“Either this is madness, or it Hell.”
“It is neither; it is Knowledge.”
Edwin A. Abbott’s Flatland is, in this reviewer’s calculations, 35% Just for Fun, 30% Social Satire, and 35% Devotional to Truth. I like all of that stuff, so I really liked this book. I recommend it to anyone looking for real answers, what I like to call The Search.
The narrator/writer of Flatland is a square. I don’t mean a boring person from the 1950s; I mean an actual square on a two-dimensional plane. He writers to us, three-dimensional humans, about what it’s like to live in two dimensions, how his fellow shapes (males) and lines (females) distinguish one another and move about their business, and their relative awareness of other ways of being.
Our square explains that shapes can “see”, but because they’re on a plane, everything is a line of some form. Lower class (simpler) shapes have a protocol for feeling, whereas upper classes uses vision and voice to tell the different between, say, a hexagon and an octagon. The more sides, the higher the class. Lower classes cannot touch higher classes – the biggest faux pas possible! Eventually, after many generations of careful marriages and some medical procedures, a shape achieves “circle” status, in which they have so many sides that they’re indistinguishable from a true circle. (You can imagine the social commentary happening here on class.)
Unsurprisingly, most two-dimensional folks can’t (or won’t) comprehend what a square with an extra dimension would be. The Square is open to new ideas, though, and that takes him on some unexpected journeys to other dimensions. Or does it? Is the square enlightened, or mad? Does the search improve our lives or drive us into fitful nights of loneliness? If we have to pick, which do we choose?
I loved this book. Because it was written in the 1880s, you can download it for free on Project Gutenberg.