Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions

"Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions is an old book that holds up incredibly well. It was published in 1884 under the pseudonym ‘A Square.’ This extremely slender volume takes you on a journey through various dimensions. The protagonist, a square, lives in a two-dimensional world and is introduced to the concept of three dimensions by a sphere. The book contains thought experiments, such as how to picture something from a different angle. If you did geometry in secondary school, you might remember when the teacher tried to explain a tesseract to you. When you try to picture a four-dimensional cube with your three-dimensional mind, you can understand what the poor squares are going through. In this book, the description of Flatland society is a sharp critique of society during the author’s time. Women are straight lines and are considered inferior. They have their separate little world. Criminals are isosceles triangles and they can’t change because that’s the way they’re made. Abbott makes all of these commentaries on society conforming to a very particular structure. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Circles are perfect, so when the square encounters this creature from another dimension, and it’s a sphere, he thinks, ‘Oh my goodness, circles—the height of perfection.’ The square lives in a rigidly structured world that he totally believes in, so when this entity appears from beyond and says, ‘look at these dimensions,’ that’s the encounter with the god-like object. Something fascinating happens; the square then says to the sphere: ‘Wait a minute. If there are four dimensions, then surely there are even higher dimensions.’ The sphere says: ‘Whoa, we don’t go that way. There’s no perfection beyond mine. I’ve come to educate you. Why are you being like this?’ The square thinks, ‘This is not a god. This is someone who has come to mess around with our perception of being and feel good about it.’ It’s absolutely hilarious. The square becomes an outcast, but the job is already done. He’s already started questioning his perception of society because he’s been shown that even his physical world is not what he thinks it is, so he begins to rethink his social world. He questions what he has been told about women, about criminals, and the whole class structure that’s in place, which is based on how many sides each person has. The idea is that if you’re very careful about who you marry, your children will have more and more sides. Your family will achieve higher and higher levels, and eventually produce a priesthood-level circle. The square starts questioning all of this, and it’s something that would not have happened without that rupture that was brought about by someone saying to him: ‘The physical world is not what you think it is.’ In Till We Have Faces , the deity that presents itself is real; in Flatland , the deity is not real, but the epiphany—the revelation—still happens. It still opens up his mind and makes him think: ‘Wow, there’s more going on here than I realized.’"