4D Reading List

Image: Gemma Anderson-Tempini, And She Built a Crooked House, Leeds, 2023. Photography by Jules Lister.

Edwin Abbott Abbott - Flatland

The classic novella and social satire about a world that mimics our own, Flatland depicts a world rendered in two dimensions, where its inhabitants are geometric shapes that take up social statuses and occupy a space that extends only in two dimensions.

Gemma Anderson-Tempini - Drawing as a Way of Knowing in Art and Science

Informed by Goethe's studies of morphology, this book by the artist behind And She Built a Crooked House explores the tried and tested ways in which drawing as a research practice and method and unveil insights into the morphological intricacies of the natural sciences, mathematics, and art. In collaboration with scientists working on cutting-edge research and inspired by the work of Paul Klee, Anderson-Tempini gives form to the breadth of natural processes as well as the shapes that exist beyond our three-dimensional world.

Mark Blacklock - Hinton

“Blacklock is leading us once again into the uneasy liminal space between fact and fiction.” - Nina Allan for the Guardian

This historical fiction about one of the foremost figures associated with the fourth spatial dimension is written by author Mark Blacklock, whose essay on And She Built a Crooked House situates the exhibition within the cultural history of higher-dimensional thinking. Following the often unconventional personal life of British mathematician and writer Charles Hinton, this novel entwines historical accuracy with vivid storytelling to tell the tale of four-dimensionality from a human perspective.

Robert A Heinlein - And He Built a Crooked House

The namesake of this exhibition, And He Built a Crooked House by celebrated science fiction author Robert A Heinlein, tells the tale of an architect inspired by the idea of a tesseract as the blueprint for a house he wants to build. What happens when three-dimensional beings enter into a fourth-dimensional building?

Stephen Hawking - A Brief History of Time

Understanding fourth-dimensional geometry fully requires a deep dive into the physics that weave together our physical reality. Luckily, for those of us who aren’t equipped to decipher complex mathematical theorems, A Brief History of Time offers a lucid overview of the cosmos intended for the layperson.

Lewis Carroll - Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

More than a century and a half ago, around the time when interest in mathematical concepts of higher dimensions was taking over Victorian England, this whimsical and oneiric story was published to wide acclaim, capturing the imaginations of children and adults alike. Having been adapted into blockbuster films since, the tale continues to entertain as it pushes its audiences to rethink the possible, where hyperspace and the secret nooks and crannies of the mind find correlation.

Hao Jingfang - Folding Beijing

This novella, which won the Hugo Award for Best Novelette in 2016, sets out a future society in Beijing that is segregated by class, and where space itself is divided into three. The city folds and unfolds to hide the spaces from one another, keeping populations underground during their “off” times. The protagonist, a waste worker by the name of Lao Dao who lives in the Third Space, is given the opportunity to earn a small fortune for himself and his daughter by smuggling a message into the Second Space. The folding of space and parallel realities is a theme that consistently surfaces in higher dimensional thinking, and Folding Beijing exemplifies how this type of spatial imagining can provide the framework for deeper societal analysis. 

Madeleine L'Engle - A Wrinkle in Time

A classic science fiction novel where readers encounter otherworldly beings and the dark forces of the universe, A Wrinkle in Time follows the adventures of a young girl named Meg Murry whose father has mysteriously disappeared. Central to the book are tesseracts, which we might know as the version of a cube that is fourth-dimensional. In A Wrinkle in Time, however, tesseracts are a method to travel through space. Whilst time is considered the fourth dimension in this book, a tesseract is the fifth dimension that allows one to traverse impossible distances instantaneously. An adventure through higher dimensional realities, this book offers a gripping way to explore the possibilities of the fourth spatial dimension.

Federico Campagna - Technic and Magic: The Reconstruction of Reality

Whilst many philosophers have explored the nature of reality throughout the centuries, Technic and Magic offers a way to rethink the rationalist approach to understanding existence. Just as Gemma Anderson-Tempini explores new approaches to knowledge through reconfiguring taxonomy or exploring possibilities beyond our three-dimensional reality through her artwork and artistic research, Campagna provides the framework for imagining a way to break through the rigid conventions that paint our epistemological reality.

Kurt Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse-Five

One of American author Kurt Vonnegut’s most famous novels, this darkly humorous and often existential satire follows the life of a man named Billy, who unwittingly becomes unstuck in time. War, aliens, the blurring between the all-too-real and not-quite-believable coupled with Vonnegut’s signature succinct writing makes this classic a beloved work of art decades after its initial publication. And the fact that Billy Pilgrim continually swings from one reality to another reminds us of the installation at Burton Grange, where minds are stretched beyond their earthly confines through playful interventions based in reality.

C.S. Lewis - The Chronicles of Narnia

We couldn’t complete this list without a nod to the original wardrobe through which a fantastical world beyond our imagination exists, when a wardrobe of similar function resides at And She Built a Crooked House. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe sees the four Pevensie children enter a wardrobe in a large house in the English countryside, through which danger, adventure, and glory await. Whilst the book series is not directly linked to the mathematical underpinnings of the fourth spatial dimension, themes of the extraordinary found within ordinary spaces and the existence of parallel universes remind us of the fertile ground for imagination that higher dimensional thinking can offer us.

H. G. Wells

One of the few authors who has been given the title Father of Science Fiction, stories by H. G. Wells occupy popular thought in the form of both classic novels and Hollywood films. Alive around the same time as Charles Hinton, there is evidence to suggest that Wells was influenced by Hinton’s writing and ideas, with overlaps in some of the themes of their writings. With over 50 novels and a wealth of other publications under his belt, themes of parallel universes and other worlds are a constant. One that reminds us most of the particularities of the 4th spatial dimension is the Time Machine, in which time becomes a dimension that simulates space, traversable given the right mechanics. 

Other books

There are countless other books that relate to the playful, scientific, and mind-expanding aspects of And She Built a Crooked House. We’ve included listed a few more, including those that have helped us understand the depths of the fourth spatial dimension, inspired the essays written for the exhibition, or pushed us to think further than the three-dimensional reality of our everyday:

George Batchelor - The life and legacy of G.I. Taylor

Mark Blacklock - The Emergence of the Fourth Dimension

Linda Dalrymple Henderson - The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art

Charles Howard Hinton - An Episode of Flatland: or How a Plane Folk Discovered the Third Dimension

Charles Howard Hinton - A New Era of Thought

Charles Howard Hinton - Stella and an Unfinished Communication: Studies in the Unseen

P. D. Ouspensky - Tertium Organum

Cabanne Pierre - Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp

Leonard Susskind - The Black Hole War

Johann Karl Friedrich Zöllner - Transcendental Physics

Want to contribute to this growing list? Join the conversation and let us know about the higher dimensional books you’ve been reading by posting your picks with hashtag #4DReadingList on either Instagram or X, and don’t forget to tag us.