[This blog spoils some aspects of the story.]
The story itself comes from the perspective of a Square who lives in a two-dimensional world. There is no up or down, only the cardinal directions of north, south, east, and west. Their perspective is also flat, and so anything they see only appears as lines of various lengths that appear and disappear differently based on how they enter or leave view.
The first half of the book does its best to explain life in two dimensions. It sounds rather excruciating to live that way when you can barely see anything, but everyone living there is used to it. And that is something that takes some time to understand. If I had lived in a two-dimensional world, I wouldn't care because I wouldn't know of anything better.
The author does a very good job explaining how 2D life works and even utilizes a few pictures to help illustrate the concepts. The Square does know his audience. He understands that he is talking to three-dimensional readers, so the explanations are intended specifically for us.
As the book progresses, the Square gets the opportunity to explore a few other worlds outside of Flatland, each having its own dimension count. His first foray is into Lineland, which is an entire universe with only one dimension. Here everyone is a line and can only walk from left to right. They also are incapable of getting around each other. Although it was a little confusing, it seemed like mating took place by way of sound waves, basically happening over long distance. Offspring would simply join in the line and they would sort of just dance from left to right.
Similar to life in Flatland, the Linelanders did not know or understand anything of two-dimensional worlds. For this reason, they were perfectly content to live life in such a constricted way. But to the Square, the idea of going from two-dimensions to only one sounded terrible, much in the same way that going from 3D to 2D would be to us.
The Square also gets to go into our world which the author calls Spaceland. Spaceland is an entire universe that has three-dimensions: height, width, and also depth. To the Square, this was like going into Heaven. It did actually feel liberating to him, although it took him a long time to understand it. Meeting an actual Sphere was like talking to God himself.
One last little interdimensional journey takes place before the story ends. The Square travels to Pointland which is an entire universe of zero dimensions. This surprised me because I did not think such a place could exist and certainly could not be populated, but the book makes such an idea seem plausible.
Pointland was an extremely small universe that housed only one person who was only a dot. He was alone and happy to be so. He stood there, unable to move for all eternity, and enjoyed being alive. Like it was in the other worlds, he did not seem to care about his limitations because that was simply his reality. I did think it was very interesting that the Square was actually aggravated with the dot for enjoying such a terrible existence, but it was very clear that he just did not understand. This was my favorite part of the entire book, by the way.
"Flatland" was not well received when it came out. Honestly, it does seem like a book that should have come out in the 1900s instead, for that was when people finally began to notice how cool it was. And it is cool, and I do recommend it. It is a very easy read, and it opens your minds to both higher and also lower concepts that you might not normally think about.
As a side note, this book inspired one of Norton Juster's fantastic short stories "The Dot and the Line." In case you don't know, Norton Juster is the great writer who gave us "The Phantom Tollbooth." You should probably pick that one up as well. It's a classic!
This blog was written on January 31, 2023.
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Fascinating. Its simplicity shows that the writer was not pretentious. He did actually have a point. He articulated a realistic concept of interdimensional travel.
ReplyDeleteHahaha. He had a "point."
DeleteInteresting stuff, the way Abbott was able to put such a complex concept into perspective is a testament to their writing prowess. It's cool that the book inspired Norton Juster, who was so very insightful in their writing as well.
ReplyDeleteOh, he got it right and it was easy enough to understand.
DeleteCarl Sagan spoke about Flatland, so I wonder if he read this book. It is interesting to view existence from a different perspective. We really do take so many things for granted.
ReplyDeleteOh it sounds like something he would like.
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