Flatland

A short novella narrated by a two-dimensional square who lives in a plane, is visited by a sphere from the third dimension, and cannot make his countrymen believe what he has seen. Half of it is a genuinely useful thought experiment about dimension — the standard classroom route to thinking about a fourth — and half of it is a satire of Victorian hierarchy, with class determined by number of sides and women reduced to line segments.

Its treatment of Flatland’s women — line segments, kept apart and required to sound a continuous warning cry as they move — is the element most often singled out now, and whether Abbott was satirising his society’s assumptions or reproducing them is genuinely disputed. The durable part is the argument about dimension, and about what a society does to the person who reports something it has no category for.

Context: Opens the list’s large Fiction grouping; unusual on such a list for being a mathematical parable rather than a novel of character.

Connections

• A Library to Build Great Americans — the list this came from.
• Edwin Abbott Abbott — the author, a classicist and schoolmaster who wrote it as “A Square”.
• Open Source Knowledge — the book as a teaching device that has outlived its own satire.