Bodies And Souls

The Biblical concept of a human being was of an animated body, returning to dust at death.

The Platonic concept was of a reincarnating soul that achieved perfection only in disembodied pure thought.

The Aristotelian concept was that the soul was the form of the body.

Christianity synthesized the Biblical and Platonic concepts. Christians expect a hereafter for the soul immediately after death but also await the resurrection of the body.

If a soul is:

(a) to have new sensory experiences and
(b) to communicate with other conscious beings -

- between the death and resurrection of its body, then it needs at least the appearance of a body inhabiting a shared environment. So is Dante's and Niven & Pournelle's Inferno a mere appearance?

Poul Anderson provides a physical Hell by having inert matter animated by parapsychic forces. See here.

Addendum, 14 Mar '16: CS Lewis suggests in Letters To Malcolm that a realistic appearance of the body is the resurrection of the body. However, I do not share Lewis' Platonic mind-body dualism. I think that being became conscious. Reality is one.

Alternatives

Poul Anderson's Operation... series and SM Stirling's Draka series each feature an alternative version of World War II. However, these are different kinds of alternatives because Operation... is a "fantastic alternative history" whereas the Draka inhabit a "realistic alternative history." (See here.) The dystopian Drakan Domination could have emerged in our timeline, requiring only an alternative course of events in recent world history, whereas the magical technology of Operation... would have required different laws of physics.

In our timeline, my parents' generation lived through World War II into the Cold War which involved a nuclear arms race that also incorporated a space race. In the Draka timeline, Eric von Shrakenberg and his contemporaries live through the Eurasian War into the Protracted Struggle that involves different kinds of arms and space races.

In Draka Vol III, The Stone Dogs, we appreciate seeing Eric again. We also unexpectedly see the inside of a Draka Citizen girls' boarding school. However, earlier volumes had informed us about the educational system so it makes sense that, as the series proceeds, we are shown a school as perceived by a pupil, in this case Eric's niece.

The Damnation of the Draka continues.

I have frequently mentioned aircars and now learn that the Draka had them in 1969. Their versions of the Alice books have slightly different titles. Do they have some writers of fiction that we do not? Do we have a Lalique, Halgelstein or Dobson? Conversational use of prepositions is arbitrary and changeable over time. Thus, the Draka have come say "to home" where we say, "at home." Their horrible society is convincingly detailed. Might it really exist in a parallel universe? It is good when at last we hear some anti-Draka sentiment from a serf, even though he is immediately killed.

Another serf who accepts her servitude nevertheless observes that the Draka are arrogant and cruel without realizing it. She takes pride in the fact that it is the serfs, not their masters, who build everything, also that the serfs will survive whether or not the Draka win against the Alliance. She likes some individual Draka but is not a Draka-lover. This favored serf and her Landholder "owner" agree that the serf's son is sullen and difficult but we learn that he is anti-Draka. Point of view matters.

As in Stirling's Conquistador, dangerous animals have been imported into conquered territories. While hunting and killing a large leopard in Italy, some Draka disregard the nearby cave that must be its lair. Is it not obvious that the leopard's mate will emerge from the cave?

A Draka landholder heir says:

"'The Race makes possible the only way of life I know, the only world I feel at home in, the only contentment I can ever have.'"
-SM Stirling, The Stone Dogs (New York, 1990), p. 92.

We really do need to see the Draka lose everything but I suspect that the series remains consistently dystopian. Still reading, I have yet to learn the significance of the title.

We vicariously enjoy Drakan luxury and must remind ourselves that it is built on slavery. The Draka do not need to remind themselves. They glory in it.

I have just reached a point where the viewpoint character not only has finished school but also has completed pilot training. I feel a distaste for continuing to read not because of any defect in the writing but only because the dreaded Draka are described so vividly.

