Poul Anderson: "The Game of Glory," "A Message in Secret," and "The Plague of Masters"

Let's read my 1979 Ace copy of Flandry of Terra, a collection of three late-'50s/early-'60s Dominic Flandry stories by Poul Anderson with a good Michael Whelan cover featuring lots of guns, astronomical phenomena, and weird aliens, plus a mustache and a hot chick.  The three stories in the collection have proven enduringly popular, and been reprinted many times in numerous languages and under various titles.  Flandry of Terra first appeared as a hardcover in America in 1965, and first as a paperback in Britain in 1976.  There isn't any special introduction or afterword or anything, though in my printing there is a dedication to Jack and Norma Vance, and to a Johnny, presumably the Vances' son.  I like seeing these little evidences that writers can get along instead of being riven by professional jealousies and ideological rifts and all that, which seems, to me, to be the norm.  (The '76 British paperback, viewable at the internet archive, lacks this dedication.)

Like the Michael Whelan cover on my copy, the cover of the British 1976 paperback promises awesome militaristic adventure; well, let's see if the texts live up to these covers, or if, like the cover of our last paperback, Eric Frank Russell's earthbound chase thriller The Mindwarpers, which shows a space ship, these covers amount to false advertising.

"The Game of Glory" (1958)

"The Game of Glory" debuted in Venture, in the same issue as Algis Budrys's tale "The Edge of the Sea," which we just read in March.

The story begins with Captain Flandry in charge of intelligence operations on a formerly semi-autonomous planet that has just had its semi-autonomy violently revoked because its elite rejected a Terran demand for permission to set up a new space navy base.  The Terran military having conquered the place, Flandry is hunting down the anti-Terran elements among the elite so local collaborationists can be put in their place.  (In these Flandry stories, Anderson does not sugar coat the decadence and the ruthless realpolitik that characterizes the Terran Empire!)  One of the marines escorting Flandry, a black guy, is killed by a sniper, and his dying words provide Flandry a clue that suggests the soldier's  home world is seething with rebellion!  

Flandry, alone, flies to that black dude's home planet, a world covered in water whose "native" population is made up of ethnic Africans who colonized the place 500 years ago and are dedicated to fishing and other nautical pursuits; the planetary elite of whites and Asians who rule in Terra's name arrived some 100 years ago when the Terran Empire conquered the planet and form a sort of bourgeois class and live on a little island.  Landing on this island, Flandry finds that the Imperial representative has been murdered.  After an interview with the dead man's beautiful and decadent wife, Flandry accompanies a beautiful and heroic native lady aristocrat to her underwater city to continue his investigations.  

Flandry uses his charm as well as trickery to figure out who on this water planet is plotting a rebellion against Terra and to convince important people to side with him and Terra against the rebels and aid him in the fight against them and the hunt for the agent of Terra's rival space empire, the Merseians, who fomented the rebellion.  

This is a good story; the futuristic weapons and equipment and the enemy agent--a huge aquatic creature--are sold SF fun SF elements, Anderson offers vivid images of alien landscapes as well as decent fight scenes, and he also does a good job of integrating into the narrative his themes of cultural and political decline and decadence and the ambiguous nature of imperialism--the plot and setting and characters successfully illustrate those themes.  The story's racial politics would presumably invite comment from today's readers; the black people Flandry meets in the story are all more likable and admirable than all the white people he meets, so obviously Anderson means "The Game of Glory" to be an anti-racism story, but maybe some today would consider Anderson's depictions of black people to be an instance of cultural appropriation or to constitute examples of the use of the "magic Negro" (when they help Flandry) or the "white savior" (when Flandry helps them) cliches.

A less ambiguous no-no from the point of view of today's values is how Flandry uses homosexuality as a sort of emblem or synecdoche for degeneracy.  At the end of the story, after working with the vigorous and honorable black seafarers, people who fearlessly go head-to-head with sea monsters and storms, Flandry sums up how debased the Terran Empire is with a sarcastic reference to "our noble homosexual Emperor."                 

It is probably not nice to beat up on Russell again, but I think The Mindwarpers, the last subject laid out for dissection here at MPorcius Fiction Log, presents an illuminating contrast to "The Game of Glory."  Both stories are about a guy serving his powerful polity in a bipolar milieu in which it is at odds with another powerful empire and both stories chronicle how the guy travels from place to place to talk to people in an effort to discover and foil a plot of the opposing empire; both tales have a fight in the middle and a climactic fight at the end.  But while Anderson in his story makes sure all the places are vividly described and all the people and relationships in the story tell us something about what it is like to live in the hero's empire in a specific period of history, its culture and ethos and atmosphere, Russell signally fails to do any of that, not even providing names for the big cities the hero goes to or the opposing empire, and presenting almost no relationships whatsoever between his secondary characters.

