Edwin A. Abbott’s hallucinatory tale has captivated readers for more than a hundred years—including contemporary scientists such as Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking. In this mind-expanding satire, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions describes a two-dimensional world organized by strict caste system of geometrical forms. The narrator, A. Square, introduces us to Flatland before describing his revelatory explorations of Lineland, a one-dimensional world, and Pointland, a world of no dimensions, and the hitherto inconceivable three-dimensional world of Spaceland, through which he is ushered by his Virgil-like guide, Sphere. In Flatland, Square is regarded as a heretic and imprisoned for his belief in the existence of a third, and possibly even a fourth, dimension.
Although it did not achieve popular success on its publication in 1884, Flatland gained a broad audience after the publication of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which focused attention on the concept of a fourth dimension. The book enjoyed another renaissance with the advent of modern science fiction in the late 1930s and is now widely acknowledged as a pioneering work of mathematical fiction.
Includes the author's original illustrations and a short biography.
Industry Reviews
“A very puzzling book and a very distressing one, and to be enjoyed by about six, or at the outside seven, persons in the whole of the United States and Canada.”
—The New York Times, February 3, 1885
“Flatland, invites its readers to consider the outrageous possibility of four dimensions and more. It slyly accomplished this suggestion by portraying the highly limited life of a world of only two dimensions."
—Alan LIghtman, author of Einstein’s Dreams
“Flatland is a dissertation that could lead to very profound thought about our Universe and ourselves.”
—Isaac Asimov
