Flatland

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**Title** **Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions**
The cover to Flatland, 6th Edition.
Author	Edwin Abbott Abbott
Illustrator	Edwin Abbott Abbott
Country	United Kingdom
Language	English
Genre(s)	Novella
Publisher	Seely & Co.
Released	1884
Media type	Print (Hardback)
Pages	viii, 100 pp
ISBN	NA

For various uses of the term Flatlander, see Flatlander (disambiguation)

Illustration of a simple house in Flatland.

Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions is a 1884 novella by Edwin Abbott Abbott, still popular among mathematics and computer science students, and considered useful reading for people studying topics such as the concept of other dimensions. As a piece of literature, Flatland is respected for its satire on the social hierarchy of Victorian society.

1 The story
2 Social elements
3 Editions in print
4 Related works
5 Other uses
6 Notes
7 References
8 External links

The story posits a two dimensional world (Flatland). The narrator, a humble square, guides us through some of the implications of life in two dimensions. Square has a dream about a visit to a one-dimensional world (Lineland), and attempts to convince the realm's ignorant monarch of a second dimension. The narrator is then visited by a three-dimensional sphere, which he cannot comprehend until he sees the third dimension for himself. He then has a dream about visiting Pointland (which comprises a self-aware point that occupies all space and knows nothing but itself) with the Sphere and learns that he cannot "rescue [the point] from his self-satisfaction". He learns to aspire and to teach others to aspire. The teacher-student relationship is reversed when, after the Square's mind is opened to new dimensions, the Square tries to convince the Sphere of the fourth spatial dimension's existence. (And the fifth and sixth and so on.) The narrator is eventually imprisoned in Flatland for his attempts to corrupt the common belief that there are only two dimensions, but is still able to travel when the sphere visits to "pop" him out of the second dimension.

In the book, men are portrayed as polygons whose social class is directly proportional to the number of sides they have; therefore, triangles, having only three sides, are at the bottom of the social ladder and are considered generally unintelligent, while the Priests are composed of multi-sided polygons whose shapes approximate a circle, which is considered to be the "perfect" shape. On the other hand, the female population is comprised only of lines, who are required by law to sway back and forth and sound a "peace-cry" as they walk, due to the fact that when a line is coming towards an observer in a 2-D world, it appears merely as a point. Square talks of accounts where men have been killed (both by accident and on purpose) by being stabbed by women. This explains the need for separate doors for women and men in buildings. Also, colors in Flatland were banned, when lower classes painted themselves to appear to be higher ordered (i.e. women tried to be circles).

In the world of Flatland, classes are distinguished using the "Art of Feeling" and the "Art of Sight Recognition". Feeling, practised by the lower classes and women, determines the configuration of a person by feeling one of their angles. The "Art of Sight Recognition", practised by the upper classes, is aided by "Fog", which allows an observer to determine the depth of an object. With this, polygons with sharp angles relative to the observer will fade out more rapidly than polygons with more gradual angles. The population of Flatland can "evolve" through the Law of Nature, which states:

"a male child shall have one more side than his father, so that each generation shall rise (as a rule) one step in the scale of development and nobility. Thus the son of a Square is a Pentagon; the son of a Pentagon, a Hexagon; and so on."

This rule is not the case when dealing with isosceles triangles (Soldiers and Workmen), for their evolution occurs through eventually achieving the status of an equilateral triangle, removing them from serfdom. The smallest angle of an isosceles triangle gains thirty minutes (half a degree) each generation. Additionally, the rule does not seem to apply to many-sided polygons; the sons of several hundred-sided polygons will often develop fifty or more sides than their parents.

In the book, the three-dimensional Sphere has the ability to stand inches away from a Flatlander and observe them without being seen, can remove Flatland objects from closed containers and teleport them via the third dimension without traversing the space in between, and is capable of seeing and touching the inside and outside of everything in the two dimensional universe; at one point, the Sphere gently pokes the narrator's intestines and launches him into three dimensions as proof of his powers.

Flatland (5th edition, 1963), 1983 reprint with foreword by Isaac Asimov, HarperCollins, ISBN 0-06-463573-2
- bound together with Dionys Burger's Sphereland (1994), HarperCollins, ISBN 0-06-273276-5
The Annotated Flatland (2002), coauthor Ian Stewart, Perseus Publishing, ISBN 0-73820541-9
Oxford University Press (2006), ISBN 0-19-280598-3
Dover Publications thrift edition (2007), ISBN 0-486-27263-X

Numerous companions to Flatland have been written, including:

An Episode on Flatland: Or How a Plain Folk Discovered the Third Dimension by Charles Howard Hinton (1907)
Sphereland by Dionys Burger (1965)
The Planiverse by A. K. Dewdney (1984)
Flatterland by Ian Stewart (2001)
Spaceland by Rudy Rucker (2002)
VAS: An Opera in Flatland by Steve Tomasula (2002)

Short stories inspired by Flatland include:

The Incredible Umbrella by Marvin Kaye (1980) includes a chapter set in Flatland
Message Found in a Copy of "Flatland" by Rudy Rucker (1983)
Tangents by Greg Bear

Flatland, A 1965 animated film directed by Eric Martin and narrated by Dudley Moore.
Flatland, A 1982 short film directed by mathematician Michele Emmer.
Flatland the Film, a 95 minute animated independent film completed January 2007, directed by Ladd Ehlinger Jr. It has not been released theatrically, and is only available on DVD.^[1]
Flatland: The Movie, an upcoming animated feature film directed by Jeffrey Travis with a May 1, 2007 release date. ^[2]
An animated sequence in the movie What the Bleep Do We Know!? shows a human interacting with a Flatlander.

"Homer³," the third segment of the 29 October 1995 episode of The Simpsons, portrays an inhabitant of a two-dimensional universe entering the third dimension.

Role-playing games based on Flatland include:

"KaSE Edwin A Abbot’s Flatland (Inflated)" by T Craig Drake, Red Anvil Productions (2005)
"The Flatland Role Playing Game" by Marcus Rowland (1998), revised and expanded as "The Original Flatland Role Playing Game" (2006).

Christian teacher Rob Bell borrowed the "flatland" concept in his Everything is Spiritual tour.
Christian author David Brandt Berg also used the "flatland" concept in one of his lectures on the existence of the spirit world, published in Dare to be Different.
Lisa Randall, a theoretical physicist, gave a brief overview of Flatland in her book Warped Passages.
Independent hip-hop musician, proGrammar, penned the following lyrics in his song, "Music": "Flatlanders can't understand the measure of a man from a different planet, with a different plan."