"Hinton" by Mark Blacklock

An audio book

Howard, exiled from the UK in the 1880s, having spent 5 years in Japan, sails with his wife and 4 kids to the States for a job. He's a maths lecturer, and tries to teach his kids about navigation, etc. But he's also a science fiction writer of sorts, interested in thought experiments, Flatlands (flatfish, flying fish) and worlds with different moral codes. At Oxford he was aware of Wilde and Ruskin. He likes curves and spheres and especially N-dimensional geometry. Parallel lines meeting at infinity are used as an analogy. Working at Princeton he invents a mechanical baseball pitcher. His children go off in several directions. He works at Greenwich, where stars determine the official time. He helps invent the tesserract and in the 1880 inspires discussion of "time-space". He dies suddenly. He wife kills herself a year later.

Three-quarters through, an academic voice takes over, and various notes/letters are presented - letters from Havelock-Ellis etc. We learn of Howard's bigamy, his idea of a book being an example of spatial technology. One of his sons patents a climbing frame designed to help kids understand 3D co-ordinates.

Until I read the reviews I didn't know that this was based on a real person. There are letters in the book - some may be authentic documents. Trouble is, there are long boring sections - e.g. the earnest father's letter at 4:19 (Chapter 8.10?).

Other reviews

• Nina Allan (This is a dense, multilayered, knotty book, demanding the reader’s full cooperation. But Blacklock’s attention to detail, his imaginative reach, not to mention his willingness to wrestle with problems of geometry, have produced a singular literary achievement.)
• Anthony Cummins (Hinton serves as an ingenious variant on the traditional buried secret narrative, in which the requisite playing for time is primarily an effect of structure, not to mention any number of diverting typographical tricks - when Hinton tries looking through a stereoscope for the first time, there’s a ghostly doubling of the text; when he invents a machine for throwing baseballs, the sound appears in supersize fonts. Yet, perhaps aptly for a novel concerned with the psychic repercussions of denial, it’s hard not to feel that the relentless game-playing might also work to ward off hard questions about the value Blacklock is adding by telling Hinton’s story this way, rather than as orthodox biography.)
• goodreads