"He stopped them by conjuring up phantoms. He made them think a few million of his race were still alive, able to give the Roidhunate valuable help in the form of staff work, while he himself would be a unique field agent—if they were otherwise left alone. We may never know how he impressed and tricked those tough-minded fighter lords; he did, that's all. They believe they have a worldful of enormous intellects for allies, whom they'd better treat with respect. He draws on a micro part of the computers, data banks, stored knowledge beyond our imagining, to generate advice for them... excellent advice, but they don't suspect how much more they might be able to get, or by what means.
"Maybe he's had some wish to influence them, as if they learned from Chereion. Or maybe he's simply been biding his time till they too erode from his planet."
Flandry was quiet for a few heartbeats before he finished: "Need we care which, when real people are in danger?"
The Gospodar straightened, walked to an intercom, spoke his orders.
There followed a span while ships chose targets. He and Flandry moved aside, to stand before a screen showing stars that lay beyond every known empire. "I own to a desire for vengeance," he confessed. "My judgment might have been different otherwise."
Flandry nodded. "Me too. That's how we are. If only—No, never mind."
"Do you think we can demolish everything?"
"I don't know. I'm assuming the things we want to kill are under the cities—some of the cities—and plenty of megatonnage will if nothing else crumble their caverns around them." Flandry smote a fist hurtfully against a bulkhead. "I told Qow, we don't ever have more to go on than guesswork!"
"Still, the best guess is, we'll smash enough of the system—whether or not we reach Aycharaych himself—"
"For his sake, let's hope we do."
"Are you that forgiving, Dominic? Well, regardless, Intelligence is the balance wheel of military operations. Merseian Intelligence should be... not broken, but badly knocked askew.... Will Emperor Hans feel grateful?"
"Yes, I expect he'll defend us to the limit against the nobles who'll want our scalps." Flandry wolf-grinned. "In fact, he should welcome such an issue. The quarrel can force influential appeasers out of his regime.
"And... he's bound to agree you've proved your case for keeping your own armed forces."
"So Dennitza stays in the Empire—" Miyatovich laid a hand on his companion's shoulder. "Between us, my friend, I dare hope myself that what I care about will still be there when the Empire is gone. However, that scarcely touches our lifetimes. What do you plan to do with the rest of yours?"
"Carry on as before," Flandry said.
"Go back to Terra?" The eyes which were like Kossara's searched him. "In God's name, why?"
Flandry made no response. Shortly sirens whooped and voices crackled. The bombardment was beginning.
A missile sprang from a ship. Among the stars it flew arrow slim; but when it pierced air, hurricane furies trailed its mass. That drum-roar rolled from horizon to horizon beneath the moon, shook apart wind-carven crags, sent landslides grumbling to the bottoms of canyons. When it caught the first high dawnlight, the missile turned into a silver comet. Minutes later it spied the towers and treasures it was to destroy, and plunged. It had weapons ready against ground defenses; but only the spires reached gleaming for heaven.
The fireball outshone whole suns. It bloomed so tall and wide that the top of the atmosphere, too thin to carry it further, became a roof; therefore it sat for minutes on the curve of the planet, ablaze, before it faded. Dust then made a thick and deadly night above a crater full of molten stone. Wrath tolled around the world.
And more strikes came, and more.
Flandry watched. When the hour was ended, he answered Miyatovich: "I have my own people."
——————————————
In glory did Gospodar Bodin ride home.
Maidens danced to crown him with flowers. The songs of their joy rang from the headwaters of the Lyubisha to the waves of the Black Ocean, up the highest mountains and down the fairest glens; and all the bells of Zorkagrad pealed until Lake Stoyan gave back their music.
Springtime came, never more sweet, and blossoms well-nigh buried the tomb which Gospodar Bodin had raised for St. Kossara. There did he often pray, in after years of his lordship over us; and while he lived, no foeman troubled the peace she brought us through his valor. Sing, poets, of his fame and honor! Long may God give us folk like these!
And may they hearten each one of us. For in this is our hope.
