• jerkface@lemmy.ca
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    4 months ago

    I know this post’s title as the title of an old science fiction short story I read as a kid 35 years ago (it was already old! you be quiet) about a guy who builds his house as an unfolded tesseract net of cubes, but then there is an earthquake and the house folds itself along the fourth dimension and it becomes an actual hypercube, with the inhabitants lost and confused inside.

    But I wonder now if that story’s title was already a reference to something else? Or do other people know that story?

    • Justas🇱🇹OP
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      4 months ago

      I am referencing that story and it’s Wikipedia page says:

      “‘—And He Built a Crooked House—’”[a] is a science fiction short story by American writer Robert A. Heinlein, first published in Astounding Science Fiction in February 1941.[1] It was reprinted in the anthology Fantasia Mathematica (Clifton Fadiman, ed.) in 1958, and in the Heinlein collections The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag in 1959 and The Best of Robert Heinlein in 1973. The story is about a mathematically inclined architect named Quintus Teal who has what he thinks is a brilliant idea to save on real estate costs by building a house shaped like the unfolded net of a tesseract. The title is paraphrased from the nursery rhyme “There Was a Crooked Man”.

    • jerkface@lemmy.ca
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      4 months ago

      Oh, it’s Heinlein, yeah, I guess maybe a few other people have read it…

      • pixelmeow@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        In case you haven’t come back to the post, the story is by Robert Heinlein with the (almost) same title as the post.