Although I have noted that Hinton shifted to exploring the social, ethical and personal effects of his hyperspace philosophy in the second series of his Scientific Romances, I do not wish to imply a total lack of concern with the personal or political in the first series. In subverting the second law of thermodynamics in ‘The Persian King’, Hinton was not just providing a way out of cosmic heat death brought on by entropy. Bruce Clarke describes Hinton's treatment of the dissipation of heat as a reversal of the moral polarity of the second law of thermodynamics, which was typically associated with decadence and degeneracy. While not all writers went as far as Stewart and Tait in admonishing the ‘wasteful character’ of the dissipation of heat, the term ‘dissipation’ itself carries with it connotations of moral condemnation. M. Norton Wise observes that the principle of entropy expressed by Thomson in ‘On a Universal Tendency in Nature to the Dissipation of Mechanical Energy’ in fact ‘reflect[s] the easy analogy between the degraded state of energy […] and the degraded state of the laboring poor’. Like late-Victorian anxieties about biological degeneration, the discourse of Victorian thermodynamics was often utilized by political and cultural conservatives to pathologize those who challenged traditional Victorian hierarchies. It is no coincidence that Stewart and Tait described ‘the tendency of heat […] toward equalisation’ as ‘par excellence the communist of our universe’. Just as the equalization of heat leads to a degraded state of energy, the degradation of humanity would result from the levelling of class distinctions.

Noting the gendered dichotomy of nature and culture in industrialized models of time management and productivity, Wise and Patricia Murphy observe how – in nineteenth century capitalist discourse – linear, irreversible time and productivity came to be associated with more prestigious masculine work while repetitive, and ‘reproductive’ labour was gendered as feminine. In industrialized urban areas, the labouring poor were seen to conglomerate in ‘unruly crowds and mobs’ that, in one Victorian statistician's words, ‘substitute, for a population that accumulates and preserves instruction and is steadily progressive, a population that is young, inexperienced, ignorant, credulous, irritable, passionate, and dangerous, having a perpetual tendency to moral as well as physical deterioration’.