This is volume two of three of the Dominic Flandry subseries of the Baen collection of Anderson's Technic Civilization works. I was accordingly surprised to find that well over half the pagecount is taken up by two stories, "Outpost of Empire" and The Day of Their Return, which don't feature Flandry at all, although they're set in the same decadent Terran Empire and the latter takes place in the aftermath of Flandry's exploits in The Rebel Worlds. I didn't like these two very much, the mostly former due to the overly idealized portrayal of a pseudo-primitive society, the latter because the protagonist was too uninspiring. The latter also has an episode that may be interpreted as antiziganist - not sure if Anderson intended it to be read that way, but I found it jarring. Anderson was usually good at depicting foreign societies as believable mixes of good and bad; you might say these stories represent a couple of missteps.

The rest of the book consists of a number of short stories staring Dominic Flandry, busily bringing down barbarian warlords and foiling dastardly plots. They're distinctly more energetic than the two non-Flandry stories, and if they depict strange cultures more cursorily, they also do it less objectionably. If they're somewhat formulaic, the formula is a good one, and I definitely prefer them to the first two stories.

As of this writing, the only other review of the book is by someone who takes the opposite view, prefering the two non-Flandry stories. No accounting for taste I guess.

...All in all I was not too impressed with this collection. Thankfully the two works really worth reading make up some two-thirds of the total collection so the four mediocre stories ending it don't make it a disappointment. Captain Flandry does suffer from repetitions of various kinds. Flandry or another protagonist states the inevitability of the Long Night in each story at least once. A number of them also follow the same plot. The Mersians try to shake a border world loose from the empire, Flandry finds out about it and investigates, Flandry finds he is hopelessly ill prepared, Flandry overcomes these challenges anyway (and gets the girl). This volume offers very little variation compared to the previous books(Rise of the Terran Empire in particular). It wasn't a punishment to read but Anderson has written better material. I hope the sixth volume, Sir Dominic Flandry: The Last Knight of Terra, expected in December 2010, contains better stories.

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