Friday 20 April 2012

Fives

I had another look at the seven shorter works about Dominic Flandry. These works keep re-arranging themselves in my head. In publication order, they are:

"Tiger by the Tail" (January, 1951);
"Honorable Enemies" (May, 1951);
"The Warriors from Nowhere" (1954);
"The Game of Glory" (1958);
"Hunters of the Sky Cave" (June, 1959);
"A Message in Secret" (December, 1959);
"The Plague of Masters" (1960-'61).

Flandry has acquired a private spaceship and an alien servant in the third and fifth of these stories but not in the others. For this reason, these two stories come later in the Chronology:

"Tiger by the Tail" (fictitious date 3032);
"Honorable Enemies" (3033);
"The Game of Glory" (3035);
"A Message in Secret" (3037);
"The Plague of Masters" (3038);
"Hunters of the Sky Cave" (3040);
"The Warriors from Nowhere" (3042).

In fact, "The Warriors from Nowhere" retroactively became a prequel to the Flandry novel, A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows, published 1974, fictitious date 3047. Two further novels feature Flandry: A Stone in Heaven (1979/3061) and The Game of Empire (1985/3064). Thus, of these ten works, five are set before Flandry had acquired the Hooligan and Chives and five after. There are another five works set still earlier during Flandry's life time. Five works are set during the period of the colonization of Avalon and the early Terran Empire. There are five works about the Trader Team. There are six about van Rijn but I think that the first of these, "Margin of Profit" (1956/2416), should be included in an introductory collection, leaving five in the van Rijn series proper. 

The "introductory" section of the History divides into four stories introducing:

the Jerusalem Catholic Church (which becomes important later);
Ythrians (discovered during the Grand Survey);
Ythrian religion;
Adzel (later a member of van Rijn's Trader Team);

and five stories about: 

van Rijn;
Falkayn (later the leader of the Trader Team) on the planet Ivanhoe;
Falkayn starting to work for van Rijn;
later events on Ivanhoe;
later events on two other planets discovered during the Grand Survey. 

The Technic History could end with five works if we were to include the disputed "Memory," although I now agree with Anderson that that story does not really belong in this timeline. Nevertheless, the History can be subdivided into two groups of four works and seven groups of five works. This breaks down a long series into manageable units and shows how far the series progresses from its opening in "The Saturn Game" (1981/circa 2055) to its conclusion in "Starfog" (1967/7100).

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