Introduction by Banesh Hoffman
91 pages
Published 1884
Read April 11
Rating: 1.5 out of 5
If you're like me, you spent much time in your formative years in used bookstores. Should you have happened to browse the science fiction and fantasy shelves at any point in the 1990s, perchance alphabetically, you would have encountered Flatland in abundance. I never went to high school (or took any other classes where this book might have been assigned), so I always assumed it was from the 1970s, a contemporary of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It seemed, at least from the jacket summary, to fit that same cultural ethos, a cheeky genre-crossing commentary on social mores. I never felt any real pull to read Flatland until I was skimming lists of brief classic reads and learned that it was from the 1880s.
I was better off uninterested.
Math fantasy has maintained a modest but persistent seat at the fantasy table, most notably in my experience R.A. Lafferty’s “Narrow Valley” and Rudy Rucker’s “Inside Out,” both of which I happened to read and review here. I don't know if any math fantasy stories predate Flatland, but it is perhaps the most famous example.
Abbott employs his world of geometrical hierarchy to satirize the ranks of Victorian society. The Flatlanders — or at least their circular aristocracy — perceive polygons and circles as the most intelligent and noble shapes, and encourage a eugenics program to turn the “barbarous” masses of narrow triangles into equilateral triangles, and thence into “superior” shapes. Women, meanwhile, are considered simply straight lines: lacking a dimension, devoid of intelligence, a deadly danger to the men around them. Abbott pursues this vicious satire so acutely (heh) that he had to include a preface to the second printing, hinting that perhaps the satire had been misread as mere women-hating.
I’ll be honest: Without the preface, and without access to Wikipedia, I probably would have made the same mistake. One is reminded of those white dudes in the 1980s who were so keen to portray the gritty realities of racism that they sprinkled racial violence and the N-word throughout their stories.
Beyond this satire of social perceptions, there isn’t much depth (heh) to Flatland. Where Gulliver’s Travels also manages to tell a strange and memorable adventure tale, Flatland pretty much exhausts Abbott’s geometric satire with chapter after chapter of social mores in the first half of the book, then contrasts Flatland to Lineland and Spaceland in the second half, by way of dialogues in geometry.
If you haven’t read Flatland, I’ll spare you the trouble and give you its best line. Our narrator, a Square, is addressed by a Sphere from Spaceland, who attempts to demonstrate the reality of the third dimension. His conception of the universe attacked, the Square responds:
“Monster,” I shrieked, “be thou juggler, enchanter, dream, or devil, no more will I endure thy mockeries. Either thou or I must perish.”
That’s fully worthy of a Tumblr shitpost.
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