So, thumbs up for "The Game of Glory."

LEFT: This 1999 special issue of a Japanese magazine features stories by Leigh Brackett,
Keith Laumer, and Fred Saberhagen as well as "The Game of Glory"
RIGHT: This French collection contains all three of today's stories, plus four other 1950s Flandry tales

"A Message in Secret" (1959)

"A Message in Secret" first appeared as the cover story of Fantastic, and its first book publication was as half of an Ace Double, where it was retitled Mayday Orbit.  

Planet Altai, far from the main space lanes, was colonized by humans from Central Asia like seven centuries ago, and Terra, center of a space empire of some four million stars, hasn't paid much attention to it since.  But in response to rumors that something is up there, Flandry is sent to Altai to investigate, travelling as the sole passenger on a merchant ship owned and crewed by non-humans, people from the independent system of Betelgeuse.  

Altai is an icy world of steppe and desert where most of the people live as motorized nomads--the planet has rings, as depicted by Michael Whelan on the cover of my copy of Flandry of Terra, and many of the tribespeople ride heavily armed motorcycles, as depicted on that British paperback edition.  Flandry quickly learns that the dominant of the planet's tribes, the tribe resident in the capital city, has a secret alliance with the Merseians and is even receiving high tech Merseian weapons.  Flandry hooks up with a female soldier of a pro-Terra tribe; her tribe was defeated by the pro-Merseia tribe and is being held captive as a member of the pro-Merseian khan's harem.  Mounted on stolen motorcycles, they fight their way out of the capital and make their way through the snowy wilderness to another pro-Terra tribe.  Significantly, this tribe has a different religion than most of the human tribes on Altai.  

Flandry and this dissident tribe's shaman consult the uncanny natives of Altai, weird little guys with psychic powers who have abandoned high tech civilization.  These jokers have domesticated herds of animals much like flying jellyfish, some as big as a passenger balloon, and Flandry figures out a way to use these airborne creatures to save his butt and Terran foreign policy.  

In the capital city is a two-kilometer high pagoda, a temple of the quasi-Islamic, quasi-Buddhist mainstream religion of the humans of Altai.  On a stormy night, carried in the tentacles of one of these Brobdingnagian flying jellyfish, Flandry spray paints in Roman letters visible from many miles away a message nobody on Altai understands, but any Terran will immediately recognize, "MAYDAY."  This sacrilege causes xenophobic riots, and the Betelgeusans flee the planet, carrying with them the news of the strife-triggering graffiti, news which quickly reaches the Terran authorities, who send a ship to investigate.  When Flandry, listening to radio traffic, knows the Terran ship is in the sky above, he has the pro-Terra tribesmen--expert cavalry men--ride in formations that form English words appraising the Terran spacers above of the Merseian-sympathizer threat on Altai.  Soon enough, a powerful Terran naval force arrives to kill a lot of people and set things to rights (from the Terran point of view, at least.)  

As we sort of expect from one of these vintage hard SF stories, the hero resolves the plot by using his wits and tricking other people.  But if that is not enough drama for you, in the weeks between the departure of the Betelgeusan merchants and the arrival of the Terran space fleet, Flandry gets involved in a love triangle as well as fights against Terran rats that have evolved over the centuries to the size of dogs and some of the pro-Merseia tribesmen.

A good story which shares the merits I saw in "The Game of Glory."  Thumbs up for "A Message in Secret."    

"The Plague of Masters" (1960)

This tale appeared in 1960 as part of an Ace Double under the title Earthman, Go Home! and was serialized across the December '60 and January '61 issues of Fantastic under the title "A Plague of Masters."  (Remember "A Plague of Lighthouse Keepers?"  That was really something, wasn't it?)  

Three hundred years ago, planet Unan Besar was colonized by people descended from the inhabitants of the Malay Peninsula, and they have had no direct contact with the rest of human civilization since.  Unan Besar's atmosphere contains a toxin that will kill a person after prolonged exposure, so everybody on the planet has to take a pill every thirty days.  The technicians of the government department that makes these pills--Biocontrol-- jealously guard the secrets to their manufacture and have made themselves dictators of the planet.  The first Biocontrol scientists may have been technocratic socialists who thought they could make this world of jungles and swamps a paradise by meticulously managing a planned economy, but, proving Flandry's assertion that scientific government never works, Biocontrol quickly evolved into a ruthless and corrupt oligarchy indifferent to the fate of those ruled.  Nowadays the Biocontrol technicians and their lackeys live in palaces and most people eke out an existence as peasants or as toilers or thieves in crime-ridden slums.

