There’s a popular meme going round right now, Which Science-Fiction writer are you? The one I would like to be like is Edwin A. Abbot. Hopefully he’ll get a new spur of popularity with the release of Flatland as a movie.

The novel is initially about a two dimensional world, utterly flat. In it live men and women. The men are polygons and the women lines. The story explains the class system and satirises the Victorian attitudes of Abbot’s time. There are a variety of restrictions on women for instance. Being a line a woman is only visible as a point if moving towards a man. This is dangerous because a line could penetrate a polygon and kill it, so women are forced to waggle as they walk and issue a peace-cry to let men know there are women around.

Into this world of order comes a point which grows into an expanding circle and then shrinks back to a point before leaving. This is befriended by a square who learns that the circle is in fact a sphere passing through Flatland. The sphere attempts to explain the concept of a third dimension to the square – but the square cannot grasp this. The More >