Strange Horizons, September 2002

by Strange Horizons

  PS: What do you like about your writing?

  MFM: Oh, there's lots of things I hate about my writing, but what do I like about it? I think there are real nice moments in it. There are times I knew stuff that I'm really surprised that I knew. Insights into humanity.

  PS: Are those conscious decisions?

  MFM: No, I find them in the process of writing. I come to something and I say, “Oh I know,” and I write that. At the beginning of the first section of Nekropolis, the first line from the mother is, “All of my children are taller than I am.” I like that moment because it suggests a certain kind of pride. I have physically done well by my children, I have made sure they had enough to eat, that they grew strong. I liked finding that in her. It feels to me to ring true to an experience different from mine.

  I really fought putting a mother into Nekropolis. I wasn't going to because I was going to work with mothers in the next book. It's a good thing I did because the next book didn't pan out, so the fact that there's a mother in the center of Nekropolis is not a bad thing at all. And she is in the very middle of that, she's the exact middle, and I think she is a character who is more important than you first feel when you read the book. But that's the kind of thing I like in my stories, those moments of what I think are psychological acuity, although I could be deluding myself.

  PS: You often explore the idea of class, and notably those who are marginalized by the system, whether it be because of class, economic status, or gender identity.

  MFM: Science fiction and historical novels have this common problem. When you're writing a contemporary novel you don't have to explain how the gas pump works, which means that when you read Madame Bovary, unless you've been pretty educated you find a lot of it perplexing.

  PS: Which is why Norton annotates it.

  MFM: Yes, but they never annotate what I don't know. I want to know what they ate. But historical and science fiction have to create an understanding of the surroundings for the reader. Things that most fiction assumes, you can't. And one way to do that is to put an outsider in, so it's as strange for them as it is for the reader. They can naively describe.

  PS: That's a classic science fiction ploy.

  MFM: Absolutely. It's an old, old, old, old, old ploy. It's harder and harder to do without being cliché, so the kind of outside you pick has to get stranger and stranger.

  PS: It can no longer be the football quarterback on the rocketship with the professor and his daughter. “Gee, professor, what does this strange knob do?"

  MFM: Right, so now you can have a character who is pretending to be a boy, who notices all of the things the boys do, interacting with everyday stuff. Then I can describe the everyday stuff the boys are interacting with as well—the tents, the water pump, the way food is handed out in the refugee camp.

  PS: Do you have a more overtly political motive behind using the outsider?

  MFM: No. I think it's a cultural thing, and not just specific to science fiction. Our symbol of the Vietnam War is the P.O.W. Imagine that being the symbol of World War II. The P.O.W. is the guy who got captured. He's the victim. We equate victimhood with sainthood, and it occurred to me that victims were not necessarily saints, that they were just victims. In Nekropolis, I didn't want Hariba to be a good person as a result of being in restrictive circumstances. I wanted to show how restrictive circumstances can simply restrict you. I write about outsiders because I live in a culture that tends to think about outsiders as privileged, morally. The worst thing to be, in certain circumstances, is a straight, white male.

  PS: Could you say this about a gay character, though? Does a gay person have privilege in America? Certainly not the same way a veteran does.

  MFM: Oh no. No. But if you watch how gays are presented in the media, unless you watch Jerry Springer, they tend to be witty, wise, or they die. When we marginalize characters, we often make them into either martyrs or Yodas. But I don't think picking outsiders is a conscious choice on my part. It's partly from being influenced by the idea that outsiders are somehow interesting.

  PS: Do you want to riff on where the genre is and where it's going?

  MFM: I don't know any trends, exactly, but it seems to me we're losing control of the genre. If you think about when I was growing up, science fiction wasn't on television. Star Trek and Lost in Space were it. There were Twilight Zone and Outer Limits, but when I was a kid people believed those were horror. Now you have Buffy the Vampire Slayer and X-Files and Terminator 2.

  PS: I agree with you. People don't think of Terminator 2 as science fiction. Many people who go to that movie would never go see a science fiction film.

  MFM: At all. It's an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie. And there's some high literature that is science fiction influenced. I mentioned David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow sold as non-genre literature. And they go to another planet! So I think there might be developing a split between our science fiction and SF of the world. But I do think that science fiction is in the culture in a way that it wasn't forty years ago.

  PS: And what will science fiction be like forty years from now? In most visions of the future, we don't see what they think of as science fiction. Will it be science based, or sociological, or something we can't imagine?

  MFM: And what is a science fiction geek doing fifty years from now. What do they think will be the important future developments?

  PS: What do you think will be the consequence of mainstreaming science fiction?

  MFM: I think it might harden our conventions. You hear people say that mainstream writers reinvent the wheel when they write science fiction. People gripe about The Handmaid's Tale. I think that's a reaction to the fact that there's their stuff and there's our stuff. But I don't know. I have no clue. It's going to be an interesting ride.

  * * * *

  Pat Stansberry would like to call himself a writer, but he spends most of his time grading English essays. He teaches at Cleveland State University, edited Whiskey Island, the university's literary journal, co-directed the 2000 Imagination Conference, and teaches Imagination/2: Workshops for Beginning Writers, none of which helped him finish his long-uncompleted novel.