World Designers

Never underestimate the explanatory power of natural selection. For Poul Anderson on "Science and Creation," see here. Even when I was at University, I still thought that organisms must have been designed and I have discussed natural selection with people who clearly did not understand that:

individuals best able to survive in a given environment live longer and breed more, thus bequeathing pro-survival genes to more members of succeeding generations and changing their species in the process;

one quadruped population becomes longer-legged by evading predators whereas another such population becomes longer-necked by grazing trees, to grossly over-simplify.

Characters in some works of science fiction find evidence of design on different cosmic levels:

in Poul Anderson's Operation Chaos, inhabitants of at least one universe can directly contact either the Creator or his Adversary;

in Anderson's Genesis, the failure of rockets in an AI emulation is evidence for the artificiality of the emulated environment although its inhabitants have no way to deduce this and may even be deactivated at any moment;

in CS Lewis' Perelandra, Elwin Ransom meets the Venerian Adam and Eve;

in Carl Sagan's Contact, computations of the value of pi disclose that the numbers after the decimal point display a pattern that conveys a message;

in Arthur C Clarke's The City And The Stars, a civilization powerful enough to move heavenly bodies has constructed a circular constellation to communicate to any other space travelers, "We are here;"

in Philip Jose Farmer's Riverworld series, everyone who has died on Earth is resurrected on another planet that has been designed or redesigned to accommodate them;

SM Stirling's The Sky People (New York, 2006), set on Venus, contains the following dialogue:

Marc: "'You don't mean the aliens-did-it stuff, eh?'"
Cynthia: "'You got a better explanation? And that explains a lot - how Venus has a fossil record that ends two hundred million years ago, and how you've got dinosaurs and people together at the same time. This place isn't a naturally living planet at all: it's a terrarium, a zoo. An experimental station.'" (p. 201)

However, as yet, our universe displays no such signs of cosmic engineering - no radio messages, Dyson spheres, artifacts moving at near light speed etc.

Norse Myths In Modern Fiction II

It is easy to remember books featuring Odin and the Aesir in diverse forms. However, I was reminded of Anderson's understated use of another aspect of Norse myth. Operation Chaos, like its inspiration, Heinlein's Magic Inc, had climaxed with an expedition to Hell, where Valeria Matuchek's parents rescued their kidnapped baby daughter. In a far less dramatic chapter of Operation Luna, Valeria's mother visits Yggdrasil to consult the oracular severed head, Mimir, who regularly advises the Aesir. Ginny and her guide, a dwarf, see the path trodden by Odin when he descends Yggdrasil to visit Mimir but they neither meet nor want to meet the Hanged God.

I remembered this as I was rereading Mike Carey's Lucifer which also mixes mythologies - Michael and Lucifer fight above Yggdrasil, Fenris Wolf attacks the angelic city etc. Also, the Nine Worlds featured in a recent Thor film. The myths live as fiction.

A Multiversal Threat?

Poul Anderson's Operation Chaos, four stories unambiguously set neither on our Earth nor on another planet but on another Earth in an alternative timeline, does not mention multiple timelines (I don't think) except in the Introduction written for the collected edition. Three Hearts And Three Lions begins on our Earth, then moves to another. Finally, A Midsummer Tempest provides an inter-universal meeting place for travelers from many timelines. Thus, there is narrative progression.

In that Introduction to Operation Chaos:

"Whatever manifold form it takes, the war of Law and Chaos surely goes on in them all.
"We have learned certain things. We ought to broadcast the lesson and the warning."
-Poul Anderson, Operation Chaos (Sutton, Surrey, 1995), p. 2.

Law and Chaos make war in Three Hearts... and in Michael Moorcock's Multiverse. Order and Chaos make war in DC Comics, including Neil Gaiman's The Sandman. So what is the warning? Will Chaos attack all the timelines simultaneously? Will characters from different Anderson works and from other fictional universes have to join forces against a common threat? Well, no. Anderson was an imaginative but also a restrained author who continued to write good novels of different genres set in different periods and universes but who did not follow up on that Introductory warning. Its sense of impending menace contributed to the particular volume but did not need to be taken any further.

