Excerpt: Edwin Abbott's 'Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions'

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Published in London in 1884, Edwin Abbot’s amusing short novel Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions is a biting critique of Victorian social hierarchies and a canonical work of scientific and theological commentary. It is also a remarkable spatial allegory, challenging conceptions of visual reality and postulating on the existence of unfamiliar dimensions that are obscured by the learned limits of our own knowledge. The book’s narrator, A Square, lives in a two-dimensional planar world inhabited by geometric shapes that are stratified into social classes based on the number of their sides. Polygons constitute the highest classes, while the laboring isosceles triangles exist only above the women, straight lines condemned to tirelessly wiggle back and forth to make themselves visible. One day, A Square receives a strange visitor—a Sphere—from a three-dimensional place called Spaceland, who reveals to him the limits of his conceived reality. Posing enduring questions of knowledge, reason, and faith, this deeply architectural novel is simultaneously among the most entertaining articulations of a phenomenological approach to our sensory understanding of space.

The first three sections of the book are excerpted below.

Part I: This World

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Cite: David Langdon. "Excerpt: Edwin Abbott's 'Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions'" 06 Dec 2014. ArchDaily. Accessed . <https://www.archdaily.com/575732/book-excerpt-edwin-abbott-s-flatland-a-romance-of-many-dimensions> ISSN 0719-8884

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