Charles Howard Hinton (1853–1907)

Despite name and date this is not apparently related to the more famous [b:Flatland|433567|Flatland A Romance of Many Dimensions|Edwin A. Abbott|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1435435775l/433567._SY75_.jpg|4243538] book. Its also rather terrible, however its still more interesting than a lot of stuff i’ve read so i’m going to give it a low 3-stars.

Some problems include:
The narrator does not interact in anyway with the story.
Its set in a two-dimensional world but a lot of scenes are impossible to imagine working in two-dimensions.
It has an insipid love story stuck in it.
It often uses a very conversational style, a sort of witty repartee, that's really hard to pull off successfully in any book frankly.
Its philosophising only rarely works.

But its main problem is related to that old adage, ‘don’t put a cannon on stage in the first act unless your going to fire it in the final act’. This story has an entire armada of cannons NONE of which go off.
Or to put that plainer, this book sets up a lot of plots and none of them pay off.

Still, on the upside its got a lot of interesting ideas. The whole thing feels quite dystopian to start with, then breaks into a kind of environmental disaster film with sci-fi undertones.

The main premise (which to reiterate goes no where, but still) is that the world is threatened by catastrophe and the only scientist who can save it, is ignored by the politicians and his fellow scientists.
So he’s forced to turn to the church and use its power to save people from themselves.

There are a lot of cool ways that plot could have gone..... and then it didn’t ;) .

Made available by the Merril Collection.… (mais)

Para ayudar a nuestra imaginación a aceptar un mundo de cuatro dimensiones, Hinton, en el primer relato de este libro, propone un ámbito no menos ficticio, pero de acceso más posible: un mundo de dos. Lo hace con una probidad tan minuciosa y tan infatigable que seguirlo suele ser arduo, pese a los escrupulosos diagramas que complementan la exposición.
The Persian King, el tercer relato de este libro, que al principio parece ser un juego a la manera de Las Mil y Una Noches es, al fin, una parábola del universo, no sin alguna inevitable incursión a las matemáticas.
Hinton tiene un lugar asegurado en la historia de la literatura. Sus Scientific Romances son anteriores a las sombrías imaginaciones de Wells. El mismo título de la serie prefigura de manera inequívoca el oleaje, al parecer inagotable, de obras de science-fiction que han invadido nuestro siglo.… (mais)

"But I thought, Stella, that the forbidden tree was the tree of knowledge."
     "That was Adam's tree, Hugh! There were two trees in the garden of Eden, a big one for Adam, and a smaller one near it for Eve. Her tree was the tree of being seen and known. When she ate that kind of fruit, she became visible, she was no longer as she was meant to be." (32)

This book contains two novellas by Charles Hinton, a mathematician who coined the word "tesseract." The first, "Stella," is the reason I read it, a story of scientific invisibility that predates H. G. Wells's The Invisible Man (1897). Michael Graham is our man of science, but it's kind of borderline as an inclusion in my project, because 1) we never actually see his point-of-view, as he's dead by the time the story begins, and 2) I don't think he's ever actually described as a scientist or a man of science.

Spoilers head, though this is one of those books you won't see much of a reason to read if you don't know some of them. Graham was actually a philosopher trying to figure out how to create altruistic people; he determined that adults cannot be adapted to new moral codes because their minds formed around old ones, and it's even difficult to raise children because the environment of society will impose itself on them (23). So he decided to raise a child in absolute secret. His theory became that he needed to find out what the soul did when the most fundamental self-regarding impulses were denied (48). For boys, that's taking things, but for girls, that's being seen. It's impossible to stop a boy from wanting things (because then he will die), but it is possible to stop a girl from being seen if you adjust her index of refraction! So he raised a girl named Stella from birth in a state of invisibility.

The book is narrated by Hugh "Steddy" Stedman Churton, a lawyer sent to wind up Graham's affairs. While staying in Graham's old house, he meets and falls in love with Stella; eventually, Stella is kidnapped by a medium looking to use her to enhance his bogus seances.

It's a strange book, but a very enjoyable one. There's a certain weird logic to Graham's ideas, and Hinton is surprisingly good at depicting the tension between different ideas; this isn't one of those Victorian books where someone expounds a theory and you're clearly meant to take their side. Graham's ideas are weird, of course, but Churton's insistence that Stella needs to be visible and marry him feels very small-minded. He's unwilling to open himself up to the strange possibilities that the universe has to offer beyond our dimension, and he clearly doesn't value women when he can't see how attractive they are. Additionally, though the novella is obviously exploring the way women need to be seen, I don't Churton ever recognizes his need to be seen, but he definitely has one too.

The novella is only 107 pages long, and I zipped through it in a couple sittings. I think it helps that Hinton clearly has a sense of humor and of adventure. The joke on p. 105 made me laugh aloud.

There are some other men of science in the book, too. Frank Cornish is Churton's friend and Graham's nephew who gets an M.D., but spends his time researching, not in medical practice; he helps Churton figure out some of the science behind Stella's invisibility. There's also "Professor C——", a chemist who helps Churton track down Stella. Churton gets Professor C—— to help him because of his love of experiments; Churton says, "he possessed in a marked degree that ardour for experiment which becomes a second nature with scientific men" (61). However, there's one point where Churton and Professor C—— probably could have rescued Stella earlier but C—— wastes time asking her questions about coefficients (65).

I don't think it will make it into my project, because the science is mostly, well, invisible, but it will make it onto my list. Thanks to Elizabeth L. Throesch's book on Hinton for alerting me to its existence.

Additionally, the book contains another novella by Hinton, "An Unfinished Communication," about a man who goes to see an "unlearner." It starts out funny, with some good jokes, but quickly becomes ponderous, and I stopped putting the work into figuring out what was going on.… (mais)

Flatland by Edwin A. Abbott is one of my favorite books. It harbored in me, early on, a liking of mathematics. And since it’s in the public domain, so many books, movies, and other adaptations have been made to at least reference it in part.

I’ve made it one of my goals to track down and read as many of the books that are in some part inspired by Abbott’s Flatland, which is how I came across Charles Howard Hinton’s An Episode of Flatland.

Don’t be confused, this does not take place in the same Flatland, but in a world called “Astria,” which, as opposed to Abbott’s flatland, which has a north, east, south, and west, but no up and down, has instead east, west, up, and down, but no north and south. If you’re confused, imagine a side-scrolling video game.

I initially had high hopes for this book, as Hinton had written extensively on mathematics and a higher dimensions, acting as a co-inspirator with Abbott on extradimensional thinking. He does a great job of introducing a two-dimensional world, albeit not perfectly, and goes to extra lengths to make the physiology, history, and culture of the people well known to the reader before delving in and letting us live out their lives. However, I found that after we got over the neat aspects of the world, particularly its two-dimensionality, all this was soon forgotten in the prose, giving a story in which regular people seem to have simply forgotten about that third-dimension.

Having been spoiled, I suppose, on books that take pains to develop their two-dimensional worlds, including the necessary technology like oxygen tanks in every room with a door, I found Hinton’s adherence to these laws a bit lax, or at least his efforts to maintain a somewhat believable two-dimensional world were not as important as the story he was trying to tell.

In the end, the book reads more like any other early 20th centure book that deals with the social problems of the day, and, I suppose that’s not so bad. For setting his book in a two-dimensional world, the characters are anything but, having depth, history, prejudices, and the like.

I suppose, my only complaint is that I went into it expecting something like Flatterland, The Planiverse, or Sphereland, and instead got a story in which people couldn’t turn to their right or their left.… (mais)