Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions

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.