Multiverse

Poul Anderson's inter-universal inn, the Old Phoenix, is the setting for:

"House Rule"
"Losers' Night"
A Midsummer Tempest, xi THE TAPROOM OF THE OLD PHOENIX.
A Midsummer Tempest, xii LATER.
A MidsummerTempest, Epilogue THE TAPROOM OF THE OLD PHOENIX.

In A Midsummer Tempest, the inn is a meeting place for:

Prince Rupert from the Shakespearean universe of the same novel;

Holger Carlsen from the Carolingian universe of Anderson's Three Hearts And Three Lions;

Valeria Matuchek from the magical universe of Anderson's Operation Chaos and Operation Luna.

In "House Rule," the inn is a meeting place for:

Nicholas van Rijn from the hard sf universe of Anderson's Technic History;
Sancho Panza from Don Quixote;
Erik the Red, possibly from our universe.

Other guests from our universe or nearer ones include:

the first person narrator of the two short stories;
Leonardo da Vinci;
Albert Einstein;
Heloise and Abelard;
Francois Villon;
Winston Churchill;
an unnamed but identifiable Irish political leader.

Anderson wrote that he hoped to return to the Old Phoenix again...

The inn could have provided a framing sequence for a collection of new stories to display each of the different genres that Anderson wrote. Neil Gaiman used his Inn of the Worlds' End as a Chaucerian venue.

Today, I have read in Latin Caesar's and Tacitus' accounts of the Druids and their resistance to Roman rule.

Peter And Poul II

The previous post highlighted some parallels between A Midsummer Tempest by Poul Anderson and The Alchemist's Revenge by Peter Cakebread. Both novels can be characterized by saying that the English Civil War of the seventeenth century is being fought in a version of history where magic works. (Such a historical difference presupposes a corresponding cosmological difference but let's not go that far right now.)

One difference between the novels (so I initially thought) was that A Midsummer Tempest also places more recent technology in the seventeenth century. But so does The Alchemists' Revenge! Reading further, I find that not all of the anachronistic mechanisms are alchemically empowered. Some of them are merely ingenious engineering - although still suspected of Satanic influence, of course.

Each of these novels is one part of a vaster fictional universe but the ways in which this is done could not be more different.

A Midsummer Tempest...
...is set in a universe where all of Shakespeare's plays were literally true. Specifically, it is a sequel to A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest. Further, this Shakespearean universe coexists with the Carolingian universe of Anderson's Three Hearts And Three Lions and with the magical universe of his two Operation... volumes. Prince Rupert meets Holger Danske and Valeria Matuchek in the inter-universal inn, the Old Phoenix.

The Alchemist's Revenge...
...is the "First Book of the Companie of Reluctant Heroes." Further, this series is set in the universe of the Clockwork & Chivalry Role Playing Game (RPG) by Peter Cakebread and Ken Walton. Since RPG's are interactive dramas, maybe there is some connection with Old Will after all!

In both cases...
...the fiction must be understood in the context of the history:

"...for all the differences, much remains the same as the real history. Traditional society and values are crumbling; religious and political factions vie for supremacy; kin fight kin, in a bitter struggle for England's future; and ordinary folk struggle to get by, in a world turned upside down...
"...if we were going to do history, even alternate history, we needed to get the history right, before going on to change it."
-Peter Cakebread, The Apprentice's Revenge (Swindon, 2013), pp. 214-215.

Right on.

Wolf

There are, apparently, two ways for a man become a wolf. Either he is born a werewolf or he utters a transformation spell while wearing a magic skin. Poul Anderson, of course, gives us both. His two Operation... novels are narrated by a werewolf and the hero of The Broken Sword (London, 1977) transforms. The same close thinking goes into describing the experience in both cases.

Anderson realises that the wolf brain would not be able to carry all the memories and purposes of the man. His werewolf is trained to retain enough self-control to fulfill his human purposes in animal form and not simply to hunt or go wild. This character tells his readers that words cannot describe the experience but then describes it very well.

