Tuesday 20 May 2014

Converging Strands

Although A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows is not the last novel to feature Dominic Flandry, it nevertheless ties together several narrative threads and thus is a culmination -

first contact with Ythri occurs in "Wings of Victory";

Nicholas van Rijn first appears in "Margin of Profit" and visits the planet Diomedes in The Man Who Counts;

Aycharaych is first mentioned in A Circus Of Hells and first appears in The Day Of Their Return;

human beings and Ythrians jointly colonize some Avalonian islands in "Wingless" and the main, Coronan, continent in "Rescue on Avalon";

Avalon successfully resists Terran annexation in The People Of The Wind;

Dominic Flandry:
first appears, and also meets Tachwyr the Dark, in Ensign Flandry;
visits the planet Talwin, where he hears of Aycharaych, in A Circus Of Hells;
meets Aycharaych in "Honorable Enemies";
refers to van Rijn in "A Plague of Masters";
visits the Taurian Sector of the Terran Empire in "The Warriors from Nowhere."

In A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows, Flandry:
investigates allegedly Avalonian subversion, actually Aycharaych-instigated, on Diomedes;
re-meets both Tachwyr and Aycharaych on Talwin;
revisits the Taurian Sector;
learns Aycharaych's secret and bombards his home planet.

As ever with Anderson's works, the list became longer and more complicated while being written. When tracing interconnecting threads, it is difficult to stop short of summarizing the entire History. I have previously listed the narrative strands that converge in the very last story, "Starfog."

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