Penguin Classics / Flatland

"Imagine a vast sheet of paper on which Lines, Triangles, Squares, Pentagons, Hexagons, and other figures, instead of remaining fixed in their places, move freely about, on or in the surface, but without the power of rising above or sinking below it...and you will have a pretty correct notion of my country and countrymen". So begins Edwin Abbott's delightful fable of Flatland -- a world that quite literally lacks depth.

All existence is limited to length and breadth in Flatland, its inhabitants unable even to imagine a third dimension. Abbott's amiable narrator, A Square, provides an overview of this fantastic world -- its physics and metaphysics, its history, customs, and religious beliefs. But when a strange visitor mysteriously appears and transports the incredulous Flatlander to the Land of Three Dimensions, his worldview is forever shattered.

Written more than a century ago, Flatland conceals within its brilliant parody of Victorian society speculations about the universe that resonate in Einstein's theory of relativity as well as the current "string-theory" of nature. "If", as Alan Lightman writes in his Introduction, "the very dimensionality of space is open to question, then what beliefs remain sacred?"