There is a vivid description in The Broken Sword:

"It was strange, being a wolf. The interplay of bone, muscle, and sinew was something else from what it had been. The air ruffled his fur. His sight was dim, flat, and colourless. But he heard every faintest sound, every sigh and whisper, the night's huge stillness had turned murmurous - many of those tones too high for men ever to hear. And he smelled the air as if it were a living thing, uncounted subtle odours, hints and traces swirling in his nostrils. And there were sensations for which men have no words.

"It was like being in a new world, a world which in every way felt different. And he himself was changed, not alone in body but in nerve and brain. His mind moved in wolfish tracks, narrower though somehow keener. He was not able in beast shape to think all the thoughts he did as a man, nor, on becoming man again, to remember all he had sensed and thought as a beast." (pp. 127-128)

He smells a frightened hare but his human soul drives him on because his purpose is to spy, not to eat. To enter a castle, he transforms into an eagle and Anderson also describes that experience.

Until it happens to someone, this is the best description that we will get.

The Valeria Matuchek Trilogy

It is almost a trilogy.

Volume I
In Poul Anderson's Operation Chaos, Valeria's parents meet and marry. Valeria is born and grows to the age of three. A demon kidnaps her but her parents rescue her from Hell.

Volume II
In Anderson's Operation Luna, Valeria turns fifteen and is the first human being on the Moon in her timeline.

Volume III
In his A Midsummer Tempest, Valeria, now a graduate student travelling between timelines, advises other travellers, including Holger Danske from Three Hearts And Three Lions, whom she meets in the inter-cosmic inn.

Epilogues
In "House Rule," we meet a regular of the inter-cosmic inn.
In "Losers' Night," the regular lists spectacular women including Moll Flanders, Sojourner Truth and Valeria Matuchek.

The writing order of the Volumes was I, III, II so Anderson filled in an account of Valeria's teenage years after he had included the adult Valeria as a supporting character in A Midsummer Tempest.

Maybe her flight to the Moon qualified her as a spectacular woman or perhaps there was more later? We would like to know the rest of her career but, as far as it goes, this trilogy, or tetralogy if we include Three Hearts And Three Lions, and its Epilogues is already a comprehensive, and not merely linear, narrative sequence.

Comments Across The Timelines

An author comments as his character speculates. Steve Matuchek, narrator of Operation Chaos and its sequel Operation Luna (New York, 2000), says:

"...think of the persecution of the Jews right up till the last century, and how readily it could revive - say in a strong, modern country that'd lost a major war and proposed to take its grudges out on the whole world, beginning with them. Or maybe a big but backward country, captured by an ideology that claimed human nature itself could be changed, setting out to do this with secret police, concentration camps, mass slaughters... Such things can happen." (p. 265)

Imaginative writers both comment on this our world and create their other worlds. Steve continues:

"Demons with a lunar stronghold, striking out of it with tricks, temptations, lies, illusions, disruptions, despair, to set man against man, could make them happen." (p. 265)

So readers simultaneously appreciate both social commentary and apocalyptic fantasy.

Operation Chaos began with absurdities like the magical medical practice of staring at germs through a microscope with the Evil Eye! But such entertaining absurdities do not prevent the same series from later addressing serious issues.

To Steve's hypothetical cases, we could add two more:

a big but backward country where an attempt to change social relationships had been defeated, leaving in power a self-serving bureaucracy whose industrial/military competition against more advanced countries compelled it to suppress and exploit its own population with secret police etc justified by an ideology about changing human nature;

a strong, modern country supporting dictatorships and threatening or waging wars in order to protect its own economic interests and access to sources of fuel.

Series And Sequences

Operation Luna is the sequel to Operation Chaos which is a collection of "Operation Afreet," "Operation Salamander," "Operation Incubus" and "Operation Changeling." Thus, there are six "Operation" titles but five "Operation" works and two Operation volumes. These volumes are also connected, though less directly, to two novels that do not have the word Operation... in their titles. In an earlier post, I discussed how these four volumes are connected both to each other and to two short stories which, I argue, could form the basis of a further collection.

