I’ve spent a lot of time talking about short stories about invisibility, but my searches have occasionally reminded me of some of my other favorite, non-invisibility-related, science fiction stories. Today I thought I’d take a short look at “A Subway Named Mobius,” written by Armin Joseph Deutsch and which appeared in the December 1950 issue of Astounding Science Fiction.
This story is one of the true classics of science fiction, all the more remarkable because I believe it is the only story that Deutsch ever published! It is a semi-humorous story based on one of the more challenging subjects in mathematics, topology: the study of those properties of sets or objects that are invariant under continuous deformations of the object. A classic example of this line of thinking is the topological similarity of a coffee cup and a donut; both of them have a single hole, and if we imagine them made out of clay, one could be molded into the other, as long as we obey the rule that we can stretch and compress and warp the clay, but not tear it.
Another classic structure from topology is the Möbius strip, a one-sided surface, that gives the story its name. It is created by taking a ribbon of paper, giving one end a half-twist, and then taping the ends together. It is distinct from a cylinder, which could be created by taping the ends of the paper together without the half-twist.
So let’s take a look at “A Subway Named Mobius!” You can read the entire story from its original source at this link.
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