  Visit Maureen F. McHugh's Web site.

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  Spirits, Art, and the Fourth Dimension

  By Bryan Clair

  9/16/02

  In the mid-nineteenth century, Henry Slade of Albion, Michigan was notorious as an accomplished spirit medium. His séances and slate writing were sufficiently impressive that European nobles invited him to their courts, and it was on his tour of Europe in the 1870s that he convinced a handful of notable German scientists of the reality of the spirit world. Dr. J. C. F. Zöllner of Leipzig published an account of Slade's demonstrations in his 1878 book Transcendental Physics, arguing that the physical impossibilities must have been caused by spirit beings living in the fourth dimension.

  The 1881 Atlantic Monthly's humorously scathing review of his work says:

  One opens this work of Zöllner with great interest, in the expectation of something substantial and more edifying than the dreary accounts of table-tippings, and the insane conversations of great men who, entering into a Nirvana, have apparently forgotten all they learned in this world, and have nothing better to do than to move chamber furniture. Unfortunately, this hope is not realized.

  Nevertheless, Zöllner's book and the controversy it engendered led to a surge in popular interest in the fourth dimension that lasted well into the 20th century.

  So, what exactly did Slade do? Along with a torrent of slate writing, apparitions, and mysterious noises, he really got Zöllner's attention by causing knots to appear in a loop of cord, as shown below. Try this yourself, and you'll find it can only be done by unsealing the ends. Though the actual cord hung below the table, Zöllner observed the wax seal for the entire séance and was convinced by Slade's claim of spiritual intervention.

  Zöllner designed several physica
l challenges for Slade, to test his fourth dimension hypothesis. To understand the challenges (and how Slade's responses almost entirely fail to meet them), we need to first understand the fourth dimension.

  Mathematically, “dimension” refers to the number of coordinates needed to describe a point, or equivalently the degrees of freedom of motion in a space. A line is one-dimensional because a point in the line needs only one coordinate for its description. You could say “dang, there's a hundred people in front of me,” which describes very well your sorry position in line. As another example, the volume of sound is a one-dimensional concept. A particular volume needs only one number to describe it, possibly from the scientific decibel scale, or maybe on the stereo knob “turn it up to 10” scale.

  A two-dimensional space needs two numbers for each point. The flat, infinite plane from high-school geometry is the prime example, with each point given an x and a y coordinate. The surface of a sphere is also two-dimensional; for example, points on the Earth are described by longitude and latitude. Though we spend most of our days wandering the two-dimensional surface of the Earth, our space is in fact three-dimensional, which means we can move on three axes, North-South, East-West, and Up-Down. Describing points in space requires three coordinates: to spot an airplane, you need longitude and latitude, plus elevation.

  Question: What dimension is “color space"? That is, how many coordinates does it take to describe a color? (This is especially interesting because there are many different ways to describe color, yet all have the same number of coordinates!)

  The next step is the fourth dimension. Mathematically, it's no problem to define four-dimensional space, or “hyperspace.” It's just an abstract space that needs four coordinates to describe each of its points, which works very well for computations, but is not much help in visualization. Trying to think in four dimensions is a serious challenge, and requires a complicated collection of mental crutches to make any progress.

  The most effective crutch is the analogy with one lower dimension, a trick perfected in the novel Flatland, written by the 19th century minister E. A. Abbott. The book is the story of A. Square, who lives in a two dimensional world. Mr. Square describes his world, with some not-so-subtle criticism of Victorian society, and then is visited by a sphere from the third dimension.

  You can imagine a two dimensional being as an amoeba trapped in a microscope slide, or as an ink spot moving on a piece of paper. Often it's easier to picture him as very flat and living on the surface of a table. Let's use this analogy to explain Slade's feats of four-dimensional dexterity. Consider a challenge for a two-dimensional spiritual medium. We present him with a rubber band and a penny, and challenge him to put the penny inside the rubber band. You too, can play this game, but as a two-dimensional being you'll need to keep the penny and rubber band flat on a table at all times. Clearly, it can't be done. However, using the third dimension you can pick part of the rubber band off the table, slide it over the penny, and set it back down. The two-dimensional being would see part of the rubber band mysteriously disappear, then reappear on the other side of the penny.

  Question: How would a two-dimensional being know that the penny was actually inside the rubber band?

  Now, we have some of the tools to help us understand Slade's challenges. In further sittings, Slade's “spirits” caused rings of wood to disappear from a tabletop and reappear encircling the table's leg, caused burns to appear on pig intestines held below the table, and caused snail shells to teleport from table to floor.

  The rubber-band-and-penny thought experiment shows us exactly how Slade's rings-around-the-table trick could work, if the medium had access to the fourth dimension. He simply lifts “up” the ring into the fourth dimension, and sets it back “down” around the table. But putting rings around a table is not what Zöllner had challenged Slade to do! In fact, Slade was to link the two wooden rings to each other. The rings were of different woods, each carved from a single piece. Two such linked rings are physically impossible to create, so their existence alone would provide excellent evidence for the fourth dimension. Linking the table, though impressive, is possible to fake.