Amen
CHRONOLOGY OF TECHNIC CIVILIZATION
COMPILED BY SANDRA MIESEL
The Technic Civilization series sweeps across five millennia and hundreds of light-years of space to chronicle three cycles of history shaping both human and non-human life in our corner of the universe. It begins in the twenty-first century, with recovery from a violent period of global unrest known as the Chaos. New space technologies ease Earth's demand for resources and energy permitting exploration of the Solar system.
Although Technic Civilization is extinct, another—and perhaps better—turn on the Wheel of Time has begun for our galaxy. The Commonalty must inevitably decline just as the League and Empire did before it. But the Wheel will go on turning as long as there are thinking minds to wonder at the stars.
***
Poul Anderson was consulted about this chart but any errors are my own.
Lurex and Gold: Poul Anderson's Dominic Flandry Series
by Sandra Miesel
Science fiction critic Algis Budrys once speculated that "Dominic Flandry could have sprung from no union less than that of Diana the Huntress and David Niven, with all the early personality advantages one would derive from such a fortune."1 From his sleek seal-brown hair to his soft beefleather boots, Flandry is the epitome of rakish elegance, a devil in velvyl whose smile "had bowled over female hearts from Scotha to Antares." (The Plague of Masters, 1961, chapter 6) Poul Anderson's debonair Naval Intelligence agent exerts his agile body and nimble wits preserving the moribund Terran Empire a thousand years hence. As Flandry says, "What was the use of this struggle to keep a decaying civilization from being eaten alive, if you never got a chance at any of the decadence yourself?" ("The Game of Glory," 1958) His life is a glittering web woven of lurex and genuine gold.
Yet Flandry is a voluptuary with a conscience, a hedonist subject to bouts of *Angst*. "'We're hollow and corrupt,'" he says of his class, "'and death has marked us for its own. Ultimately, though we disguise it, however strenuous and hazardous our amusements are, the only reason we can find for living is to have fun. And I'm afraid that isn't reason enough.'" (Hunters of the Sky Cave, 1959 chapter 8) Flandry often broods over the price of his pleasures. He desperately needs to believe in the merit of the bargains he strikes to prolong the Empire's lifespan. He takes some grim satisfaction in tabulating the billions of man-years of peace his exploits have bought for others and in predicting that colonies he has saved will outlive the Empire. The last knight of Terra is a failed gentleman, but a species of gentleman nonetheless.
It is this combination of opposing traits that makes Flandry so memorable. His charm has a certain bittersweet "Gallic" flavor, a blend of cynicism and idealism. Initially, Anderson intended him to be a science fictional cousin of the Saint, not another James Bond. (Remember, Fleming's hero postdates Anderson's.) Moreover, the Terran officer's relationship with his intrepid alien servant Chives has faint traces of Bertie Wooster's with Jeeves or Lord Peter Wimsey's with Bunter.
But Anderson's restless imagination was not content to remain with his original premises. Fifteen years after the first Flandry story appeared, he shifted the series from template to developmental mode and transformed his hero into a futuristic Horatio Hornblower. The Terran is a born aristocrat and the Briton an incorrigible bourgeois but Ensign Flandry's rise is meant to match Midshipman Hornblower's.
Like C.S. Forester, Anderson was faced with the challenge
of extrapolating his hero's youth from his maturity: seven stories about Captain Flandry (1951-61) precede Ensign Flandry (1966). Unlike Forester, he also had to expand and justify the imaginary universe which his hero inhabits and invent settings for his heroics. Most of the time Anderson manages to achieve psychological and historical consistency and accommodate scientific advances. This makes his Flandry cycle a more technically interesting example of series-writing than his David Falkayn cycle which appeared in correct chronological order.
Furthermore, since Flandry has survived through 28 of Anderson's first 32 years as a professional writer, these works record fluctuations in the author's sentiments and skills like annual growth rings on a tree. The Flandry saga exemplifies Anderson's adventure fiction and summarizes many of his own personal interests, opinions and tastes. The perceptive reader will recognize that Anderson is a scientifically educated man who reads history, favors limited government, delights in nature, adores women, and enjoys Mozart, Hiroshige, Scotch, and Alice in Wonderland.
