Racconti scientifici

Hinton has almost reached obscurity. Being no less mysterious than his works, biographical directories ignore this author. To help our imagination accept a four-dimensional world, in the first story of this book Hinton presents an environment that is no less fictitious, but with a more feasible access: a two-dimensional world. He does so with such painstaking and unflagging probity that following him can be arduous, despite the scrupulous diagrams that complement the exposition. Hinton is no storyteller, he is a solitary ratiocinator who instinctively takes refuge in an all-reliable speculative world, since he is its creator and source. In the pages his Scientific Romances (1888) he sought a narrative form. His secret geometry was intimately connected with his rigorous morality which emerges in The Persian King, the second story in this book, which recalls the A Thousand and One Nights pattern of play, which ultimately is a parable of the universe, not without some inevitable foray into the mathematical realm.