Sometimes, three or four works by Poul Anderson form a linear series, a trilogy or tetralogy. In other cases, as with this "Old Phoenix Sequence" or the Maurai histories, there is a looser sequence of connected works. Each of these series or sequences deserves to be republished in uniform editions with covers indicating the optimal reading order.

In most cases, we wish that there had been more but, if Anderson had written more of any one series or sequence, he would necessarily have written less of another. 

Operation Chaos Conclusion

Poul Anderson's Operation Chaos combines three ideas:

Hell, a place inhabited by malevolent demons;
a universe at full entropy, dark space containing only dead stars and planets;
a universe with radically non-Euclidean and locally variable spatiotemporal relationships.

Do these ideas fit together? Parapsychic forces move and animate otherwise inert matter so that, on a dead planet in the full entropy universe, demons are embodied and dead armies fight an endless battle.

Considered in isolation, the non-Euclidean space-time idea might have led just to a game of hide and seek in a four dimensional labyrinth but, combined with the first two ideas, it enables:

demons to prepare horrific conditions for anyone arriving from Earth;
the Matucheks, rescuing their kidnapped daughter Valeria, to arrive in Hell/on the dead planet before Valeria and her kidnapper, thus to return her immediately to Earth before she has had time to experience any of the Hellish conditions.

So Anderson just about pulls it all together.

The Adversary, or some other being almost as low down in Hell, had directly addressed Steve Matuchek a few times in a way that had suggested a build up to a big showdown that never really happens. The kidnapping of Valeria was not, as I had thought, an attempt to lure the Matucheks to a place where they could be disposed of but more of a local accident. The Matucheks confront only a local baron and his hordes in Hell. However, there is a sequel, Operation Luna, which I will shortly reread.

(Incidentally, though, the Matucheks return from Hell with a prisoner, Valeria's kidnapper, whose evidence closes down a demonic front, the Johannine Church, so they have indeed set back the Adversary's plans as he had anticipated they would.)

The Wealth Of Anderson's Works

The more we reread of Poul Anderson's texts, the more there is to be found in them. So far, these posts about the "Old Phoenix Sequence" have covered:

the nature of Hell in Operation Chaos;

clever implications of fantasy premises in Operation Chaos;

scientific rationales for fantasy ideas in Three Hearts And Three Lions;

the use of language and Shakespearean allusions in A Midsummer Tempest;

an ingenious sequel to The Tempest;

the physical environment of the Old Phoenix;

contrasts between the Time Patrol series and the Old Phoenix;

Valeria Matuchek's life and career;

Nicholas van Rijn's antics in the old Phoenix;

the basic conflicts underlying Three Hearts And Three Lions and A Midsummer Tempest;

the issue of religious intolerance as shown in A Midsummer Tempest;

the political demands of the Johannines;

connections with Robert Heinlein, James Blish and Neil Gaiman;

the plausibility or otherwise of different imagined alternative histories;

clever uses of real history as shown by the inclusion of d'Artagnan;

literary references to Oscar Wilde and The Wind In The Willows.

The Low Continuum

We start to learn something about the Hell of the "Operation..." timeline in Chapter XXIII of Poul Anderson's Operation Chaos (New York, 1995). It is referred to as "...the hell universe..." or "...the Low Continuum..." and there is also a "...Heaven" (pp.164-167).  There is an "...Adversary..." with "...minions..." in Hell. (p. 166)

The uncertainty principle allows psychic influences (visions, temptations or inspirations) to be transferred from one space-time plenum to another but the conservation laws of physics entail that a material object can be transferred only if it is replaced with an identical amount of matter "...whose configuration has to be fairly similar to preserve momentum...," which may be why angels appear in human form on Earth. (p. 165)

A demon's naturally chaotic form would arrive as a scattered mass of material weighing only a few pounds but he would immediately pull it together, borrowing an existing shape, while counter-transferring dirt, dust or rubbish - anything in a high-entropy state. Kidnapping Valeria, he counter-transfers mass in her form, hence a changeling.

