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Vijay Fafat
- Published on
Another story which plays on one person zig-zagging back and forth through time - treated as the fourth dimension - to create a complicated storyline supposed to engender comedy, astonishment and a logical conundrum. I suppose it was okay for 1942, when such yarns may not have been as common.
“Uncle Nat” is an unscrupulous mathematician who has built a time car which can go back and forth in time since - as H G Wells had explained - is “the fourth dimension”. Uncle explains this geometrically to his nephew, Garth, complete with a wire-frame model of a tesseract. All of this is hand-waving hogwash even if standard geometry, because the narrative from there switches deus ex machine to speak of time as the fourth dimension and we are off to a breathless story about self-consistent time-loops not worth the bother. Why a genius who can invent time travel has to rely on such a hare-brained plan to steal bonds from a banker and try to get his nephew framed for the crime is a question best left unasked.