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"Looking back through history, I see no evidence for humanity making the best of things, and I think it's a pretty safe bet that's an on-going trend."
- Richard Morgan
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| Tesseract House | ||
| A house built in the shape of a four-dimensional figure. |
Quintus Teal, California architect, liked to push the envelope. In this case, the envelope was the comfortably three-dimensional floor plan of the average house.
| Under Teal's impassioned heckling the tesseract house was built in days rather than weeks, and its cross shapped second story came jutting out at the four corners of the world...
[Then, after driving up with clients to look at the finished house - after a small California earthquake...] Teal turned from their faces to the house. Gone was the crazy tower with its jutting second-story rooms. No trace remained of the seven rooms above ground floor level. Nothing remained by the single room that rested on the foundation... "Let's go on up..." He touched another button; a mate, in deeper colors, to the fairy bridge that had let them up from below offered them access to the next floor. They climbed it... and found themselves in the master bedroom. Its shades were drawn, as had been those on the level below, but the mellow lighting came on automatically. Teal at once activated the switch which controlled still another flight of stairs, and they hurried up into the top-floor study. ...They climbed a fourth flight of stairs, but when the cover at the top lifted to let them reach the level above, they found themselves, not on the roof, but standing in the ground-floor room where they had entered the house. |
| Technovelgy from -And He Built A Crooked House,
by Robert Heinlein. Published by Street and Smith in 1940 Additional resources -
|
From the original publication of this story, here is the scene in which the residents look out the window... to see themselves looking out the window.
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'Our study of your race has convinced us that you are not fitted to leave your planet in the present state of your civilization.'
'...the spreading beam of the deranging ray struck them, and Then one toppled and fell. Then another.'
'Within seconds the material was spread out over fifty yards, in a matter of hours it might occupy several cubic miles of space...'
'The men are dead, but their acquired wisdom lives on and I am the beneficiary.'
'Young people found the driverless car admirable for petting.'
'After twenty generations of shillyshallying...'