Army personnel sent to explore Hell returned after a few minutes in acute shock, unable to describe anything, and instruments recorded incoherent data. It is theorized that the space-time there is violently non-Euclidean with locally variable geometry.

In physical science, high entropy would mean no activity and certainly no complex organisms capable of consciousness, intelligence or motivation but clearly para-physical laws are different. In James Blish's The Day After Judgement, the sequel to his Black Easter, human characters speculate that full negative entropy would be eternal life.

If (I am extrapolating here) the universes of the "Operation..." timeline comprise a spectrum stretching from the full negative entropy of Heaven to the permanently high entropy of Hell and if, further, destructively motivated demons are the form naturally taken by consciousness in this version of Hell, then:

(i) this differs from the orthodox Christian belief that demons are rebellious creatures;

(ii) the "...Manichaean elements..." of "...the Johannine doctrine..." would seem to be more applicable.

(The Manichaean idea of diabolical creativity is an issue in James Blish's A Case Of Conscience, which comes after Doctor Mirabilis and Black Easter/The Day After Judgement in Blish's After Such Knowledge Trilogy.)

The Johnnies' Demands

Let us consider some of the demands of the Johannine demonstrators in Poul Anderson's Operation Chaos (New York, 1995), pp. 148-149:

(i) School courses in Gnostic philosophy and history. No, church and state should be separate.

(ii) Total income equalisation. Impossible in a market economy where commodities, including labour power, are sold at their value and trained labour power has a higher value.

(iii) The phasing out of materialism, hypocrisy and injustice. This cannot be legislated.

(iv) World peace and universal disarmament. This cannot be effected by any single government - but the present government could propose an international conference with these objectives.

(v) End the occupation of formerly hostile countries and spend the money on social uplift at home. Why not also spend it on social uplift in the formerly occupied countries?

(vi) Amnesty for rioters. To comment on this, we would need to know more about the circumstances of the riots. 

"Operation Changeling"

In Poul Anderson's Operation Chaos (New York, 1995), there is scientific proof of  "...Divinity...absolute evil, atonement, and an afterlife..." but God has many partial manifestations so the religious options include Petrine Christianity, Johannine Christianity, mainstream Islam, the Muslim Caliphate sect and Unitarianism. (p. 137)

Are there some timelines with a hereafter and others without? If someone born in a timeline without a hereafter dies in a timeline with a hereafter, does s/he then enter that hereafter?

Because paraphysical forces work in the "Operation..." timeline, the 1960's message of love is preached by the "Johnnies," the Johannine Church, who believe that the age of the Holy Spirit is beginning. Readers of the works of Anderson's fellow fantasy, hard sf and historical fiction writer, James Blish, will remember, from Blish's historical novel, Doctor Mirabilis,that Roger Bacon, the founder of scientific method, was imprisoned as a Joachist schismatic because he believed that the Age of the Spirit had begun in 1261, seven hundred years earlier.

Bacon is referred back to both in Blish's contemporary fantasy novel, Black Easter, and in his futuristic end of the universe novel, The Triumph Of Time. Thus, Bacon becomes a sort of unofficial patron saint of science, hard sf and those falsely accused of practicing magic. Blish and Anderson resonate on several levels, the biggest difference being Anderson's bigger output.

Operations Incubus, Changeling And Luna

Steve Matuchek and Virginia Graylock meet, become engaged and marry.

They dispose of an incubus/succubus on their honeymoon.

Their daughter Valeria is born.

At the age of three, Valeria is kidnapped/exchanged and has to be rescued from Hell.

Steve attempts telepathic contact with other timelines which may exist.

As a teenager, Valeria is the first person on the Moon in their timeline.

As a graduate student, she explores other timelines which are now known to exist.

In the Old Phoenix, the inn between the world, she helps other travellers, Holger Danske and Rupert of the Rhine.

Another series that we wish had continued...

"Operation Salamander"

Is the magic getting a bit implausible by the time we have read as far as Chapter IX of Poul Anderson's Operation Chaos (New York, 1995)? University Physical Sciences are housed in a "...grimy little..." building and nuclear physics is to be valued only because, e.g., it makes alchemy practical by preventing the unintended production of radioactive isotopes (pp.55-56).

