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A review by __sol__
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin A. Abbott
3.0
Reads like a proto Greg Egan story, with the mathematics and the speculation on life in different spatial dimensions. The satire is largely lost on me 135 years removed (when the narrator laments that the denial of education to women has created social strain between men and women and husbands and wives, I can't help but marvel that in the intervening time we're well on our way to implementing a reversal). Still, the society he depicts seems hellish to the extreme. Even ignoring the subjugation of women and the strictly delineated caste system, it implements the worst kind of eugenic policies of execution for minor failings such as having irregular angles or failing to achieve a satisfactory standard of sight-recognition for the higher polygons. Not to mention practice of breaking many-sided polygon children into circles. I can't believe I've never heard this book come up in discussions of dystopic literature.
The actual story, as such, is extremely simple and can be summed up as "seeing is believing". Nobody can be convinced of the existence of higher dimensions until they see them themselves. Even the Sphere initially the idea of four or more spatial dimensions until Square turns Spheres argument of analogy back on him.
The actual story, as such, is extremely simple and can be summed up as "seeing is believing". Nobody can be convinced of the existence of higher dimensions until they see them themselves. Even the Sphere initially the idea of four or more spatial dimensions until Square turns Spheres argument of analogy back on him.