Intertextualities

(i) Poul Anderson's A Stone In Heaven refers to the events of Anderson's A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows but not to any work of that title because these novels do not exist in the fictional history that they describe.

(ii) Anderson's Steve Matuchek telepathically broadcasts the text of Operation Chaos to hypothetical other universes and later writes the text of Operation Luna although not for publication. Thus, there is no intertextuality in this case.

(iii) In Dornford Yates' She Fell Among Thieves, two continuing characters, Mansel and Chandos, meet the new heroine, Jenny, and Chandos marries her. Several volumes later, Chandos, narrating, reminisces in conversation with Mansel:

"So we came back to Jenny, by way of She Fell Among Thieves."
-Dornford Yates, Ne'er-Do-Well (Kelly Bray, Cornwall, 2001), p. 2.

Fictitiously, Chandos not only narrates these novels but also writes them and gets them published, like Dr. Watson, as factual accounts of his adventures, although this generates massive contradictions, e.g., Chandos not only confesses to murder but also describes Mansel's highly confidential affair with his cousin's wife while simultaneously assuring us that no one else knows about it! However, despite these absurdities, I feel that Yates has earned the right to refer to his own works by their titles. I read She Fell Among Thieves several times in the 1960s and again recently and it is curiously meaningful when Chandos himself refers to that work by its title. (Nostalgia is part of it.)

(iv) Tad Williams' contribution to Multiverse: Exploring Poul Anderson's Worlds refers to Anderson's The High Crusade, "The Man Who Came Early" and Three Hearts And Three Lions and also to the contents of Tau Zero and the Dominic Flandry series. In Williams' story, these works are simultaneously fictions written by Poul Anderson and created realities in which it is possible to intervene. However, this is all one big joke and the only question for the reader is: How absurd can this text get?