Flandry's first home was in the pulp magazines alongside such bold adventurers as C.L. Moore's Northwest Smith and Leigh Brackett's Eric John Stark. The influence of these early peers lingers in his flamboyant garb and flair for melodrama. Nowadays, sf protagonists seldom worry about the tilt of their bonnets nor ride rockets to probable doom sipping Lapsang Soochong tea.
Flandry's earliest escapades, "Tiger by the Tail" (1951),''Honorable Enemies" (1951), and "Warriors from Nowhere" (1954), are simply entertainments. Their pseudo-medieval and quasi-Oriental settings are conventional; their casts of curvaceous ladies, brash barbarians, rotten noblemen, and alien menaces are drawn from the basic Planet Stories Repertory Company. (Special revisions for later reprints justify such matters as inhabited worlds around Betelgeuse.)
Against this background, Flandry's impudent roguery blazes up like a nova. Although his novelty failed to excite pulp readers (a group as tradition- bound as Kabuki fanciers), it laid the groundwork for his subsequent popularity. Thus "Tiger by the Tail" remains enjoyable while "Witch of the Demon Seas," its running mate from the very same issue of Planet Stories, is mercifully forgotten. "Tiger by the Tail" has survived changes in taste partly because it’s based on Mark Twain's "Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg."
A whole new audience was waiting for Flandry after the demise of the pulps, an audience with higher expectations of its amusements. By then Anderson's talent had matured. He was able to spin cleverer puzzles at longer lengths using stronger characters. For instance, compare Aycharaych's first appearance in "Honorable Enemies" with his next encore in Hunters of the Sky Cave. Eight years more writing experience had equipped the author to present his ambiguous villain more skillfully.
Anderson had also shaken off pulp conventions sufficiently to realize that aliens are not merely humans disguised with horns, tails, and tinted skins. He no longer copies past cultures as closely as he did in "Tiger by the Tail" where the Celtic and Nordic prototypes of the Scothani are perhaps too obvious despite rationalizations. The Ice People of "A Message in Secret" (1959), the hydrogen-breathing Ymirites and lupine Ardazirho of Hunters of the Sky Cave are more pleasingly original. The "otherness" of the latter two races is heightened by playing them off against the essentially American colonists of Vixen.
However, colonial societies can still be plausibly modeled on past historic ones, especially when a pattern of ethnic immigration is assumed. Anderson maintains that preserving a cultural, religious, or political heritage will motivate extrasolar colonization. Therefore he presents Boer-Bantus on Nyanza in "The Came of Glory," Russo-Mongols on Altai in "A Message in Secret," and Balinese-Indonesians on Unan Besar in The Plague of Masters. At this point, Anderson had not quite perfected his procedures: his repetitions are too neat, he arbitrarily borrows personal and geographical names, and he selective choices—the natives of Unan Besar could just as easily be Muslims than polytheists. But each planetary society is richly colorful and shows the regional differences appropriate to a world. None is in danger of being mistaken for the State of Delaware.
Furthermore, from the warm shallow seas of Nyanza to the wind-scourged deserts of Vixen, each people occupies a thoroughly realized environment complete with marvelous scenery. This is an arctic forest on Altai:
White slender trees with intricate, oddly geometric branches flashed like icicles, like jewels. Their thin, bluish leaves vibrated continuously. It seemed that they should tinkle, that the whole forest was glass. ("A Message in Secret," chapter 8)
Compare it with a stand of gigantic Trees on tropical Unan Besar:
The great Trees were . . . incredibly massive, organic mountains with roots like foothills. They shot straight up for fifty meters or so, then began to branch, broadest at the bottom, tapering to a spire. The slim higher boughs would each have made a Terran oak; the lowest were forests in themselves, forking again and yet again, the five-pointed leaves (small delicately serrated, green on top but with a golden underside of nearly mirror brightness) outnumbering the visible stars. (The Plague of Masters, chapter 13)
These stories demonstrate Anderson's growing fascination with extraterrestrial astrophysics and ecology as well as his ability to express it in hard data. (They coincide with his first major attempt at world-building, The Man Who Counts/War the Wing-Men, 1958.) Thereafter, each place Flandry visits is more exotically alien than the last.