In "...the goetic age...," a football match is a contest not of physical prowess but of the "...essentially intellectual..." Art (p. 58). Footballers levitate, change form - one even into a greased pig -, cast spells and counterspells, wear Tarnkappes and toss thunderbolts. One accidentally steps on a blown scorecard, piercing several of his opponents' names.

Clearly, this is not a football match. Fantasy and sf fans praise what we see as clever and logical implications deduced by the author from his initial premise. A guy I knew would have dismissed many of these implications as "tricks." Obviously, the fantasy of Operation Chaos is very different from that of the same author's Three Hearts And Three Lions or his A Midsummer Tempest. Three premises:

the Carolingian myths were true;
Shakespeare's plays were true;
magic works.

The first involves a very basic conflict between orderly civilization and a primordial destructiveness.
The second involves the modern conflict between immemorial forests and industrial factories.
The third involves "tricks"?

In fact, something else is going on beneath the surface of Operation Chaos but it is very abstract. In the untitled opening passage, Steve Matuchek refers to the trans-cosmic war between Law and Chaos, which we recognize from the Carolingian universe of Three Hearts And Three Lions. This is a "...strife...older than creation..." (p. 3)

Also, in Chapter IV, which was maybe added to the book version, Steve, rendered unconscious to the outside world, enters a void where he overhears a malevolent message or monologue. In Chapter XI, again rendered unconscious, he does not overhear but is addressed by "...absolute hate..." (p. 76). So there is an ultimate opponent of some sort but this is all very vague as yet.   

"Operation Afreet" III

The reader of Operation Chaos (New York, 1995) is surprised to realise (at least, I was) that the enemy had invaded the US so that the combat described in the opening chapters takes place not in Europe, Africa or Asia but at home. This is World War II but in an alternative timeline so details like where the conflict occurred can differ as well.

We learn of magical medical techniques:

sticking pins into model bacteria;
sympathetic operations on enlarged anatomical dummies;
looking at germs through a microscope with the Evil Eye!

Chapter VIII begins:

"Here we reach one of the interludes." (p. 48)

This must be an insert between the first two of the originally separate stories. We are in transition between "Operation Afreet" and "Operation Salamander." The War is winding down. Werewolf Steve Matuchek and witch Ginny Graylock are working towards getting married and thus becoming the parents of Valeria Matuchek who is already known to us if we have read the books in the wrong order. Steve plays the Wolf Man in horror films (he did mention acting experience earlier) but his real ambition is to become an engineer and to create an antigravity spell powerful enough for interplanetary travel. Forty three years after "Operation Afreet" was published in 1956, Operation Luna was published in 1999. Thus, this series spans Anderson's career.

"Operation Afreet" II

In Poul Anderson's Operation Chaos (New York, 1995), the neat touches continue -

The conservation of mass means that a big man becomes a big werebeast. Our hero's opponent is a very big tiger but at the expense of also being a monstrously fat man, so fat that he finds it convenient to enchant objects like a cigar and ash tray to fly towards him. A small werefox is a one foot dwarf as a man.

Crystal balls are used for intelligence gathering but can be jammed.

"Emir" has become military rank in the Caliphate that the US fights in World War II.

Under the Geneva Convention, a captured soldier is not obliged to divulge his real name because this would make it possible to cast name-spells on him. He can give an "...official johnsmith..." instead. (p. 29)

The Caliphate sect, described as "heretical" by an unspecified criterion, argues that the Prophet forbade wine but did not mention any other alcoholic drinks.

Korzybski's semantic theory is quoted as modifying the name-thing identity principle underlying magical spells but Virginia ("Ginny"), talking to an afreet unfamiliar with modern semantics can argue that she is, like him, a jinni because her name is Ginny.

Anderson simultaneously progresses his action-adventure narrative and continues to present bizarre ideas that are logical implications of his single premise.