Summary Of Flatland: A Romance Of Many Dimensions

"Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions", is not a romance in the modern sense of the word. The book was written at the tail end of the Romantic Period in Europe. It is a fanciful view of what a world might look like if it contain only two dimensions. The book is "illustrated" with two dimensional drawings by the author. The story of flatland begins with a description of the world in two dimensions. People in this world have no concept of depth, only length and width. The world appears to be vertical because the rain simply falls from north to south. The houses are made in the shape of a pentagon. Fog is fairly common in this world. In Flatland, the men are all polygons, and the women are lines. The fewer equal sides a person contains, the

Nevertheless, some are found among the criminal class. Advancement is possible within flatland society, but only in a generational manner. Typically, the son of an isosceles will be equilateral, the son of an equilateral will be a square, whose son is most often a pentagon, and so forth adding a side every generation. At one point in the history of Flatland, painting was discovered. It had the unfortunate consequence of upsetting the social order because it allowed every polygon or triangle to look like another. In this way the various stratifications of society were erased. The rule of the "circles" seemed to be coming to the end. But a reaction occurred and the use of colors and paints was outlawed. The social structure was ratcheted back to its previous state. The lower orders in Flatland are treated rather callously. They can be summarily executed for knowing things they should not. Some obtuse people are used in schools, tied into place merely for the purpose of teaching young polygons about angles. The Square, the narrator, has a vision of yet another land, which he calls Lineland. It is the land of one dimension where the king lives on a line, controlling his people by