Flatland

Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions is a satirical novella by the English theologian, Anglican priest and schoolmaster Edwin Abbott Abbott, first published in 1884 by Seeley and Co. Of London.

The book was written pseudonymously by a square, and it uses the fictional two-dimensional world of Flatland to satirise the class and gender hierarchies of Victorian society. That satire is present throughout, but the novella's more enduring contribution is its examination of dimensions, which is why it is still read as a way of thinking about how a mind limited to fewer dimensions would receive evidence of more. The square is visited in turn by a sphere from Spaceland, which is how the argument about dimensions is made in both directions.

The narrative is a sequence of failed explanations. The square cannot make the monarch of Lineland understand a second dimension, and the sphere has the same difficulty making the square understand a third, which is the device that turns the geometry into an argument about the limits of fixed thought. A sequel, Sphereland, was written by Dionys Burger in 1957, and several films have been based on the book, including a feature in 2007.