More on Setting: Height, Width, Depth, and…?

[Image at right: artist's rendering of a four-dimensional hypercube, or tesseract]

Walter Tevis, who died in 1984, was the author of several popular novels made into very successful movies: The Hustler, The Color of Money, and The Man Who Fell to Earth. But he began his career writing straight-up science fiction. Among his earliest stories was “The Ifth of Oofth,” originally published in Galaxy Science Fiction magazine in 1957 and anthologized numerous times thereafter.

In the story, the narrator visits a friend of his named Farnsworth. The latter has constructed a little doohickey of a gizmo which he wants to share, and hands it to the narrator:

The thing, upon examination, appeared simple: a more or less cross-shaped construction of several dozen one-inch cubes, half of them of thin, transparent plastic, the other half made of thin little sheets of aluminum. Each cube seemed to be hinged to two others very cunningly and the arrangement of them all was somewhat confusing.

Finally, I said, “How many cubes?” I had tried to count them, but kept getting lost.

“Sixty-four,” he said. “I think.”

“You think?”

“Well–” He seemed embarrassed. “At least I made sixty-four cubes, thirty-two of each kind; but somehow I haven’t been able to count them since. They seem to… get lost,or shift around, or something.”

While they’re talking about the object, one thing leads to another and they end up dropping it:

Farnsworth made a grab for it, apparently beside himself, and the gesture was so sudden that I drew back. It made Farnsworth miss his grab and the little object flew from my hands and hit the floor, solidly, on one of its corners. There was a slight bump as it hit, and a faint clicking noise, and the thing seemed to crumple in a very peculiar way. And sitting in front of us on the floor was one little one-inch cube, and nothing else.

(I’ll let you read the story for yourself if you’d like — I was delighted to find a PDF version online, and I’ve brought it here to RAMH for safekeeping.)

Got that so far? The two characters started out with 64 cubes, fastened together along their edges in a peculiar way. When they drop the cubes on the floor, all 64 cubes collapse inwardly into a single cube.

The idea which Tevis plays with in this story is the notion of a universe with more than the conventional three dimensions of space. By now, it’s common wisdom that a fourth should be added — time — but Farnsworth calls the fourth dimension ifth. There’s also a fifth dimension (which has nothing to do with the singing group of the 1970s-80s), dubbed by Farnsworth oofth… and so on, up to 64 dimensions (although he doesn’t name any others). The cube which he and the narrator end up with is not a conventional three-dimensional cube, but a 64-dimension one.

Just think about a story’s setting. It exists in three dimensions, of course: a geographic location, a terrain, perhaps one or more buildings and one or more rooms, within which the characters and objects exist in spatial relationships to other characters and objects.

Now expand that further. Add a fourth dimension, time — or call it ifth if you’d like. So now Character X may be said to stand, oh, six feet northwest of Character Y, and on the floor directly beneath Character Z… but furthermore, X is standing there a certain number of units of ifth (say, four days) away from Y and Z. (Maybe X is a homicide detective who’s been called in after the crime, trying to reconstruct the places and events of earlier in the week.) I guess with the “ifth” dimension added, now we’ve got a story line: a plot. Pick the story up. Heft it. And next: drop the story on the floor. Click. A single object. Four dimensions. With me so far?

You know what’s coming next, don’t you?

Right: oofth.

So you tell me. Is oofth, oh, say… is it character development? theme? language/style? POV?

Are there sixty-four possible dimensions to a complete story? If you could somehow magically unfold everything from that one box, how many types of relationships might exist between any pair of objects, ideas, characters, events?

And — perhaps most importantly — how many dimensions can you juggle at once? Do you find them easier to juggle one at a time, or do you prefer to fold them inwardly and toss them back and forth in a single solid N-dimensional package?