Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions
1884
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions
1884
In a world where your shape determines your worth, social climbing means adding sides. Women are lines, forever confined to the lowest rung. Men begin as triangles and, through education and breeding, can ascend the hierarchy all the way to the coveted Circles who rule as priests and philosophers. Our narrator, A Square, is a respectable middle-class polygon whose tidy existence unravels when a mysterious visitor from the third dimension appears to reveal that everything he believes about reality is dangerously incomplete. What follows is at once a razor-sharp satire of Victorian class obsession and a genuinely mind-bending philosophical adventure. A Square travels to Lineland, where inhabitants can only move forward and back; to Pointland, where a solitary point contains an entire universe of self-regard; and to Spaceland, where he witnesses for the first time the true shape of his own wife. Each dimension functions as a prism for understanding the limits of human perception and the arrogance of assuming our vantage point is the only one that exists. More than a century old, Flatland remains startlingly fresh because its central question has only grown more urgent: what realities might we be incapable of seeing, and how much of our social order is simply failure of imagination? For readers who delight in wordplay, mathematical speculation, and satire that cuts both ways.
Editions
X-Ray
“...learn this lesson, that to be self-contented is to be vile and ignorant, and that to aspire is better than to be blindly and impotently happy..””
— Edwin Abbott Abbott
“Upward, not Northward””
— Edwin Abbott Abbott
“Behold yon miserable creature. That Point is a Being like ourselves, but confined to the non-dimensional Gulf. He is himself his own World, his own Universe; of any other than himself he can form no conception; he knows not Length, nor Breadth, nor Height, for he has had no experience of them; he has no cognizance even of the number Two; nor has he a thought of Plurality, for he is himself his One and All, being really Nothing. Yet mark his perfect self-contentment, and hence learn this lesson, that to be self-contented is to be vile and ignorant, and that to aspire is better than to be blindly and impotently happy.””
— Edwin Abbott Abbott
“Either this is madness or it is Hell.” “It is neither,” calmly replied the voice of the Sphere, “it is Knowledge; it is Three Dimensions: open your eye once again and try to look steadily.””
— Edwin Abbott Abbott
“Like all great art, it defies the tyrant Time.””
— Edwin Abbott Abbott
“I have actually known a case where a Woman has exterminated her whole household, and half an hour afterwards, when her rage was over and the fragments swept away, has asked what has become of her husband and her children.””
— Edwin Abbott Abbott
“Distress not yourself if you cannot at first understand the deeper mysteries of Spaceland. By degrees they will dawn upon you.””
— Edwin Abbott Abbott
“In One Dimensions, did not a moving Point produce a Line with two terminal points?In two Dimensions, did not a moving Line produce a Square wit four terminal points?In Three Dimensions, did not a moving Square produce - did not the eyes of mine behold it - that blessed being, a Cube, with eight terminal points?And in Four Dimensions, shall not a moving Cube - alas, for Analogy, and alas for the Progress of Truth if it be not so - shall not, I say the motion of a divine Cube result in a still more divine organization with sixteen terminal points?Behold the infallible confirmation of the Series, 2, 4, 8, 16: is not this a Geometrical Progression? Is not this - if I might qupte my Lord's own words - "Strictly according to Analogy"?Again, was I not taught by my Lord that as in a Line there are two bonding points, and in a Square there are four bounding Lines, so in a Cube there must be six bounding Squares? Behold once more the confirming Series: 2, 4, 6: is not this an Arithmetical Progression? And consequently does it not of necessity follow that the more divine offspring of the divine Cube in the Land of Four Dimensions, must have eight bounding Cubes: and is not this also, as my Lord has taught me to believe, "strictly according to analogy"?””
— Edwin Abbott Abbott
“I call our world Flatland, not because we call it so, but to make its nature clearer to you, my happy readers, who are privileged to live in Space.””
— Edwin Abbott Abbott
