Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions

What if your entire reality was a single sheet of paper? Edwin Abbott Abbott's 1884 masterpiece imagines just that, a world where inhabitants are geometric shapes, where social status is determined by how many sides you have, and where women are barely-visible straight lines at the bottom of a brutal hierarchy. Our guide is A Square, a respectable mathematician who believes he understands his world until a mysterious visitor from the third dimension appears and turns everything he knows inside out. Through encounters with beings of fewer dimensions, characters in Lineland, Pointland, and beyond, A Square comes to grips with a terrifying possibility: there might be dimensions his mind cannot conceive. Part vicious satire of Victorian class obsession, part philosophical mind-bender about the limits of human perception, Flatland achieves the rare feat of being genuinely funny and genuinely profound. It asks what we lose when we can't imagine beyond our own circumstances, and what we might gain if we try.