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mayoroffailure 's review for:
FLATLAND - A Romance of Many Dimensions (The Distinguished Chiron Edition)
by Edwin A. Abbott
This was an interesting read for me, my mentor included it on his list of must-read science fiction, a list he compiled of the best-written and most historically significant works to the development of the genre. Without its inclusion on that list, I doubt I would have ever gone out of my way to read it. It's an interesting book, certainly unlike anything else out there, and after finishing it, I’m mostly curious what the impact of it was back when it was actually published. Unfortunately, we don't really have any mentions of the book from contemporary sources that give us an idea of what its readers thought. While the book wasn’t ignored, there are no real historical mentions of it until Einstein’s theory of relativity was published, when it was retroactively praised for seeing time as a wholly separate dimension. Ironically, it seems clear to me that that was not what Mr. Abbott was really writing about.
Flatland tells the story of a polygon who lives in a plane of existence where there are only two dimensions. We are told how his world works, its various social hierarchies and government, and how its citizens are able to recognize and interact with one another. Over the course of the story, he learns that there are dimensions outside of his own. First, in a dream, he descends to a plane of existence where there is only one dimension and speaks with the king of that dimension about its functionality and how to understand it in relation to his own existence. Then, a citizen of Spaceland enters Flatland and attempts to explain to our protagonist how it exists in a three-dimensional space.
This book operates on two levels, the first is mathematical and the second is satirical. Mr. Abbott’s main point from the mathematical perspective is that we don’t know the true dimensionality of the universe. As physics has progressed further and further beyond where it was when Flatland was published, we’ve learned that there may be an infinite number of dimensions to the space that we inhabit, it's just a matter of discovering them and finding out whether it's capable for us to even perceive them. This is more or less the exact same thing that happens to the protagonist twice. He visits and is visited by spaces that he previously didn’t believe were possible, and yet he does all he can to understand them. This is a practice engaged in by mathematicians and scientists to this day, and it will continue for as long as those professions exist, a fact which lends this story eternal relevance.
The satirical aspect of this book is the one that I enjoyed far more than the mathematical one, as it seems clear to me that Mr. Abbott wanted to use the story to comment on the absurdity of classism in his own day. If we look at each of the different dimensional planes as different social classes, and the rules and regulations contained therein, then we come away with an understanding that these modes of living are close-minded and ultimately suffocating. These social mores only lead to two-dimensional thinking, and the only way to remove yourself from it is to open your mind to other ways of thinking and living, as well as to integrate with the things you previously closed yourself off from. It's clever, but I definitely understood the point after the protagonist’s visit to Lineland, after that I felt like he was beating me over the head with his point while aggressively winking at me.
The book is well written, and the language used is plain enough that almost anyone could read this, which can be rare for books written in the 1800s. However, the story is just too long. This was a pretty threadbare premise, and it's impressive that Mr. Abbott was able to draw it out into anything more than a short story, but the novelty of it wears off pretty quickly. In my opinion, there just isn’t enough content in the ideas and settings he’s using to justify how long the book is, for a good chunk of it I was wondering if there was going to be any additional evolution or new idea introduced, but there never was. Is Flatland essential reading? Maybe for a select few, but overall I feel it’s a piece of work that can be skipped.
Flatland tells the story of a polygon who lives in a plane of existence where there are only two dimensions. We are told how his world works, its various social hierarchies and government, and how its citizens are able to recognize and interact with one another. Over the course of the story, he learns that there are dimensions outside of his own. First, in a dream, he descends to a plane of existence where there is only one dimension and speaks with the king of that dimension about its functionality and how to understand it in relation to his own existence. Then, a citizen of Spaceland enters Flatland and attempts to explain to our protagonist how it exists in a three-dimensional space.
This book operates on two levels, the first is mathematical and the second is satirical. Mr. Abbott’s main point from the mathematical perspective is that we don’t know the true dimensionality of the universe. As physics has progressed further and further beyond where it was when Flatland was published, we’ve learned that there may be an infinite number of dimensions to the space that we inhabit, it's just a matter of discovering them and finding out whether it's capable for us to even perceive them. This is more or less the exact same thing that happens to the protagonist twice. He visits and is visited by spaces that he previously didn’t believe were possible, and yet he does all he can to understand them. This is a practice engaged in by mathematicians and scientists to this day, and it will continue for as long as those professions exist, a fact which lends this story eternal relevance.
The satirical aspect of this book is the one that I enjoyed far more than the mathematical one, as it seems clear to me that Mr. Abbott wanted to use the story to comment on the absurdity of classism in his own day. If we look at each of the different dimensional planes as different social classes, and the rules and regulations contained therein, then we come away with an understanding that these modes of living are close-minded and ultimately suffocating. These social mores only lead to two-dimensional thinking, and the only way to remove yourself from it is to open your mind to other ways of thinking and living, as well as to integrate with the things you previously closed yourself off from. It's clever, but I definitely understood the point after the protagonist’s visit to Lineland, after that I felt like he was beating me over the head with his point while aggressively winking at me.
The book is well written, and the language used is plain enough that almost anyone could read this, which can be rare for books written in the 1800s. However, the story is just too long. This was a pretty threadbare premise, and it's impressive that Mr. Abbott was able to draw it out into anything more than a short story, but the novelty of it wears off pretty quickly. In my opinion, there just isn’t enough content in the ideas and settings he’s using to justify how long the book is, for a good chunk of it I was wondering if there was going to be any additional evolution or new idea introduced, but there never was. Is Flatland essential reading? Maybe for a select few, but overall I feel it’s a piece of work that can be skipped.