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Enter a Hero, Somewhat Flawed

I'll start with a quote whose authorship is unknown but not unsuspected . . .

 
Introducing . . . Dominic Flandry. Before he's through he'll have saved worlds and become the confidante of emperors. But for now he's seventeen years old, as fresh and brash a sprig of the nobility as you would care to know. The only thing as damp as the place behind his ears is the ink on his brand-new commission.

Though through this and his succeeding adventures he will struggle gloriously and win (usually) mighty victories, Dominic Flandry is essentially a tragic figure: a man who knows too much, who knows that battle, scheme and even betray as he will, in the end it will mean nothing. For with the relentlessness of physical law the Long Night approaches. The Terran Empire is dying . . .
 

I didn't see how I could top that, so I hijacked it (but please to call it research!). I can't prove it, but I think I know who wrote that anonymous text from the back cover of the Ace edition of the novel Ensign Flandry (included in these pages). The paperback was published while Jim Baen was in charge at that venerable sf publisher . . . and Jim usually did his own cover copy at three different publishers, including the one he founded . . . and to me, it reads like Jim's work. And it captures Dominic Flandry in two well-honed paragraphs.

I'll be using somewhat more paragraphs, and less effectively. But if you're now all revved up to read Ensign Flandry, and maybe the other two novels as well without further ado, go right ahead. I'll be here when you get back.

I will dispute one item in the quote. Flandry arguably isn't "a sprig of the nobility." True, his father was a minor nobleman, but Flandry was his illegitimate offspring, born of an affair with an opera singer. His mother's profession makes it seem odd that Flandry repeatedly mentions he has no interest in music, even if at one point in the following pages he is whistling an unnamed waltz tune while piloting a ship in a scene that might be Poul Anderson's sly nod at 2001: A Space Odyssey. But I digress . . .

Dominic Flandry—Captain Dominic Flandry—made his first appearances in 1951 in two pulp magazines, Planet Stories and Future. The pulps soon died, alas, but Flandry was just getting started. In the following years, Poul Anderson chronicled his further adventures, by which time Flandry had been knighted (Captain Sir Dominic Flandry, if you please), until by 1966 some back history was in order. The three novels in this set visit Flandry at the beginning of his illustrious career.

He's already obviously charming and attractive to the opposite sex, judging from their reactions. (Later, he'll pay for a biosculpt, then wonder if he's made his face too handsome.) And he's making an impression on his superiors. As one of them tells him in The Rebel Worlds, "You'll either be killed, young man, or you'll do something that will force us to step on you, or you'll go far indeed."

That's after the same superior officer refers obliquely to some of Flandry's misadventures, and says, "Don't worry . . . yet. Competent men are so heartbreakingly scarce these days, not to mention brilliant ones, that the Service keeps a blind eye handy for a broad range of escapades." That's Flandry: he's a hero, but a somewhat tarnished one; he's a rascal, but not a villain; and he's a gloomy philosopher, well aware that he's been born in the twilight of the declining Terran Empire.

As he puts it:

. . . the night is coming—the Long Night, when the empire goes under and the howling peoples camp in its ruins . . . . Our ancestors explored further than we in these years remember. When hell cut loose and their civilization seemed about to fly into pieces, they patched it together with the Empire. And they made the Empire function. But we . . . we've lost the will. We've had it too easy for too long. And so the Merseians on our Betelgeusean flank, the wild races everywhere else, press inward . . . why do I bother? . . . I could be more comfortable doing almost anything else.

These glum musings are interrupted by a woman who asks him for directions, then makes it obvious that she's interested in more than directions, putting him in a better mood and musing that another job might prove boring. That's Flandry, too: aware that civilization is shot through with irreparable cracks, but enjoying its pleasures while he can.

Mention is made of the Polesotechnic League, long gone, and Flandry "wistfully" thinks that he was born out of his proper time. "He would much rather have lived in the high and spacious days of the trader princes, when no distance and no deed looked too vast for man, than in this twilight of empire." Your humble scribe did wonder at that point how Flandry and Van Rijn would have gotten along—sparks would fly, I'd wager!

Born in the wrong century or not, he'll still charm the ladies, enjoy the expensive creature comforts, and fiercely oppose all enemies of the Empire, foreign and domestic. He has no illusions about the flaws and limitations of the Empire, but knows that it's far better than anything that might take its place.

Poul Anderson originally conceived Flandry as a science fictional counterpart of Leslie Charteris' celebrated Simon Templar, better known as the Saint, but his hero soon began to look more like a science fictional counterpart of another iconic hero with an English accent, James Bond, though the resemblance is almost certainly a case of parallel evolution, since Flandry's early adventures appeared prior to the publication of Casino Royale (1953), with 007's debut. Both Bond and Flandry have flamboyant adventures, have excellent taste in clothes, food and drink, and encounter far more than their share of, ah, friendly females (in Flandry's case, not always human). But Flandry's adventures have the additional dimension of taking place before that looming twilight of the gods backdrop. Bond is making the world safe for western civilization. Flandry is trying to keep civilization from collapsing in his lifetime, hoping that some pieces will survive the inevitable shattering of the Terran Empire.

In the first of these three novels, you'll meet Flandry, of course (or renew your acquaintance), but you'll also meet Max Abrams of the Imperial Naval Intelligence Corps, Flandry's mentor (who does his own musing on the coming Long Night, showing that it isn't Flandry's private hobgoblin). And you'll meet a character who often appears in Poul Anderson's stories in various guises: the intelligent, well-meaning, and well-connected individual who thinks that surely, we can all just get along if we sit down and discuss this like the sane beings that we are—and whose idealistic naiveté is a blueprint for disaster. Since there has never been a shortage of people like that, both in and out of government, in our "real" world, who think that we can reason with those who want to destroy us, this aspect of Ensign Flandry makes the 1966 novel very much up-to-date.

Another sort of villain, not admirable at all, appears in The Rebel Worlds. Bordering on the psychotic—on second thought, make that clear over the border—and this one also makes the story downright contemporary, when one considers the mindset of those aforementioned enemies who want to destroy us.

A villain whom you will not meet in this book is the alien Aycharaych, Flandry's most persistent nemesis, his Moriarty. But have patience, he'll have a whole novel to himself in the next volume in this series. (Flandry will not be onstage in that novel, but never fear, there'll be plenty of Flandry—Captain Flandry by then—in the rest of the next book.)

I've found that most people visualize Dominic Flandry as Errol Flynn. I've always opted for a young David Niven, probably because I first encountered Flandry in "A Handful of Stars" (later retitled "We Claim These Stars," and still later, "Hunters of the Sky Cave") in the June 1959 Amazing Stories shortly after seeing several vintage David Niven movies on TV (and I was startled a few years later when Algis Budrys wrote in a book review that Flandry could have only be born of a union between David Niven and Diana the Huntress). You can visualize him as you wish (but if you see him as Brad Pitt, I don't want to hear about it), but that's really peripheral to the fast-moving and thoughtful adventures in which you're about to join him. Bon voyage—and fasten your seat belts.

—Hank Davis, 2009

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