I hope it's a proper book review - FLATLAND: Romance of Many Dimensions

 Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin A. Abbott was sitting on my wish list for quite a long time. It was that book that even though you know you wanted it, it didn't rank high enough on your priority scale to buy. When I read "Things To Make and Do in The Fourth Dimension" by Matt Parker, Flatland moved higher on the rank until finally I couldn't resist the temptation, I wanted to read it so bad. I think I'm not a huge bookworm but maaaan when you just find those dream books. I tried to find the used one in Indonesia but couldn't find any. I was hesitating  on buying the new one, mainly because I was saving for other book, and also limited saving due to currently being unemployed (cries, need to sell more bags and get a freaking job as soon as possible Voila!). Fortunately, after scavenging through some online book stores, I managed to find the cheapest version (Dover Thrift Editions) available for only less than half of the other version's price at Rp 43.000,-. For me it was a huuuge deal.

After waiting for a month (ahhh the feeling of waiting for your book to arrive),I finally got my hands on the book. I read the heck out of it like there's no tomorrow. I had been waiting for so long. I must say that this version of the book was not quite what I expected. Obviously what could you expect for a third of the price? The letters are small and packed to save page, I guess. But whatever, I still love it no matter what. Some of the words are old-timeys so it's a little harder to understand, mind you this book was originally published in 1884 but overalls it was a great adventure. Oh! and it has illustrations, there you go, your oasis among the desert of words.

The book is about the inhabitants of flatland, a two dimensional world that only has width and length. Their 'humans' are consisted of 2 dimensional shapes such as squares, triangles, circles, pentagons, hexagons, etc. What's interesting is, I thought it was going to be a bunch of geometrical mumbo jumbo, but it's actually more than that. It surprisingly has political and social conflicts. To avoid spoilers, I will only tell you about the geometry and how things work in each dimension and not the social and political conflicts.

 

Here's a sneak peek, the inhabitants of flatland can only see straight lines, even though they have width and length. Why? Imagine (or actually do) cutting a piece of paper into three different shapes, a circle, a square, and a triangle. Now lay them on a flat surface such as a table, If you're standing, I assume your eyes would be above the surface of the table (unless you have a giant table). The shapes would appear as they are. But now get down so that your eyes are the same height of the table. See the shapes from the edge of the table and they'll appear as straight lines, as demonstrated on my illustrations bellow.

So that's how the inhabitants of flatland see everything. It looks complicated but the flatlanders managed to developed an ability to recognize one another. Flatlanders can move to the north, south, west, and east across the flatland, but they don't have any sense about height or depth. Their up is the north and their down is the south.

What makes this book even more interesting is that the protagonist, in this case a square, experienced being in the fewer and higher dimensional worlds. One day he visited the lineland of the one dimension world. The inhabitants of the lineland can only move in two directions, back and forth. They don't understand that right and left exist. They can only see a point. The square desperately tried to tell them about the other two directions but it was no use. The book explained further on how the linelanders communicate with each other.

The other day, he was visited by a sphere. The sphere was a being from the 3 dimensional world, the spaceland. When the sphere entered the flatland, what's visible for the flatlanders was just the cross section. Moving through the flatland, the sphere appear as a straight line, which they were able to recognize as a circle, growing larger and larger before finally vanished into thin air.

The sphere tried so hard to tell the square about the third dimension but he just couldn't understand. The sphere then took him to the land of no dimension, the pointland where there was only a point talking to himself. The point didn't understand the concept of any directions at all. All his world was limited to the point of where he was. He was all alone, talking to himself.

That's about all I can say. I tried my best to explain. I hope my post can do this book the justice it deserves. I can assure you that the story is more interesting than what I've explained. If you want me to do more of this kind of post in the future please let me know. See ya!

Ps. There's a movie about this book (somewhere on youtube), definitely not book accurate, but just want to let you know in case you're interested in watching.