Saturday 6 December 2014

Flandry On Vixen

Dominic Flandry, organizing Vixenite resistance to Ardazirho invaders, knows that an effective "underground" needs cells, frequently changed passwords and widely separated hiding places. (Here is a different meaning of the word "Underground" from the one quoted in a recent post.)

I recently mentioned World War II (WWII). The Ardazirho occupation of Vixen puts Flandry very much into a WWII scenario without going as far as to transport him to Occupied France via time travel. But there are always science fictional elements:

Flandry is "...trained to tell faces apart, even nonhuman faces -" (Sir Dominic Flandry, p. 223);

the invaders have a keener sense of smell than man;

they control crowds not with hounds but with "...batsnakes..." (p. 219);

they walk differently, not hitting the ground with boot-heels but clicking with metallic toes;

their chief officer is not a Commandant but a Clanmaster;

the Ardazirho have no discernible uniforms because their recently unified planet still has disparate clans;

to capture the Clanmaster in Garth alive, Flandry must knock him out with a knuckleduster because an anaesthetic might be fatal.

(With ten minutes still to go, today has nearly as many (133) page views as yesterday (138) although this is the first post for today. I have been busy with other activities and will be increasingly so till Christmas.)

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Hi, Paul!

I find Flandry's activities on Vixen organizing "underground" resistance to the Ardazirho and the collecting of intelligence VERY interesting. It reminds me of how he discussed with Kossara Vymezal the basic methods of intelligence work in A KNIGHT OF GHOSTS AND SHADOWS. It also reminds me of MURDER IN BLACK LETTER because both that book and WE CLAIM THESE STARS shows a certain method of breaking resistance--without doing any physical injury to the person being interrogated--by a prisoner being questioned.

Sean