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lee_foust 's review for:
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions
by Edwin A. Abbott
I took an odd excursion into the earliest of science fiction novels just because I was in my favorite used bookstore in San Francisco again as my summer vacation began and there it was and, “I’ve always wanted to read this,” I remembered and that is how I allow chance into my life.
It strikes me first of all how different science fiction could have been without the effect of NASA, I guess, and the lure of space travel—as well as the overwhelming popularity in that same time period of the Western, that most banal and simplistic expression of the American artistic psyche. I mean, let’s face it, the dual horrors of Ronald Reagan as a US president and the dismantling of American cinema aimed at post-12-year-olds by Lucas and Spielberg, are both unthinkable without the double punch of John Wayne and his illegitimate grand-child, Star Wars, the two key banalities that have assured a front-row seat for the mindless in both American politics and art.
While not, by any means, the positive answer to such banal simplicity of idea, Flatland is a thoughtful and creative little ditty about what a mathematical-geometrical universe might be like, dare I say it, spiritually speaking. If I have understood the metaphor correctly, this is one of those brave attempts by a Christian scholar and theologian to reconcile the fundamental belief in a higher deity with present scientific knowledge. Perhaps what we think of as “God” is only a being who lives in a world consisting of one more dimension than our own; for would not such a being appear to be a God to us? I do believe that he/she/it would, if they existed, therefore I found this novel rather clever—and it was not necessary that I actually believe in God, either, to get and appreciate the allegory.
Best thing about Flatland, though, are the pot-shots that it takes along the way at societal conformity, racism, and their role in hierarchies, intolerance, the old Galileo situation of a church attempting to officially adhere to outdated scriptural ephemera over ever-growing scientific knowledge—frequently such idiocy is called “tradition.” Clever, often quite funny, entertaining, and it made me feel good about my easy grasp of geometry—which was something of a triumph for me who struggled so desperately with numerical mathematics all through school whilst breezing through the humanistic sciences. I bet Flatland also inspired Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics as well—down with the Space Opera/Western, long live actual speculative fiction!
Here’s my favorite quotation; it pertains to the king of Pointland, the one-dimensional world: ‘Behold yon miserable creature. That Point is a Being like ourselves, but confined to the non-dimensional Gulf. He himself is his own World; his own Universe; of any other than himself he can form no conception; ... Yet mark his perfect self-contentment, and hence learn this lesson, that to be self-contented is to be vile and ignorant, and that to aspire is better than to be blindly and impotently happy.” That to all those “it's all up to you to feel good ‘cause the world is perfect” memes that I see on Facebook all day long. It’s not up to me because the world around me is a mess and it would self-centered and ill advised for me to ignore that. We're all in this together and we’re only as smart as the dumbest among us, so we must speak of and fight against both ignorance and false beliefs.
It strikes me first of all how different science fiction could have been without the effect of NASA, I guess, and the lure of space travel—as well as the overwhelming popularity in that same time period of the Western, that most banal and simplistic expression of the American artistic psyche. I mean, let’s face it, the dual horrors of Ronald Reagan as a US president and the dismantling of American cinema aimed at post-12-year-olds by Lucas and Spielberg, are both unthinkable without the double punch of John Wayne and his illegitimate grand-child, Star Wars, the two key banalities that have assured a front-row seat for the mindless in both American politics and art.
While not, by any means, the positive answer to such banal simplicity of idea, Flatland is a thoughtful and creative little ditty about what a mathematical-geometrical universe might be like, dare I say it, spiritually speaking. If I have understood the metaphor correctly, this is one of those brave attempts by a Christian scholar and theologian to reconcile the fundamental belief in a higher deity with present scientific knowledge. Perhaps what we think of as “God” is only a being who lives in a world consisting of one more dimension than our own; for would not such a being appear to be a God to us? I do believe that he/she/it would, if they existed, therefore I found this novel rather clever—and it was not necessary that I actually believe in God, either, to get and appreciate the allegory.
Best thing about Flatland, though, are the pot-shots that it takes along the way at societal conformity, racism, and their role in hierarchies, intolerance, the old Galileo situation of a church attempting to officially adhere to outdated scriptural ephemera over ever-growing scientific knowledge—frequently such idiocy is called “tradition.” Clever, often quite funny, entertaining, and it made me feel good about my easy grasp of geometry—which was something of a triumph for me who struggled so desperately with numerical mathematics all through school whilst breezing through the humanistic sciences. I bet Flatland also inspired Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics as well—down with the Space Opera/Western, long live actual speculative fiction!
Here’s my favorite quotation; it pertains to the king of Pointland, the one-dimensional world: ‘Behold yon miserable creature. That Point is a Being like ourselves, but confined to the non-dimensional Gulf. He himself is his own World; his own Universe; of any other than himself he can form no conception; ... Yet mark his perfect self-contentment, and hence learn this lesson, that to be self-contented is to be vile and ignorant, and that to aspire is better than to be blindly and impotently happy.” That to all those “it's all up to you to feel good ‘cause the world is perfect” memes that I see on Facebook all day long. It’s not up to me because the world around me is a mess and it would self-centered and ill advised for me to ignore that. We're all in this together and we’re only as smart as the dumbest among us, so we must speak of and fight against both ignorance and false beliefs.