Friday 31 May 2013

Outposts Of Empire

Poul Anderson's "Outpost of Empire" and The Day Of Their Return, set between the Young Flandry Trilogy and the Captain Flandry series, each describe an outpost of the Terran Empire.

The first highlights a character that had been briefly introduced in the first Young Flandry novel, Ensign Flandry, and the second introduces a character who re-appears, briefly but significantly, in the first of the three later Flandry novels. Thus, these two intermediate works are woven into the web of future historical interconnections.

I think that the speech mostly without articles that I noticed in the character Peter Jowett is repeated in another character, Tatiana Thane, and thus might turn out to be a feature of Aenean Anglic. I am rereading the Chunderban Desai chapters of The Day Of Their Return because these are rich in imaginative details and present a parallel narrative to the more active adventures of Desai's adversary, Ivar Frederiksen.

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Hi, Paul!

Irumclaw, one of the planets featured in A CIRCUS OF HELLS, was also an outpost of the Empire. And a prime motivation for Flandry's maneuverings in that book was to finesse matters in such a way that the Empire would not withdraw from Irumclaw. Flandry disliked that possibility because abandoning Irumclaw would undermine an entire frontier of the Empire.

Sean