Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions
This is my Flatland shrine. Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions is a book published in 1884 by a guy called Edwin Abbott Abbott. It's about a 2-Dimensional world, its history and the story of the time that one of its inhabitants began dreaming of lower and higher dimensions. It's a great read! It's a political satire, it's a speculative fiction, it's not too long (it's only about 100 or so pages, and half of that is exposition), it gets you attempting to imagine the 4th dimension, and it's a great way to think about cosmic horror.
There was also a movie or two released about it, and plenty of sci-fi plots have used the premise of a 2-dimensional world since 1884. There's also something to do with Gravity Falls here, but admittedly I'd never seen the show, so I don't know. I do know that whenever I take a gander at the flatland tag on tumblr half of it is filled with Bill Cipher, so I feel like something is afoot.
Here's a fancover I made for the book. Maybe I'll reskin my copy of flatland one day... Bookbinding is cool...
What Happens In Flatland
As a disclaimer, I'm just going to write down everything that happens in flatland. If you wanted to read it, take a gander here! if not, proceed carefully.
The first half of the book is exposition: The nature of flatland, the caste system, the way women are treated, who's in charge, how people interact with each other, the brief period in history when flatlanders were colorful, and so on. The second half of the book is dedicated to the story of a Square, an inhabitant of flatland who has a dream in which he's transported to a 1-dimensional world. He exists outside of it, and tries to explain the concept of two dimensions to the people there. They cannot comprehend the higher dimension, and the king of the dimension tries to kill him. Later, on New Year's Eve, he's visited by a Sphere in the same way he visited lineland (the land of one dimension) in his dream, a disembodied voice and then a "sliver" of a person phasing in and out of his reality. The Sphere tries to tell the Square about the third dimension, which the Square cannot comprehend. The Sphere, frustrated, then peels the poor square cleanly out of his plane of reality, and he gets to discover what three dimensions looks like. The Sphere tells the Square that his kind can only visit flatland every 1000 years to select an apostle to attempt to convince the masses of the existence of the third dimension. The Sphere also teaches him about the "order of analogy" (i.e. a point moving becomes a line, a line moving becomes a square, and a square moving becomes a cube) but when the Square suggests there must be a fourth dimension made of moving 3-dimensional figures, the Sphere cannot comprehend this and sends the Square back to flatland. At one point (I need to reread it...) the Square and the Sphere visit pointland in a dream, the realm of zero dimensions, inhabited by a single point who believes that it and its thoughts are everything in the world. He then tries to convince the government of flatland that a third dimension exists, but is unable to move an object upwards, being in a 2-dimensional reality, and he is imprisoned for the rest of his days for insanity, or moreso for knowing the truth. In prison he writes a memoir, and that memoir is the book. That's all!
Things I Like About Flatland
I think it's a pretty good read because it's such a fun thought experiment. As I was reading it, I'd always try to imagine the world from a flatlander's point of view, in two dimensions without any concept of up or down. The whole world would look like a thin line with varying values across it. But what would exist outside of that? A flatlander couldn't comprehend that, and so in what ways can we, third dimensional beings, not comprehend the fourth dimension? It gets you thinking. It's also a fun way to play with cosmic horror and the concept of "higher beings" by playing with lower ones. Also because it came out in 1884, you get fun stuff like having a literal actual square saying things like "Hitherto" and "My lord".