Dangerous Dimensions: Mind-bending Tales of the Mathematical Weird
'I have stood on the dim shore beyond time and matter and seen it. It moves through strange curves and outrageous angles. Some day I shall travel in time and meet it face to face.'
Unlike nineteenth-century Gothic fiction, which tends to fixate on the past, the haunted and the ghostly, early weird fiction probes the very boundaries of reality - the laws and limits of time, space and matter. Here, unimaginable terrors lurk in hitherto unknown mirror dimensions, calamities in ultra-space threaten to wipe clean all evidence of our universe and experiments in non-Euclidean geometry lead to sickening consequences.
In twelve speculative tales of our universe's mathematics and physics gone awry, this new anthology presents an abundance of curiosities - and terrors - with stories from Jorge Luis Borges, Miriam Allen deFord, Frank Belknap Long and Algernon Blackwood.
Henry Bartholomew
Henry Bartholomew is a lecturer in the English Department at XJTLU. He received his PhD from the University of Exeter, and has taught at both Exeter and the University of Plymouth. His research centers on Gothic and weird fiction, the ghost story, dark ecology, Speculative Realism, and the author Algernon Blackwood. He is the editor of three short story collections, one for the British Library (2020) and two for Handheld Press (2023; 2024). His other published work includes an essay on the uncanny for the journal Open Philosophy (2019) and a chapter on psychic vampires for The Palgrave Handbook to the Vampire (2023). He is currently working on two projects: a substantial, two-volume essay collection for Palgrave titled New Directions to the Ghost Story (due 2025), and a monograph - Gothic Immaterialism: Objects, Affects, and the Ghost Story, 1890-1920 - which examines how new theories about "objects" and "things" shine fresh light on the British ghost story tradition.
British Library Tales of the Weird
British Library Tales of the Weird consists of fifty-seven books, and the series is set to expand with the upcoming release of two more books. The current recommended reading order for the series is provided below.
