Victorian society seems to be a preferred metaphor and target for scientifically and technologically inclined writers who strive to express social and cultural critique. Meanwhile I have finished “The Diamond Age, or: The Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer” (↵Stephenson 1996 [1995])—that second generation cyberpunk-tale wherein the Neo-Victorians feature so prominently. Both emotionally and intellectually I really enjoyed following artifex John Percival Hackworth through the post-nation-state-collapse, retro-tribalized, nano-tech infected near-future universe created by Neal Stephenson. But now I again am in savant Edward “Leviathan” Mallory’s company, enjoying—and co-suffering—his adventurous path through a Victorian alternate reality dominated by what might have been the societal consequences of Charles Babbage’s difference engine. That means I resumed my reading of Gibson & Sterling’s collaborative steampunk-novel of the same name (↵Gibson & Sterling 1991). In the respective context of the two novels ‘savant’ denominates the highest order of scholars, ‘artifex’ the highest order of engineers. A person thus attributed is a member of the aristocracies of said noble arts & crafts. The individual going by the adequate pseudonym—I dare not say nickname’—↑Seifert Surface is both a savant and an artifex. A graduate student of three dimensional topology and geometry at Stanford who creates experiencable mathematical conundrums in the virtual world of Second Life. Inspired by ↑Robert A. Heinlein‘s short story ↑“And He Built a Crooked House” (Heinlein 1940) he has created a house being a tesseract, which can be visited, toured, and experienced by the players within Second Life. “What’s a tesseract?” “Didn’t you go to school? A tesseract is a hypercube, a square figure with four dimensions to it, like a cube has three, and a square has two. Here, I’ll show you.” (Heinlein 1940) No, I won’t show you—please see the Wikipedia-entry ↑Tesseract and/or the article ↑Dimensionality at the University of Winnipeg. Via the latter article I learned about ↑Edwin A. Abbott‘s (1838-1926) satirical novel ↑“Flatland: A romance of Many Dimensions” (Abbott 1884), another inspiration to cyberpunk writers, especially to ↑Rudy Rucker—by the way, in many of Rucker’s books hypercubes and all kinds of multi-dimensional space and structures star prominently … ↑tesseracts in art and literature. Anyway, Abbott’s novel can be seen as a classical example of mathematical fiction, the author trying to help us understand the idea of dimensions through the fictional example of visiting a world with only two spatial dimensions. But there is way more to it, as “Flatland” is a story that can be ↑interpreted in several ways:
 

See also ↑Thomas F. Banchoff‘s ↑From Flatland to Hypergraphics. And now for the feedback-twist: ↑Mr. Surface describes what was still to do once he had figured out how to build the tetracube-house within Second Life’s gamespace: “From there, it was mostly a matter of creating the human-sized version, building a 19th century era interior with textures and furniture […]“ [emphasis mine]
 

initially via entry at boingboing