Fourth dimension in literature

In the Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky's last work completed in 1880, the fourth dimension is used to signify that which is ungraspable to someone with earthly (or three-dimensional) concerns.

In this 1888 short story, inventor Dr. Nebogipfel asks the Reverend Cook: "Has it never glimmered upon your consciousness that nothing stood between men and a geometry of four dimensions - length, breadth, thickness, and duration - but the inertia of opinion?

..When we take up this new light of a fourth dimension and reexamine our physical science in its illumination.. ..we find ourselves no longer limited by hopeless restriction to a certain beat of time.

[18] In his 1980 novel The Number of the Beast, a "continua device" formulated using "theories on n-dimensional non-euclidean geometry" gives the protagonists the ability to time-travel and to visit fictional universes.

[19] Arthur C. Clarke published the 1950 short story "Technical Error", which explored the effects on a man after he had been rotated in the fourth dimension.

In her 1957 novel The Strange World of Planet X -- adapted from her own screenplay for an earlier 6-part British television series -- author Rene Ray tells the story of a pair of scientists whose experiments with magnetic fields open what seems to be a pathway into a fourth dimension.

One of the two researchers is driven by a lust for power and recognition to proceed without caution, while his colleague becomes increasingly alarmed at the forces with which they may be tampering -- with the wife of the former caught between them -- and this conflict and the dangers entailed in their experiments make up the major part of the story.

Published in 1962,[20] Madeleine L'Engle's award-winning[21] A Wrinkle in Time revolves around a girl called Meg whose scientist father disappears after working on a mysterious project.

Luckily, her telepathic younger brother clarifies the matter, by telling Meg that the fourth dimension of time and the fifth of the tesseract combine, enabling Euclidean geometry-contravening short-cuts to be taken through space.

"[23] Trout also explains how "..vampires and werewolves and goblins and angels" reside in this alternative plane, alongside poet William Blake.

[23] The book "Surfing through Hyperspace" by Clifford A. Pickover specifically deals with fourth spatial dimensional creatures and contains a story involving two FBI agents musing over the implications of such beings existing.

"Death's End", the 2010 final novel in Liu Cixin's Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy, begins with an introduction in which a woman gains the ability to reach inside closed spaces and remove the contents during the Fall of Constantinople.

Aside from Hyperspace as a plot device for faster than light space travel, there are only a few examples of film or television productions that have explored the possible consequences of human access to a fourth dimension.