Flatland

He lived on a plane. Then he met a sphere. In print continuously since 1884, Flatland is Edwin Abbott's short novel about A. Square, an inhabitant of a two-dimensional world ruled by rigid social hierarchies. After a tour of Flatland society in all its aspects, A. Square recounts how he was led on a series of visions and travels by A. Sphere on the last day of Flatland's year 1999. His journey takes him to Pointland, Lineland, and Spaceland, where he meets inhabitants whose limited perception mirrors his own. A. Sphere shows him how to reason past those limits through careful observation and commonsense experimentation, opening his mind to dimensions he had never imagined. When A. Square begins to dream of a four-dimensional realm he calls Thoughtland, he runs headlong into Flatland's authorities, who meet his new ideas with violent resistance. A Victorian clergyman and Shakespearean scholar, Abbott wrote Flatland as a mathematical allegory about the dawn of reason, seemingly in response to the puritanical environment of his era. Its themes include humanity's quest for truth, authority's tendency to suppress radical ideas born from that quest, and the necessity of curiosity. Readers of classic Victorian fiction, mathematical fiction, philosophical allegory, dimensional geometry, satire of class and hierarchy, and the history of speculative literature will find Flatland an odd and charming short novel whose impact far surpasses its concise prose.