The other development to be noted over the course of a decade is the deepening sense of melancholy that tinges the stories. (Anderson's series typically grow darker the longer he writes them.) To quote Budrys again, "The devil-may-care hero of the earliest stories became the socially conscious inner- directed man . . . the seeker-out-of-extracurricular adventure. . . . What he gave away prodigally in his first flush of manhood he regrets in his prime, and now he takes it." 2 Flandry's old sense of fun has not vanished—he could still trade quips with his own executioner—but he knows his former hopes for Terran Renaissance are vain. He and the Empire he serves have reached their autumn season. "'We who see winter coming can also see it won't be here till after our lifetimes . . . so we shiver a bit, and swear a bit, and go back to playing with a few bright dead leaves.'" (Hunters of the Sky Cave, chapter 8)
Finally, Anderson took an impulsive step that significantly altered the direction of the series. He tied Flandry's universe to that of his other popular character Nicholas van Rijn by mentioning the latter is a legendary folk hero on Unan Besar. (This is an appropriate place for van Rijn's reputation to survive since he is half-Indonesian.) Uniting these two blocks of stories gave Anderson the nucleus of a future history 5000 years long which now numbers more than 40 separate items including 13 full-length novels and 3 short novels. It is the most remarkable achievement of its kind in sf.
Since this splice was made in 1961, a preoccupation with the historical process itself has come to dominate the whole series. In the rise and fall of Technic civilization Anderson has found a theme engrossing enough to engage all his talents. It allows him to combine political, social, and philosophical commentary with scientific speculations. It also encourages him to go on designing worlds and cultures but adds the challenging constraint that these creations be mutually consistent. A few flaws have unavoidably crept into Anderson's scenario despite a voluminous set of background notes that "bulges out a looseleaf binder." As he explains; "Perfect consistency is possible only to God Himself, and a close study of Scripture will show that He doesn't always make it."3
Not only does cross-referencing amuse reader and writer alike, it also transmits information. Instead of mentioning Unan Besar's successful re-entry into Technic civilization, Anderson shows Flandry eating fish imported from Unan Besar in A Stone in Heaven 25 years after the events in The Plague of Masters. Genealogical references indicate whether characters met or shirked their duty to build a better universe for their offspring. Each time Anderson traces a family connection he proclaims his faith in the continuity of life: "children *are* the future." Note th
at he bridges the 700-year gap between his principal heroes with a bond of flesh. Van Rijn’s descendant Tabitha Falkayn has a brief affair with Flandry's ancestor Philippe Rochfort in The People of the Wind (1973).
Such attention to detail reflects the same spirit of craftsmanship that prompted medieval stonemason to carve the hidden parts of their work as carefully the visible ones. Consider an obscure bit of irony in Ensign Flandry: peacemongering Lord Hauksberg's name means "Hawk's Mountain." His policies are clearly doomed from the start because his title, Viscount of Ny Kalmar, and space yacht, the "Droning Margrete", point to the ill-fated Union of Kalmar established by medieval Danish queen Margaret I.
Anderson will always make allusions whether anyone notices or not. However, those who do notice leave the author pleasantly bemused and receptive to their suggestions. Several Flandry fans independently concluded that the lost colonists of Kirkasant in "Starfog" (1967) were descended from some of the McCormac exiles in The Rebel Worlds (1969). Their arguments persuaded Anderson to accept this unplanned connection as true.
History, politics, philosophy, the sciences—these are the factors shaping the final batch of Flandry tales and related works. The series has grown in scope and intricacy far beyond its frivolous origins, much to the surprise of the author himself. "That aimless, hedonistic boy who did them, in a hurry because he needed more beer, does seem rather a stranger now," says Anderson, echoing Flandry's own sentiments as he looks back across the same span of years at his younger self in A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows (1974).
Sir Dominic Flandry: The Last Knight of Terra Page 50