"Some people who talk about the Fourth Dimension do not know they mean it. It is only another way of looking at Time. There is no difference between Time and any of the three dimensions of Space except that our consciousness moves along it." (Herbert G Wells, "The Time Machine: An Invention", 1895)
"[...] the time stream is curved helically in some higher dimension. In your case, a still further distortion brought two points of the coil into contact, and a sort of short circuit threw you into the higher curve." (Robert H Wilson, "A Flight Into Time", Wonder Stories, 1931)
"Man has natural three-dimensional limits, and he also has four-dimensional ones, considering time as an extension. When he reaches those limits, he ceases to grow and mature, and forms rigidly within the mold of those limiting walls. It is stasis, which is retrogression unless all else stands still as well. A man who reaches his limits is tending toward subhumanity. Only when he becomes superhuman in time and space can immortality become practical." (Henry Kuttner & Catherine L Moore [aka Lewis Padgett], "Time Enough", 1946)
"Space and Time aren’t real, apart. And they aren’t really different. They fade one into the other all around us." (Jack Williamson, "The Legion of Space", 1947)
"There are and have been worlds and cultures without end, each nursing the proud illusion that it is unique in space and time. There have been men without number suffering from the same megalomania; men who imagined themselves unique, irreplaceable, irreproducible. There will be more [...] more plus infinity." (Alfred Bester, "The Demolished Man", 1953)
"There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to Man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call ... The Twilight Zone." (Rod Serling, "The Twilight Zone" [TV series] 1959)
"The present, as every schoolboy knows, is only the surface of the space-time sea, and a living spacewhale can dive beneath this surface and sojourn in times past, can return, if it so desires, to the primordial moment when the cosmos was born." (Robert F Young, "Starscape with Frieze of Dreams", 1970)
"An infinity of universes swim in superspace, all passing through their own cycles of birth and death; some are novel, others repetitious; some produce macrolife, others do not; still others are lifeless. In time, macrolife will attempt to reach out from its cycles to other space-time bubbles, perhaps even to past cycles, which leave their echoes in superspace, and might be reached. In all these ambitions, only the ultimate pattern of development is unknown, drawing macrolife toward some future transformation still beyond its view. There are times when the oldest macrolife senses that vaster intelligences are peering in at it from some great beyond [...]" (George Zebrowski, "Macrolife", 1979)
"The whole fabric of the space-time continuum is not merely curved, it is in fact totally bent." (Douglas N Adams, "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe", 1980)
"Time and space were themselves players, vast lands engulfing the figures, a weave of future and past. There was no riverrun of years. The abiding loops of causality ran both forward and back. The timescape rippled with waves, roiled and flexed, a great beast in the dark sea." (Gregory Benford, "Timescape", 1980)
"The dimension of the imagination is much more complex than those of time and space, which are very junior dimensions indeed." (Terry Pratchett, "The Colour of Magic", 1983)
"History too has an inertia. In the four dimensions of spacetime, particles (or events) have directionality; mathematicians, trying to show this, draw what they call 'world lines' on graphs. In human affairs, individual world lines form a thick tangle, curling out of the darkness of prehistory and stretching through time: a cable the size of Earth itself, spiraling round the sun on a long curved course. That cable of tangled world lines is history. Seeing where it has been, it is clear where it is going - it is a matter of simple extrapolation." (Kim S Robinson, "Red Mars", 1992)
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