  So are Slade's other feats. His initial feat, tying knots in a closed loop of rope, could also be done with four dimensions: move part of the rope out of our three-dimensional space, move it across the other part of rope, then bring it back to this world. But Zöllner was obviously suspicious of the rope trick, because his second challenge to Slade was to tie a knot in a closed loop cut from a pig's bladder. Unlike the sealed loop of rope, which could be switched or tampered with, Slade had no way to create a knot in any continuous piece of pork. He had three choices: cut the loop and risk exposure, actually use the fourth dimension, or claim that the spirits weren't in the mood. Not surprisingly, he chose the latter.

  Slade's final feat was to teleport some snail shells. Again, the fourth dimension is a good way to do this sort of thing. You move the shell into the fourth dimension, move it where you want it to go, then drop it back into our prosaic three-space. The two-dimensional analogy should help make this clear, as a third-dimensional being could lift an object out of the plane, move it, and set it back down. But again, this was not what Zöllner had asked for. In fact, Zöllner's challenge to Slade was to take the snail shells, which had clockwise spirals, and turn them into snail shells with counterclockwise spirals.

  Way back in 1827, the mathematician Möbius, of “Möbius strip” fame, realized that a trip through the fourth dimension could turn an object into its own mirror image. To understand, we return to the two-dimensional analogy. Take a symbol which looks wrong in a mirror, such as an N, and cut it out of a piece of paper. If you set it down on a table, you'll find there's no way to turn the N into the backwards N just by sliding the paper around the tabletop. But if you allow yourself a third dimension, you can simply lift up the N, flip it over, and place it back on the table. The four-dimensional version works the same way. You could use the fourth dimension, for example, to turn a right shoe into a left shoe.

  Question: You could use the fourth dimension to turn a right glove into a left glove. But you can already do this by turning the glove inside out. What's the difference?

  In 1909, Scientific American held an essay contest to explain the fourth dimension, and many of the essays focused on mirror reversals. Isomeric chemicals such as dextrose and levulose (literally right- and left-handed sugars) were presented as evidence for the existence of the fourth dimension on the molecular scale, and one Zöllner enthusiast claimed that clockwise and counterclockwise snails are produced by a hyperspace reversal, right down to their “juices."

  H. G. Wells used the mirroring phenomenon in “The Plattner Story” of 1896, which is about a man who accidentally blasts himself a short distance into the fourth dimension. The man finds himself in a greenish world populated by spirits of departed humans, and can see faint images of the earthly realm overlaid on his new reality. After a week he manages to return home, but has become his own mirror image, as evidenced by photographs, his writing, and most impressively his heart, which now beats on the right side of his chest.

  “The Plattner Story” was not the only appearance of the fourth dimension in literature of the period. It is the science behind The Time Machine, and also the home for the angel that falls to Earth in A Wonderful Visit, Wells’ first two novels. It is jokingly referred to in Oscar Wilde's “Canterville Ghost” of 1887, about an English spirit who is snubbed by the new American owners of his ancestral manse. And Joseph Conrad's The Inheritors of 1901 is about four-dimensional humans, devoid of conscience, who assume control of the earth.

  Like many of the Victorians, I had my first exposure to the idea of the fourth dimension through science fiction, Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle In Time and its sequels. In these novels, Charles Wallace, Meg, and Calvin “tesser” between worlds, traveling through the fourth dimension. The word “tesser” means four, and shows up in the word “tesseract,” which is the four-dim
ensional analog of the cube.

  Question: There are two points on the segment, four segments on the square, and six squares on the cube. How many cubes should be on the hypercube?

  The tesseract, or “hypercube,” is the most accessible four-dimensional object, so it's worth trying to understand. We work by inductive reasoning, starting with a point, and dragging it to trace out a segment. Then, drag the segment to trace a square, and drag the square to trace a cube. The next step is to drag the cube in a fourth direction, perpendicular to all edges of the cube, resulting in a tesseract or “hypercube.” The last step, as usual, is difficult to imagine because it requires the fourth dimension. We get the flavor with some drawings:

  Using perspective, we can draw a cube a little differently. Doing a similar projection to the hypercube leads to the three-dimensional picture below. Your mind reconstructs the picture of a cube into a mental image of “cube” quite easily. Do the same with the hypercube, and you should have a pretty good three-dimensional image of a cube inside another, with corners connected by lines. However, this is only a picture of the hypercube, projected into our space using perspective. The smaller cube in the middle is smaller because it's further away, in that fourth direction. To get an even better feel for the hypercube, play with this moving stereographic image.

  Perspective images seem natural to us in part because we're used to looking at them, especially as photographs, and in part because our eye functions in a similar manner. But in fact, perspective results in tremendous distortion of images. Close objects are shown grotesquely large while distant objects become tiny. At the start of the 20th century, a group of painters led by Picasso and Braque led a crusade against traditional perspective. They argued not only that perspective destroys proportion, but that in fact we don't see like a camera—we see with two eyes, and our eyes move to understand a scene.