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RevolutionSF Flatland
Joe Crowe, RevolutionSF
Flatland is a
novel by
Edwin A. Abbott published in 1884. All the characters are geometric shapes.
It contains an entire world created using the rules of geometry. It's required geek reading.
I only just now heard of it. I was never good at math.
The Flatland movie is full-length
computer animation, but there are no talking
forest rodents and no celebrity voices. I've never seen such a thing before.
A regular guy is wrapped up in courtroom intrigue, with assassination and sedition. Then a visitor reveals there's more to the universe
than he ever imagined. Telling his universe that, though, is kind of a problem.
The concept in Abbott's story does the best thing that science fiction does:
It creates a new thing. The story's plot is not new, but the setting is.
Flatland is a two-dimensional plane. The protagonist A Square is a square.
The number of a person's sides is how high you are in the social strata:
Circles are the ruling class, triangles are thugs. No one has a concept of up and down.
The Flatlanders don't
call their land Flatland, because they don't know anything but flatness...
A Sphere, triumphant from his return from Flatland, tosses coins to his followers
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