One thought on “My tweets”

1. As a classic work of speculative fiction, I think Flatland does fall a little short in some ways. The story is mostly a vehicle for an attempt by its author (a clergyman, schoolteacher, amateur mathematician and former Cambridge don) to explain higher-dimensional geometry to a nonspecialist audience. It probably works better as popular science than it does as literature, but I think it’s worth reading anyway – if nothing else it’s quite short.

   I’ve read suggestions that it’s also a satire on the social class system of Victorian society. In Flatland, one’s social status is determined by the number of sides one has: the protagonist A Square himself is middle-class, triangles represent the working class, while pentagons, hexagons, etc are the gentry and nobility, with circles as the royal/priestly class at the top. (Women, meanwhile, are just line segments, having no social status in their own right.) Whether this was actually an intentional satire, or just Abbott mapping familiar social norms onto this fictional world, I don’t know.

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