Flatland
Ratings128
Average rating3.6
The book is very technical. It describes how a world of two dimensions would be like. The concept is very interesting, but it just don't lend to an engaging fiction reading. Also not at all for audio listening as it requires a good deal of thinking about what was said and seeing the pictures to help you understand it.
Read 46/3:29 22%
This one should be required reading in geometry class. A fun story that helps illustrate the idea of higher dimensions through conversation between 2D and 1D creatures and finally 3D and 2D creatures.
Much like Cavendish's The Blazing World, this is more interesting than entertaining, and you probably shouldn't read it if you want something thrilling and/or adventurous. It does have, however, a plot, though it takes several chapters to get there. Some, if not most, of the social criticism is very current, and the prejudices presented in Abbott's fictional society reverberates with the prejudices we have today.
Brilliant.
Flatland is a quirky little novella about a square, living in Flatland, a country comprised entirely of two dimensions. Mr. Square is content to go about his polygonal existence, until he has a revelation of the Third Dimension, and meets a sphere.
As the title implies, though, this is a story of “many dimensions”, so it's not just that: it's also a rather funny satire of both religious revelation and Victorian social culture, looking at social stratification and the belief in innate differences of class and ability and lampooning them.
Where things get really interesting, though, is that a century later this whole thing also stands for a perfect metaphor for where modern physics is at. I have, I confess, had a really tough time understanding string theory, and its reliance on extraspatial dimensions. So the protagonist's resistance to the third dimension really resonated with me, and I think that even if I'm not closer to understanding string theory, I can at least see a little better where its proponents are coming from.
A simple idea in a simple story that is simultaneously profound. It speaks to me to the invisible boundaries that our language distinctions impose on our way of thinking and relating to the world around us, and thereby on who we are and what is both actual and potential.
It is what it says on the box.
This was a highly enjoyable and memorable read that can best be summed up as a “curiosity”. It's very enjoyable to explore the concepts of 2D living, and have that become an exploration of thought on the fourth dimension, but I think the story fails to combine them in a satisfactory manner. Splitting the book into 2 parts makes sense, but the first half is much less interesting (to me at least) than the second. Cohesion is the word which aptly describes what it lacks.
Also, it's very classist and sexist, and I am here for it.
Flatland is a revolutionary story about the original idea of there being different worlds with different amounts of dimensions. The dimensions range to the no-dimension world of Pointland to the three-dimensional world and so on. The author is very good at explaining these concepts using plain Wnglish. All in all, I am impressed with the quality of Flatland.
This one should be required reading in geometry class. A fun story that helps illustrate the idea of higher dimensions through conversation between 2D and 1D creatures and finally 3D and 2D creatures.
Mildly interesting. It was interesting to read about the idea, but then it became boring when the author started describing nitty-gritty of various rules and laws.
Going to give this one a big YIKES. I'm sure this book was really groundbreaking in 1880, with the rudimentary explanation of alternate dimensions being before its time. That's the only merit I can give this book; it hasn't aged well.
There's no real story, let alone the so-called “Romance of Many Dimensions.” The promised humour was nowhere to be found and the scientific and mathematic logic was lacking, even for a layman of the 21st century. When I wasn't scratching my head at inconsistencies and broken logic, I was rolling my eyes at the misogyny, classism and racism (shapism?)
The author took barely any time explaining the mathematical or scientific rules of the world and instead focused solely on the society of Flatland. He went out of his way to tell readers that he wasn't about to explain how the world works; how they can walk or communicate, what they eat or how their language works. However the author found it important to spend chapters (yes, chapters) explaining that the women in Flatland are mindless, yet somehow overly emotional, beings that could accidentally kill you by walking into you at the wrong angle, and who must use separate doors and hum while they walk.
Promised to be a fun, humourous science fiction classic, got a 2-dimensional dystopian with heavy incel vibes. If you're interested in learning about spatial dimensions, find a 10 minute Youtube video on it and skip this tragedy.
It felt super misogynistic and very classist. I think it's a product of the time, he doesn't come across as mean about it more like Very matter of fact. It made it hard to get at the heart of what he was trying to do (I think) which is get you to try and imagine what a fourth dimension would be like through analogy. By telling you a story of a two dimensional creature having to get a grip on a three dimensional reality, he's really trying to get you to understand how it is to conceive a fourth dimension. Which is kind of cool. But slogging through the classist mysoginy seems like too much to get through.