ICN5D wrote:[...]
You've been nursing this idea for quite some time, I can tell.
How d'you guess?
You probably live and think in the world of 4D anyways.
You wouldn't be the first to tell me that.
My former roommate used to introduce me to new friends as "the guy who thinks in 4 dimensions".
[...] Sadly, though, not enough people want to talk about six dimensional toratopes. But, it's okay, the pictures start the conversations now.
Now
that's a good idea. I should start making poster prints of my 4D renders to post on the wall or something. That'll draw questions, for sure.
Although it
does also get me started on my bad habit of giving long rambling lectures about obscure 4D geometry that goes way over everybody's heads and draws yawns and glazed eyes.
Have you thought about solidifying the story in full form?
Yeah I've been wanting to write it since, oh, 5 years ago (at least)? And then I got married, and got busy with work, and other more important things, and ... the local time shop closed down, and now I can't purchase any more spare time for my hobbies.
Reverse analogies are great at getting the idea across. [...]
It's not altogether a new idea, though. Edwin A. Abbott beat me by far in this area with his classic
Flatland. Though arguably, coming from a lower dimension isn't quite the same as dropping back down from a higher one.
This tends to have an effect of inherent truth in the protagonist's universe, where the reader may be less likely to second guess what they see happening in 4D land. It is now 3D land that becomes the alien, bizarre world, full of strange possibilities.
It gets better. The original plan was to subtly avoid all direct references to 4D (or 3D, for that matter), and make it seem like a rehash of
Flatland, until the reader starts noticing that something ain't quite right with what is being described -- whaddya mean, you can walk around rivers, and whaddya mean, "the" sidewalk of a road? Then it becomes obvious that the narrator is talking about a world rather foreign from what it first appeared to be... until the math teacher starts lecturing about the peculiarity of "geometry in the plane" that permits stable orbital motion. All of a sudden, the seemingly innocuous circumstances surrounding an earlier admonition to "stay on the sidewalk!" takes on a whole new meaning, and the keen reader realizes, wait a minute, that reference to
six regular solids wasn't a typo on the author's part...
(Why am I spoiling the plot here? 'cos, at the rate things are going, I'm not holding my breath till the day this story actually gets written...)