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Mass market paperback, 147 pages Acquired July 2008Published 2005 (originally 1884) Read January 2013 |
With Illustrations by the Author, A Square
by Edwin A. Abbott
Flatland is a clever book. It may be about two dimensions, but it works on more than one. Like a lot of the best science fiction, it allows us to imagine a world unlike ours while telling us something about the world like ours. At the same time Abbott through his obtuse (lol) narrator, A. Square, is telling us about this fantastic two-dimensional world he's constructed, he's also telling us something about our world; there's a lot of commentary on Victorian gender packed in here, for example. For example, the greatest men actually have what are technically feminine characteristics-- so a law has to be passed to make it clear that that characteristic is good in a man, but bad in a woman (55). Oddly, like in Bulwer's The Coming Race from a decade prior, women in the world of Flatland have enormous destructive power (27-8). There must be some kind of metaphor going on that I can't quite unpack; in Flatland, apartments are designed to prevent women from exercising their power (31), and that has to be some kind of commentary on the Victorian home, surely?
The best part of the book in my mind is surely the story of the Sphere who lords his extra dimension over A. Square, but cannot conceive of a four-dimensional world where he himself is less powerful. A. Square can extrapolate by analogy even though he has never seen such a world, but the Sphere cannot. To draw a connection to another late Victorian science fiction work, it puts me in mind of what Wells did in The War of the Worlds: the Martians were to the English as the English were to the Tasmanians, but until the Martians came, no one could conceive of a power with that relationship to us. By giving us a world with fewer dimensions than our own, Flatland prompts us to imagine that there must be a world out there with more, and that is its greatest cleverness.
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