a screen adaptation.

Morning On Terra

A Stone In Heaven, III.

Cairncross, knowing that Miriam Abrams is traveling to Terra to see Admiral Flandry, sets out to arrive there before her. Further down the same page, a governing noble wants to see Flandry privately. Readers are expected to put two and two together. We have discussed this particular morning in Flandry's life before, here, although I failed to mention either his overnight visitor or the Turkish towel.

Nicholas van Rijn had a penthouse on the roof of the Winged Cross in Chicago Integrate but I do not think that we have any way of telling where on Earth Flandry's comparable residence is. Flandry maintains three retreats. One of the others is a cabin with a few hectares in the High Sierra. (XIV, p. 183) Van Rijn, wealthier, owns we do not know how many mansions, including one on the peak of Kilimanjaro and another in the floating city of Delfinburg.

We are not told what van Rijn is like in the morning and I would not like to find out.

Doublecross Cairncross

A Stone In Heaven, II.

What is Duke Edwin playing at?

"Thank God for giving him the foresight to have Sten Runeberg's house bugged, after he'd gotten the man fired from Ramnu." (p. 27)

"There was no way, under these conditions, to arrange an abduction or assassination. Anything untoward would be too damnably suspicious, in a period when a degree of suspicion was already aimed at Cairncross." (p. 28)

The Duke's surname is Cairncross. We do not yet know what his game is but now the novel has its heroine, Miriam Abrams, and its villain, Duke Edwin, and, further down p. 28, at the beginning of Chapter III, we will meet the hero:

"Vice Admiral Dominic Flandry, Intelligence Corps, Imperial Terran Navy..."

Flandry has been carefully led up to through the viewpoints of Yewwl, then Abrams, then the Duke.

Abrams has confirmed that her father was Flandry's superior on Starkad and has since died. We are very much in a "Children of Empire" period but I have listed the various offspring of Flandry and his contemporaries a few times already.

We re-appreciated the beauty of Starfall on Hermes when Abrams visited Sten Runeberg and now we look forward to revisiting Flandry's place in Archopolis on Terra.

Where's Olga?

A Stone In Heaven, II.

From his battlemented tower on an extinct volcano in the middle of the Hermetian continent, Greatland, Edwin Cairncross, Grand Duke of Hermes, sees:

Antares;

 

Mogul, sun of Babur, the Hermetian Protectorate;

 

Olga, the constellation that contains, invisibly of course, the extinct sun of Mirkheim;

 

the Milky Way;

 

not Sol, which is too far away.

How many Olgas are there in the Technic History?

The Grand Survey spaceship, Olga, discovers Ythri and Avalon;

the explorers of Avalon include Olga Berg;

Olga's Landing is a city on Imhotep;

Olga is a constellation on Hermes.

The Destruction Of The Shrine

A Stone In Heaven, I.

See also The Kulembarach Clan.

The terraces of the Shrine overflow with snow. Frost has shattered several terraces and toppled some sculptures. Caretakers have withdrawn. Carelessly left fire has reduced buildings to blackened stones. The wooden gate to the arch before the tomb is gone. Wind wails. Scattered ice crystals shatter sunlight. The white cliff of the snowpack rises several kilometers above the mountain slope. Thus, the tomb, on a ledge only a third of the way up the slope, is vulnerable to avalanches.

Since there are no keepers, the first member of Yewwl's family to reach the Shrine is entitled to greet the Forebear by blowing his bugle. When he does, an avalanche topples statues and trees and buries everything that it hits, including the Shrine and everyone present except Yewwl who manages to glide away.

See also O Jerusalem!

Berserk In An Ice Age

A Stone In Heaven, I-II. 

The previous post (see the above link) focused on the fourteen-page build-up to Admiral Flandry and therefore skipped over the drama of Chapter I: an avalanche destroys the Shrine, the tomb of Kulembarach, and kills Yewwl's husband and children. A Ramnuan responds to grief by going berserk. That sounds terrible. On the other hand, the Ramnuans have never had wars, armies or states because a single soldier who lost a comrade would run amok. Maybe that going berserk is a beneficial trait after all, as Abrams suggests? Poul Anderson always presents genuinely alien biologies, psychologies and sociologies.

The Ramunam Ice Age is technologically preventable but the Duke of Hermes says no so Abrams will go to Terra to appeal to Flandry. In II, she travels to Williams Field (scroll down) on Hermes, then goes into Starfall. These places are known to us. She stays with the Runebergs, a familiar surname. This chapter also introduces her enemy, the current Duke. The plot thickens.