# And He Built a Crooked House -- Robert A. Heinlein



## Circadian (Feb 16, 2013)

I don't know why it took me so long to read Heinlein, but I decided to start with a few of his short stories.  I read _All You Zombies_, _By His Bootstraps_, and topped it off with _And He Built a Crooked House_.  The third story was by far my favorite and just might be enough to get me to read more of his stories.

Anyway, _And He Built a Crooked House_ is pretty short (my version was 11 pages), but it was a very interesting read.  It's about an architect named Quintus Teal who decides he's going to build a house in the form of a tesseract (or more accurately, the 3-dimensional shadow of a 4-dimensional tesseract).  But when an earthquake hits, the house collapses in on itself and truly becomes 4-dimensional.  The majority of the story is a tour of the house (which is bigger on the inside) and the consequences of a house existing mostly in the fourth dimension.  Despite all this mathematical/scientific mumbo jumbo, it's very intriguing and quite fun to read.

So, has anyone else read this?  Any thoughts on the story?


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## moderan (Feb 16, 2013)

Read everything you can find with that guy's name on it. Always entertaining, usually inventive and well-thought-out. Sometimes chauvinistic or jingoistic but that stuff happens to the best of us.


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## Nickleby (Mar 6, 2013)

A caveat. Read everything up to _The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress_, which won him a Hugo. From then on, tread carefully. He got, shall we say, self-indulgent in his golden years. If you don't like _The Number of the Beast_, for instance, you definitely won't like his later works.

Save _Stranger in a Strange Land_ and _The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress_ for last.


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