Tuesday 22 August 2017

Continuing Characters And Retro-Continuity

Dominic Flandry's Shalmuan servant, Chives, his Merseian opposite number, Tachwyr the Dark, and his Chereionite adversary, Aycharaych, each appear in only four instalments of Flandry's series. However, we understand that Flandry and Tachwyr have "encounters" that we do not read about.

Their third encounter that we do know about occurs on Talwin during the Terran civil war and we wish that an entire novel had been set during this conflict. Retroactively, "The Warriors from Nowhere" has been represented as showing the disordered war-torn Empire but this much earlier published story had not been written with that in mind. Princess Megan wound up being Hans Molitor's granddaughter although, in an Afterword to A Stone in Heaven, Sandra Miesel had described her as the granddaughter of an elderly interim Emperor. While a series is still growing, whatever is written about it may have to be revised.

Retrocontinuity enriches series. In the last novel featuring Flandry, Anderson added the Patrician System, the Zacharians, Dakotia and the Aycharaych scheme involving Olaf Magnusson. We understand that all of these elements of the Technic History had already existed although we had not read about them until now.

3 comments:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

I remember that comment by Sandra Miesel about the "elderly interim Emperor." Your thought was that could be best understood, assuming "Warriors From Nowhere" had not been revised, as referring to an elderly kinsman of Josip who briefly succeeded him on the throne. I actually thought of something like that in one of my letters to Poul Anderson.

However, I think it's easier to think of Hans Molitor as being that "elderly interim Emperor." He was already an old man with grandchildren when Josip died. And Hans had only a relatively brief reign of 13 years as Emperor.

I agree with what you said about THE GAME OF EMPIRE and I would have liked to have seen more of Diana Crowfeather (or Flandry, if she adopted that name) and her friends.

Sean

paulshackley2017@gmail.com said...

Sean,
Hans is the "elderly interim Emperor"? That is a good retro-interpretation of Miesel's comment.
Paul.

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

Thanks! Sean