In the first novella (“The Fifth-Dimension Catapult”), physicist Tommy Reames and
mechanic Smithers must rebuild the broken machinery that’s catapulted Professor Denham and
his beautiful daughter into a parallel dimension of vicious jungle people, strange life
forms, and a beautiful golden city. And gadzooks! In the second novella (“The
Fifth-Dimension Tube”), the vicious fifth-dimensioners invade Earth! But despite the
suggestive titles and citations of both stories in
Nahin’s
Time Machine, the stories involve only handwaving about time and
space dimensions, minor enough that we don’t even count it as a time phenomenon.
— based on Frank J. Bleiler
Because the article on dominant coordinates had appeared in the
Journal of
Physics and had dealt with a state of things in which the normal coordinates of
everyday existence were assumed to have changed their functions; when the coordinates of
time, the vertical, the horizontal and the lateral changed places and a man went east to
go up and west to go “down” and ran his streat-numbers in a fourth dimension.