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THE WHEEL TURNS





Whether the wheel (or mandala) of time or the ceaselessly rotating wheel of the galaxy—time passes. The captains and the kings depart. And the admirals and the emperors as well . . .

This seventh volume of Poul Anderson’s monumental Technic Civilization future history completes the series as it was published in bits and pieces over four decades, now assembled, for the first time, complete and in internal chronological order. The saga, spanning future centuries, is an impressive achievement, and yet (there’s no pleasing some people), one might wish for a few more stories set during the “little night” (between the sacking of Earth by space-voyaging barbarians and the rise of the Terran Empire) and the Long Night (between the simultaneous collapse of the Terran Empire and the Merseian Roidhunate, and the rebirth, millennia later, of interstellar civilization).

Perhaps Poul Anderson found such bleak times uninteresting and didn’t wish to chronicle them. Or maybe he thought he had already explored enough of the darker aspects of humans and their universe in the stories which he did write, (not all of them in the Technic Civilization series). Two stories included herein are unabashed tragedies, and one of those two is a hundred-megaton heartbreaker.

After all, one might wish for more stories, but considering the bounty that a prolific and inventive author provided, greed is not called for. And gratitude for what we do have is most certainly called for.

These include the novel, A Stone in Heaven, wherein Dominic Flandry is now a Vice Admiral who isn’t quite in the good graces of the present Emperor, who’s not the man his father was. Miriam Abrams, daughter of Imperial Intelligence spymaster Max Abrams, who recruited and mentored young Dominic Flandry long ago, is another character. Unlike the present Emperor, she is the human her father was . . . so to speak. . . . A xenologist, she’s trying to get help for the Ramnuans, who cannot survive on their rapidly cooling homeworld without Terran help. But such help is not forthcoming. Worse, when she travels to Earth, she finds that people who might be able to grease the bureaucratic wheels refuse to talk to her.

But Flandry lends a sympathetic ear, of course, and finds something more sinister than monolithic bureaucratic inertia is at work. The present emperor may be a disappointment, but at least he isn’t the tyrant another character will become if his scheme to seize the throne succeeds. Bracing action ensues and, at the end, this time Flandry actually walks off into the sunset (or, “into the autumn”) with the girl. Before that happens, there’re plenty of droll quips from Flandry, such as when he meets Cairncross, the villain of the piece:

“Well, well,” [Cairncross] said. “So this is the legendary Admiral Flandry.”

“No, the objectively real Admiral Flandry, I hope. Some would say the objectionably real.”

One might also note that the dying planet Ramnu is an echo of the dying Terran Empire. And there’s that password that Flandry imparts to Miriam: the name of a town in England. Does the town still exist in the 31st century? Could Flandry, who repeatedly claims no interest in music, be making a reference to Gilbert and Sullivan’s Ruddigore? I have no trouble believing that pair’s operettas could survive for another millennium, and if the music didn’t appeal to him, the witty dialogue might.

Next comes the last novel in the saga, The Game of Empire. There’s a new Merseian maneuver to be countered. Flandry is a player therein, and we learn that he and Miriam are now married, but the novel belongs to Diana Crowfeather, Flandry’s daughter, along with her client, Axor, a visiting Wodenite, and her friend Targovi, a felinesque Tigery. Those who have read earlier installments of the saga will recall another of the reptilian centauroid Wodenites, Adzel, valuable member of Nicholas van Rijn’s trader team. As for the Tigeries, not only did they play a crucial role in young Ensign Flandry’s first extravagant adventure, but a Tigery who knew Flandry back then makes a brief appearance here.

That is the last we see of Dominic Flandry. Possibly, he had other adventures, but the bard named Anderson did not record them. Even with life-extending drugs, Flandry likely didn’t live to see the Terran Empire’s fall. (Did his daughter? One wonders . . .) At some point, he, Miriam, and Chives must have set course for Valhalla in Hooligan, where they may have joined up with Nick van Rijn, David Falkayn, Adzel, Chee Lan, and maybe even Muddlehead.

The remaining chapters of the Technic Civilization saga are set centuries, even millennia apart, with no recurring characters. Only one is set during the Long Night itself, over half a century after The Game of Empire: “A Tragedy of Errors,” which features a flamboyant rogue reminiscent of C.L. Moore’s immortal Northwest Smith. (He might remind others of Han Solo, though the Anderson novella appeared almost a decade before Star Wars.) Interstellar communications have broken down, and the characters have no idea what’s going in elsewhere in the sphere of galactic space which once was the dominion of Terra. Consequently, neither do we readers. The falling apart of the Empire is underlined by the way that languages are beginning to change, leading to an unfortunate misunderstanding that sets the story in motion.

But far more than languages were mutating. In the novella “The Night Face,” some star colonies are slowly rebuilding human civilization and sending expeditions to other star systems. However, the humans of one long-isolated colony have changed from the original human blueprint, and when the nature of the change becomes apparent, stark tragedy ensues. At the same time, quiet heroism takes center stage: no blazing blasters, no battling starships, just a fatal choice and a personal sacrifice. Poul Anderson well understood both the tragic and the heroic aspects of living in a universe that does not care.

A century later, humans on a planet who have lost all but the simplest technology are discovered by other humans who have regained interstellar travel, and once again the passage of time in isolation has wrought a deadly change in the former. “The Sharing of Flesh” has aspects of a mystery story—though the question is not “whodunit” but “whydunnit”—as well as being a inquiry into the nature of justice. It won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards for the year it was published.

The end of the saga comes over three millennia later. In “Starfog,” human civilization has rebounded, surpassing the technology of the days of Dominic Flandry, and possibly surpassing the freedom and lack of regimentation of the earlier days of Nicholas van Rijn as well. This far future tale hearkens back to the past, as descendants of the rebels who fled into unexplored space in the Dominic Flandry novel, The Rebel Worlds, make contact with the new civilization, but cannot find their way home again. The solution to that problem is ingenious—but this story’s ending is also bittersweet.

Will the new, looser interstellar civilization have a longer life than the long-fallen Terran Empire? Perhaps, since no competing nonhuman sentients are mentioned in “Starfog.” That doesn’t mean that some might not be waiting elsewhere in the galaxy. The Terran Empire, it should be remembered, only occupied a small part of one arm of our spiral galaxy, and almost certainly other intelligences exist elsewhere, waiting to be discovered. And not all of them could be expected to be friendly or even nonbelligerent. Even without competition, water runs downhill, entropy increases, and as long as humans are still human, the social structures they erect will likely have a limited sell-by date. One should remember that galaxies and even the protons making up matter are thought to have limited lifetimes. But while the stars still burn, human will find new opportunities for adventures, possibly villainous, hopefully noble, certainly heroic, as humans and other sentients continue to attempt (if I may borrow a phrase from E. E. “Doc” Smith) to unscrew the inscrutable.

And, as the saga ends, I’ll borrow another phrase, overused but very true, and say that it has been an honor and a privilege to have been entrusted with assembling these seven volumes which comprise a major landmark of science fiction.

J J J

As with some of the earlier installments, two essays by Sandra Miesel, noted authority on the works of Poul Anderson, are included with the e-book version of Flandry’s Legacy: “The Price of Buying Time” (originally written as an afterword to A Stone in Heaven) and an afterword to “The Night Face.” They are far more intelligent and illuminating than this introduction. Go to www.baen.com for details.


—Hank Davis, 2011









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