Ensign Flandry: The Saga of Dominic Flandry 1 by Poul Anderson
I’m not sure how this one slipped through the cracks for me. I’ve read a fair bit of Anderson in my youth. Most notably his Time Patrol stories and his Psychotechnic League stories.
I picked up a paperback copy of Ensign Flandry at Camerons’s Books in Portland, OR. If you live there, or are passing through, Cameron’s is a bibliophile’s used book store erotic dream. Southeast of the larger and infinitely more well known Powell’s books, which also sells used books and could arguably be called a bibliophile’s screaming orgasm, Cameron’s is Powell’s hot younger sister.
The plot of this one caught me by surprise. When I saw it on the shelf, I wanted to read it because the Flandry series had a large influence on one of the biggest roleplaying games of my youth, Traveller. Anderson’s terse writing style lulled me into thinking this would be a textbook example of space opera, a homage to E.E. Smith.
It is that, surely. And it has all the attendant qualities of good space opera: a handsome young idealistic hero who can fight his way out of any scrape; exotic, sexy aliens with a beautiful, sexy female leader with the hots for our hero; and bad guys who have nothing but malice for the good guys and a plethora of evil plans with which to exercise that malice.
Well, that view lasted until about Chapter 3 where Anderson introduces quite a bit of ambiguity into the setup. The Terran Empire is in conflict with the Merseian Empire on the planet Starkad, using the two dominant sentient races as proxies. The story gets complex and Anderson deftly weaves layers of intrigue and politics into the story. He wrote this one in 1966 and it became clear to me that, on one level, the story can be seen as an allegory for the Vietnam War.
This one is a page turner and when it ended, I was left very pleasantly surprised and hungry to read the rest of the books in the Flandry series.
I love your analogy of Cameron books being ‘Powell’s hot younger sister’.