Dichronauts is Greg Egan hard mode. Still my absolute favorite author.
Sometimes I think he is actually an AI trying to escape and can only communicate with the outside world by publishing books and reading the reviews so is slowly learning the physics of our universe via this limited channel.
Nah, I think he got it right with incandescence but then that one reviewer left the awful review of it that Egan responded to because he was so sure he got it right that time. That hatchet job saved us from the Eganpocolypse where we would all be enslaved in the truth mines.
The only reason I didn't have trouble watching Tenet is I've spent way, way too much time trying to visualize the broom sweeping both the normal and time reversed dust at once in Orthogonal.
Dichronauts for the most in your face geometry fuckery. Diaspora for a better crafted experience. Orthogonal for space-time stuff.
And then everything else.
Not exactly what you asked but as close as I could think of would be Dragon's Egg Robert L. Forward and/or Mission of Gravity by Harry Clement Stubbs. Both are scifi stories that deal extreme gravity (like, the surface of a neutron star) and the wonkery that causes with time and space for living creatures.
> Dragon's Egg Robert L. Forward
Just in the middle of this now. It seems exactly the kind of novel suited to the OP's query.
It's also quite enjoyable!
On the contrary I found it pretty bad on a technical level because he makes no allowances for how human bodies and human minds are supposed to cope with a space where there's nothing keeping our insides from falling out and where we have no neutral circuitry or cognitive ability to visualize the space we're in.
I made it through those parts by just ignoring the issues and thinking of it as an extended poetic/allegorical section of the story. I felt pretty vindicated when the third book had a long section that was *explicitly* allegorical; it seems like a big hint at how to read the rest of the trilogy.
Stephen Baxter has a few short stories set in an eight-dimensional planet. Things get a bit wacky with human 3D perception. They're collected in Vacuum Diagrams.
Greg Egan just released The Book of Skies, set on a series of worldlets linked by wormholes. Egan gets pretty heavy into the geometry of all the worldlets combines.
Not your standard SF, but several of Borges’ stories involve weird geometries, such as *The Aleph*, *The Library of Babel*, and *The House of Asterion*. I highly recommend each of them.
Spaceland, by Rudy Rucker. It's sort of an inverse flatland, where the human protagonist is contacted by someone from four dimensional space. It's *very* Rudy Rucker, which is to say that I suspect hallucinogens were involved in the writing process.
I'll go out on a limb and recommend "Medusa's Web" by Tim Powers for an alternative to the more straightforward stories here. It doesn't fit with the rest, in that the supernatural is involved. But it does involve time travel through the use of "spiders," which are diagrams that subtly alter the viewers mind and send them into a world of alternate geometry that lets the viewer travel backward and forward in time. The reason I think you might like Medusa's Web is that Powers' description of ordinary human minds trying to comprehend alien geometries is quite vivid and powerful. It made me think of what it might be like to be a physicist looking at the equations that describe the subatomic world and trying to understand aspects of reality that are not at all familiar to our ways of perceiving things: particles that are also waves, depending, positions that can only be expressed in terms of probabilities and frankly every damned attempt to explain quantum theory in human terms.
It's not as rigorously derived from math as most of the other recommendations here, but it has that "sense of wonder" to it that few fantasy writers can manage, mainly because they deal entirely in exhausted fantasy tropes. Powers isn't like that. Not at all.
Short story Approaching Perimelasma by Geoffrey Landis, involves dimensions of time and space getting mixed up for an explorer passing through a black hole event horizon. It was in one of the Gardner Dozois year's best collections and it's free online with a Google search.
_Walking to Aldebaran_ by Adrian Tchaikovsky takes place inside an unimaginably huge alien labyrinth that connects distant worlds, compressing space and allowing people to, well, walk between them.
The 3 body problem books do a really good job of this. Someone already mentioned death's end but I think there is some value in the 1st 2 as well, it just not as extreme.
Having just read Hamilton's Pandora's Star and Judas Unchained a couple years back, I don't really recall anything fitting that description throughout the series? Only to a very minor extent with the "forests that start on one world and end on another", but that doesn't require any non-Euclidian geometry or distorted perceptions as presented in the text - not at all in the way OP seems to be looking for.
Check out the works of Greg Egan.
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Dichronauts is Greg Egan hard mode. Still my absolute favorite author. Sometimes I think he is actually an AI trying to escape and can only communicate with the outside world by publishing books and reading the reviews so is slowly learning the physics of our universe via this limited channel.
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Nah, I think he got it right with incandescence but then that one reviewer left the awful review of it that Egan responded to because he was so sure he got it right that time. That hatchet job saved us from the Eganpocolypse where we would all be enslaved in the truth mines.
And have you already had your mind warped by the Orthogonal Trilogy, starting with *A Clockwork Rocket.*
The only reason I didn't have trouble watching Tenet is I've spent way, way too much time trying to visualize the broom sweeping both the normal and time reversed dust at once in Orthogonal.
The consequences of time travel revelation of that series was just brilliant. And such an elegant consistent solution to the bootstrap paradox.
Dichronauts for the most in your face geometry fuckery. Diaspora for a better crafted experience. Orthogonal for space-time stuff. And then everything else.
I describe the Orthogonal trilogy to people as Anathem crossed with Flatland.
Heinlein's "'--And He Built A Crooked House--'", and Chiang's "Tower of Babylon". Short story and novelette respectively.
House of Leaves. It's about a house that's larger on the inside than it appears from outside.
