Scientific narratives
The book Scientific stories ( Scientific Romances ) consists of three short stories of the British mathematician Charles Howard Hinton to the fantastic literature or early science fiction can be counted. In the book are the stories A flat world ( "A Plane World") What is the fourth dimension? ("What is the Fourth Dimension?") And The King of Persia . The scientific stories appeared in the collection of fantastic literature compiled by Jorge Luis Borges , Die Bibliothek von Babel, and were published in a translation by Angelika Hildebrand into German in 1983 when this series was published in Edition Weitbrecht . In 2007 a new edition was published in the Gutenberg Book Guild . The original English version was published by Swan Sonnenschein & Co between 1884 and 1886, but without The King of Persia .
A flat world
In A Flat World , Hinton describes a world that has only two dimensions. He describes what life would be like for the inhabitants of this world and what problems they would have to master.
What is the fourth dimension?
In the story what is the fourth dimension? Hinton describes time as the fourth dimension . This idea was taken up by Albert Einstein in his theory of relativity .
The King of Persia
In The King of Persia, a king finds himself in a valley with strange inhabitants: they can only move with pain and therefore quickly become apathetic. With a sophisticated mechanism, the king can relieve them of some of the pain, thus getting them moving and building a kingdom in the valley. Due to the special nature of his subjects, he is constantly faced with new physical problems, which he mostly knows how to solve.
criticism
“ Hinton has its secure place in literary history. His Scientific Romances were created earlier than HG Wells' dark fantasy. The title clearly anticipates the apparently inexhaustible flood of science fiction literature that is inundating our century "
expenditure
- Scientific stories in the Weitbrecht edition , 1983, ISBN 3-522-71100-9
- Scientific stories in the Gutenberg Book Guild , 2007, ISBN 978-3-7632-5810-9
Web links
- [1] Hinton's writings in English