![]() ![]() The Time Machine by HG Wells The fourth dimension was a mechanical element in many of Wells’s early fictions, including The Invisible Man, The Wonderful Visit and the short stories The Remarkable Case of Davidson’s Eyes and The Plattner Story. It is an early example of the potentials offered to fantastic fiction by the idea of an extended dimensional space, often accessed through portals. This ingenious nested narrative probably provides a blueprint for HP Lovecraft’s The Dreams in the Witch House. Journals reveal that they have become drawn into a melancholy painting that hangs on the wall of an attic room, providing access to a higher dimensional space. The Hall Bedroom by Mary Wilkins Freeman A series of guests at a boarding house disappear. A Square continued a correspondence with his critics in journals of the period.Ģ. It is quietly and blindingly radical, occupying a curious position between fantasy, children’s book and social satire. ![]() Narrated by A Square, who through his encounters with a sphere gains access to our own three-dimensional spaceland, Flatland describes a rigidly segregated and hierarchical society. Flatland by Edwin Abbott One of the great underrated novels: an 1884 satire of 19th-century gender politics and the pitfalls of analogical reasoning, realised by imagining a world limited to two dimensions. The ideas of higher dimensions structure it and run through it as metaphorical machinery, while it draws on a canon of what might thought of as fourth-dimensional fiction.ġ. My novel Hinton uses his astonishing life to recreate for the reader some of these experiences. And because it is mathematically sound it disturbs what we think might be real. It disturbs standard, linear spacetime and allows an excessively intimate proximity that can be either utopian or terrifying, depending on your perspective. The extended space can turn three-dimensional objects inside out. Only a novel could begin to get at some of the wilder imaginings prompted by an imagined extra dimension. I have written about the cultural history of the fourth dimension wearing my mortar board but felt that this approach to the idea was incomplete. ![]()
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