Dangerous Dimensions: Mind-Bending Tales of the Mathematical Weird

Henry Bartholomew (ed)
British Library Tales of the Weird

Unlike the Gothic, which tends to fixate on the past, the haunted, and the ghostly, early weird fiction tends to probe, instead, the very boundaries of reality, exploring the laws and limits of time, space, and matter. This new collection assembles a range of tales from the late 19th and early 20th century that showcase weird fiction’s unique preoccupation with physics, mathematics, and mathematicians. From tales of the fifth dimension and higher space, to impossible mathematics and mirror worlds, these stories draw attention to one of the genre’s founding inspirations—the quest to explore what "reality" means, where its limits lie, and how we cope when we near the answers.

'Mind-Bending Tales of the Mathematical Weird' is an audacious subtitle for a book which one would imagine may deter more potential buyers than it would entice and I would probably put myself, mostly, in the former camp.  However I'm not entirely averse to having my brain boggled and the presence of a favourite Algernon Blackwood story that I hadn't read in a while was enough to get me to take a chance.  Indeed, Blackwood's playful John Silence story 'A Victim of Higher Space' along with the mirror dimensions of his 'The Pikestaffe Case' were the only stories here I already knew and it was fun to revisit them but even more so to have so many new things to try.

The rest of the collection plays fast and loose with time and geography in entirely entertaining ways and has many standouts including the infinite shelves of Jorge Luis Borges' 'The Library of Babel', Robert Heinlein's tesseract architecture '-and He Built a Crooked House -', the pulp romps of Frank Belknap Long's cosmic 'The Hounds of Tindalos' and Henry S. Whitehead & H.P. Lovecraft's 'The Trap'.  But alongside these are six more tales, including by such notables as H.G. Wells and John Buchan, and a fascinating introduction deserving of equal praise in what proved to be an entirely engrossing collection.  Now what are the odds of that.

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