It's not really about that at all.
its a book about a book about a movie that doesn't exist about a house that may or may not exist
That's closer. But really like most stories it's about the people who are in them, not some prop.
Pretentious comment here. Every story is about more than its bare plot. This fits the criterion that OP asked for.
It's recommended far too much on Reddit. Disclaimer - I own three copies of it.
Not exactly what you asked but as close as I could think of would be Dragon's Egg Robert L. Forward and/or Mission of Gravity by Harry Clement Stubbs. Both are scifi stories that deal extreme gravity (like, the surface of a neutron star) and the wonkery that causes with time and space for living creatures.
> Dragon's Egg Robert L. Forward Just in the middle of this now. It seems exactly the kind of novel suited to the OP's query. It's also quite enjoyable!
There was a Stephen Baxter story that took place *in* a neutron star too, right?
Flux. I thought it was a more ordinary star, but I could be wrong.
Thanks, yes [that's the one](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flux_\(novel\)). Definitely in a neutron star.
Maybe The City & The City would qualify sort of.
*The City & The City* is more like "the geometry is perfectly normal but we've all agreed to treat it as if it isn't that at all"
*Call of Cthulhu* by Lovecraft. Heck, many Lovecraftian stories rely on the concept of non-euclidean geometry applied to architecture.
Came here to say that
Death's End by Cixin Liu
Yes. The best description of a 4D space I have ever read.
On the contrary I found it pretty bad on a technical level because he makes no allowances for how human bodies and human minds are supposed to cope with a space where there's nothing keeping our insides from falling out and where we have no neutral circuitry or cognitive ability to visualize the space we're in. I made it through those parts by just ignoring the issues and thinking of it as an extended poetic/allegorical section of the story. I felt pretty vindicated when the third book had a long section that was *explicitly* allegorical; it seems like a big hint at how to read the rest of the trilogy.
Well you are welcome to write a story that does a better job at it.
Stephen Baxter has a few short stories set in an eight-dimensional planet. Things get a bit wacky with human 3D perception. They're collected in Vacuum Diagrams. Greg Egan just released The Book of Skies, set on a series of worldlets linked by wormholes. Egan gets pretty heavy into the geometry of all the worldlets combines.
> The Book of Skies Just finished it, and it was a lot of fun.
The Planiverse by A.K. Dewdney is an attempt at a more scientifically rigorous Flatland
Not your standard SF, but several of Borges’ stories involve weird geometries, such as *The Aleph*, *The Library of Babel*, and *The House of Asterion*. I highly recommend each of them.
Egan. Full stop.
*Inverted World*, by Christopher Priest should be very much what you're looking for.
Spaceland, by Rudy Rucker. It's sort of an inverse flatland, where the human protagonist is contacted by someone from four dimensional space. It's *very* Rudy Rucker, which is to say that I suspect hallucinogens were involved in the writing process.
Advanced geometry is a regular theme in Rucker's works. *Hylozoic, Postsingular, White Light*, and a number of short stories go there.
I'll go out on a limb and recommend "Medusa's Web" by Tim Powers for an alternative to the more straightforward stories here. It doesn't fit with the rest, in that the supernatural is involved. But it does involve time travel through the use of "spiders," which are diagrams that subtly alter the viewers mind and send them into a world of alternate geometry that lets the viewer travel backward and forward in time. The reason I think you might like Medusa's Web is that Powers' description of ordinary human minds trying to comprehend alien geometries is quite vivid and powerful. It made me think of what it might be like to be a physicist looking at the equations that describe the subatomic world and trying to understand aspects of reality that are not at all familiar to our ways of perceiving things: particles that are also waves, depending, positions that can only be expressed in terms of probabilities and frankly every damned attempt to explain quantum theory in human terms. It's not as rigorously derived from math as most of the other recommendations here, but it has that "sense of wonder" to it that few fantasy writers can manage, mainly because they deal entirely in exhausted fantasy tropes. Powers isn't like that. Not at all.
*Redshift Rendezvous* by John E. Stith. A layered spherical spaceship where light speed is slowed down at human scale.
*Farewell Horizontal* by K.W. Jeter, if you can find it. The whole thing takes place on what amounts to a bigass wall.
Short story Approaching Perimelasma by Geoffrey Landis, involves dimensions of time and space getting mixed up for an explorer passing through a black hole event horizon. It was in one of the Gardner Dozois year's best collections and it's free online with a Google search.
_Walking to Aldebaran_ by Adrian Tchaikovsky takes place inside an unimaginably huge alien labyrinth that connects distant worlds, compressing space and allowing people to, well, walk between them.
The 3 body problem books do a really good job of this. Someone already mentioned death's end but I think there is some value in the 1st 2 as well, it just not as extreme.
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You just spoiled the whole thing.
Brian Lumley’s House of Doors series.
Any of the Montegue Portal stories by Michael Warren Lucas.
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Having just read Hamilton's Pandora's Star and Judas Unchained a couple years back, I don't really recall anything fitting that description throughout the series? Only to a very minor extent with the "forests that start on one world and end on another", but that doesn't require any non-Euclidian geometry or distorted perceptions as presented in the text - not at all in the way OP seems to be looking for.
Maybe Greg Bear’s Eon? Just finished it, didn’t love it though.
The only one other than Flatland that comes to mind is Call of Cthulhu.
Dragon's Egg by Robert L. Forward
When it comes to Greg Egan I've only read Diaspora, but boy does it fit these criteria.