Flatland (Magill’s Guide to Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature)
At a glance:
- Author: Edwin A. Abbott
- First Published: 1884
- Type of Work: Novel
- Type of Plot: Science fiction
- Time of Work: 1999
- Setting: Flatland, a two-dimensional world
- Genres: Long fiction, Science fiction
- Subjects: Other worlds, 1990’s, Satire, Mathematics or mathematicians, Geometry
- Locales: Earth, alternate versions of
The Plot
Offered as a fictional mathematicians memoirs, Edwin A. Abbotts Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions depicts a nightmarish dystopia in which living geometrical figures persecute irregular figures (those with unequal sides) and condemn straight lines, or females, to perpetual ignorance and subservience. The novel is divided into two parts: a preface and the “central event,” as Abbott calls it.
In part 1, titled “This World,” the mathematician A. Square describes his two-dimensional world, Flatland, for an audience in Spaceland, a...
[The entire page is 993 words long]
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