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michaelmc 's review for:
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions
by Edwin A. Abbott
A strange book, is it science fiction, a math book or someone's bad dream? Or maybe all three? In Flatland there are only two dimensions. The narrator, a Flatlander, is visited by a foreigner from the lands of three dimensions who tells him there is more to the universe than what he and all Flatlanders believe to be everything. In Flatland there are people, they are of course flat, the men are figures and the women are lines. Sounds sexist, it is a very old book written in another time. The male figures have status based on the number of sides and angles in their shape. A triangle is on the bottom, the highest status figures have so many angles that they are nearly circles. These are the kings and priests of flatland. Our narrator has a dream where he is transported to a land of one dimension, a land of lines, Lineland, then he goes to another dimension, a land of no dimensions, Pointland. I heard about this book in high school. A friend was reading it, I think as an extra credit assignment for a math class. He was in a high level math than I was. It didn't interest me at the time. I would say this is really a math book. It is all about Geometry and other math concepts. It is very hard to try to imagine a two dimensional world. Perhaps that is the point of the book.