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"Science fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything. We can't talk about science, because our knowledge of it is limited and unofficial, and usually our fiction is dreadful."
- Philip K. Dick
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| Tesseract House | ||
| A house built in the shape of a four-dimensional figure. |
Quintus Teal, California architect, liked to push the envelope. In this case, the envelope was the comfortably three-dimensional floor plan of the average house.
| Under Teal's impassioned heckling the tesseract house was built in days rather than weeks, and its cross shapped second story came jutting out at the four corners of the world...
[Then, after driving up with clients to look at the finished house - after a small California earthquake...] Teal turned from their faces to the house. Gone was the crazy tower with its jutting second-story rooms. No trace remained of the seven rooms above ground floor level. Nothing remained by the single room that rested on the foundation... "Let's go on up..." He touched another button; a mate, in deeper colors, to the fairy bridge that had let them up from below offered them access to the next floor. They climbed it... and found themselves in the master bedroom. Its shades were drawn, as had been those on the level below, but the mellow lighting came on automatically. Teal at once activated the switch which controlled still another flight of stairs, and they hurried up into the top-floor study. ...They climbed a fourth flight of stairs, but when the cover at the top lifted to let them reach the level above, they found themselves, not on the roof, but standing in the ground-floor room where they had entered the house. |
| Technovelgy from -And He Built A Crooked House,
by Robert Heinlein. Published by Street and Smith in 1940 Additional resources -
|
From the original publication of this story, here is the scene in which the residents look out the window... to see themselves looking out the window.
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'The crawling... object was V-Stephen's surgeon-hand...'
'Joe got out the gravity-simulator harnesses...'
'You couldn't have the capstone without the pyramid to hold it up.'
'the unobtrusive inspections with tiny remote-cast snoopers...'
I'm hoping that this procedure becomes a normal part of medical practice!
'... nothing was perfected until M. Pantalon announced the completion of his automatic valet.'
'...its streets were of remarkable width, with few or no buildings so high as mosques, churches, State-offices, or palaces in Tellurian cities.'