The Biocontrol oligarchs know that interstellar trade would upend the social structure of Unana Besar because the high tech planets of the Terran Empire could with trivial ease develop and manufacture the life-preserving pills at low cost (Anderson's free-trade/small government politics is more evident in "The Plague of Masters" than in the other two stores we are talking about today) and so they have scrupulously avoided any intercourse with other human planets, only conducting a very limited trade with Betelgeusean merchants who strictly quarantine while on the planet's surface.  When Flandry arrives to investigate this mysterious world he soon realizes Biocontrol won't let him off the planet alive and so he fights his way out of the palace quarter into the slums, where he hooks up with a courtesan and her colleague, a ruthless mugger of tremendous physical strength.  Via elaborate disguise and trickery, and a little bit of the old ultraviolence, the three swindle a chest of silver coins out of a powerful crime boss; thus booty finances a move to a city on the other side of the planet.

Regardless, the planet's top cop manages to track the three down and imprison them.  In custody, Flandry learns all about Unana Besar's ruling cabal, many of whom are fanatics and quite a few of whom are goofballs.  The top cop, a more level-headed character than the arrogant and wacky technicians he serves, tries to sign up Flandry as his assistant--Unana Besar's number one flatfoot recognizes that a highly experienced intelligence agent from the Terran Empire has much to teach him.  

A wealthy guy Flandry made friends with right before getting captured springs the mugger and the courtesan and those two cold-blooded killers rescue Flandry; many people are slain in the process.  (This scene of mayhem is brought to life on the cover of the Ace Double version of Earthman, Go Home!)  Flandry's benefactor is from a small and remote community of anti-Biocontrol conservatives who live in a beautiful forest.  Even though they recognize that contact with the rest of the galaxy will change the traditional way of life they love, they commit themselves to helping Flandry overthrow Biocontrol and opening Unana Besar to interstellar trade.  Flandry and friends accomplish this goal via trickery and by killing a bunch of people, setting in motion the process that will end the planet's oppressive social order and improve the lives of those who survive the upheaval.    

"The Plague of Masters" is as long as "The Game of Glory" and "A Message in Secret" put together.  I like it, but not as much as those other two stories.  Individual portions are well done--chases, fights, schemes of deception--but some of them end up seeming superfluous.  For example, over quite a few pages, Flandry gets in good with that major crime boss, and together they develop an elaborate business plan, but of course the plan is just a ruse and goes nowhere beyond providing Flandry and his two felonious allies a chance to rob the crime boss.  I also feel like the secondary and minor characters here, and their relationships with Flandry and with each other, are not quite as interesting as those in the previous two stories. 

Personally, I agree with the anti-government and pro-free trade speeches Anderson puts in "The Plague of Masters," but lefties and the kind of right-wingers who find themselves more in tune with the brand spanking new Compact magazine than with 60-odd-year-old National Review may find them irritating.  

           

A thumbs up for "The Plague of Masters," but not as enthusiastic a one as for "The Game of Glory" and "A Message in Secret."

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Three good stories.  They work as espionage adventure stories, but science fiction is the literature of ideas and Anderson has read a lot of books, so along with the plot we get plenty of science, talk about politics and economics, and a wealth of references direct and indirect to world history and culture; these stories are obviously influenced by the history of the Roman and British empires as well as the Cold War, and Anderson also alludes to culturally specific phenomena like (in "The Plague of Masters") "running amok."  I feel Anderson thus provides additional layers of interest to the stories, though I can see some finding it a waste of time, tendentious, or even somehow offensive.

I expect there are quite a few more Dominic Flandry adventures in our future.  For past Flandry content from MPorcius Fiction Log, check out my blog posts on The Rebel Worlds, "Tiger By the Tail," and "Honorable Enemies."  

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My copy of Flandry of Terra has five pages of ads in the back.  So, what books was Ace actively promoting in 1979?

Well, we've got two pages of ads for books by Anderson, appropriately enough.  There's a full page devoted to Ensign Flandry, a 1966 novel that Michael Whelan's cover suggests features a sexy cat lady.  SF people love cats.  

Ian Watson and Fred Saberhagen each get a full page for a single novel, the former a 1978 novel apparently about UFOs, Miracle Visitors, the latter the first publication in book form of Love Conquers All, a 1974 serial from Galaxy, about, it seems, overpopulation and sex.  Hubba hubba.

Finally, there is another full page ad for what I guess is an SF murder mystery by Randall Garrett, Murder and Magic.  isfdb is telling me this is an installment in a long-running series; it is odd that isn't mentioned in the ad.

The Watson and Garrett books hold no attraction for me, but I am of course interested in the Anderson volumes and I am certainly curious about the Saberhagen.  Maybe we'll be talking about it soon here at MPorcius Fiction Log!