Poul Anderson, Lobachevsky and Boylai

In a post below,  I mentioned that I thought "incunabula" had something to do with Satan, and our dear reader George gently reminded me that I was was probably thinking of "incubus".   George was right and he also notes that the two words are not cognates.  


First of all we have the most knowledgeable readers.

Second, George's reminder took me back to when I first encountered the word in a novella by Poul Anderson (a science fiction and fantasy writer) called Operation Incubus.  I read it a long time ago (1971 or thereabout, which was surprising because I wasn't even born yet.)  (OK, that part isn't true but am I really that old?)  That story was contained in a larger book called Operation Chaos, which has three other novellas with the same main characters -- a married husband and wife team, the husband a werewolf and the wife a witch, in an alternative universe, fighting the forces of Satan.

One aspect of the story involved the mathematicians Lobachevsky and Boylai, both of whom independently invented (discovered?) non Euclidean geometry, and if memory serves, Boylai appeared as a cat and needed to help the couple travel through the non Euclidean geometry of Hell to recover their baby in order to get into Heaven -- Lobachevsky had made it but Boylai, who had committed suicide in real life, could only get in if he finished his task here on Earth.

I still remember parts of the book so many years later, and, like the scent of madelines, George's post brought it all flooding back, even the old comfortable Bala Library where I first read the book.

If I had that memory about every other book I read, or for that matter the little I learned about non Euclidean geometry in school, I would be ruling the world about now.

Maybe it's a good thing I can't remember all that...