You’re in a coffee shop. Two odd figures catch your attention at a nearby table: a flat, shimmering Square, and a pulsing Circle, swelling and shrinking like a hologram. Is it a dream, or just extra strong espresso?
You’re intrigued and can’t help but eavesdrop.
“I’m Square,” the flat one declares. “Our world is simple: length, width, and a natural order to everything. What’s your problem, Circle?”
The Circle glowed. “I’m actually a Sphere, from a place beyond your flat grid. Your world has length and width, but mine has depth.”
You glance at the Square. It looks skeptical. “Depth? Sounds like some spiritual cult?”
The Sphere continued. “Imagine a dot stretching to a line, a line forming a square like you. Now, picture your square rising, becoming a cube, solid, with height.”
“Cubes? That’s Impossible!”
The Sphere’s glow intensified. “Let me show you Spaceland.” With a flicker, you see the air around them bend and warp. You hear the Square gasp as he’s tugged upward.
You get a fleeting glimpse of a world where shapes swelled with depth. Spheres rolled through shimmering hills, and cubes spin with radiance. You hear the Square cry out, “Spaceland. It’s alive! The flat world feels so… flat”
Sphere reminds him, “When you really see, for the first time, it changes everything, Square. You need to share what you saw with others.”
They dropped back into the coffee shop. “I’ll try,” he murmured, “though around here most of us just like to lie flat”
You stare at your drink like a portal. Did you just see something from another dimension? A glimpse into a paradigm that you normally ignore, busy with your screen?
What you saw was not a dream. It’s an adaptation of Edward Abbott’s classic work, Flatland written in 1884. You can read Flatland in the public domain here.
A Pre-Modern Geometric Revolutionary
"I know not how to convince you. But I tell you that I have seen it."
Edwin A. Abbott (1838-1926) lived in a society as rigidly stratified as the geometric shapes in his story.
Victorian England was obsessed with social hierarchy. Science was dominated by Newtonian physics and Euclidean geometry: Reality was fixed, knowable, and three-dimensional. Yet in the late 19th century, mathematicians like Gauss and Riemann proposed space might have more than three dimensions, a radical idea that was filtering into popular discussion, blending with spiritualism and theological speculation about unseen realms.
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions was published in 1884 under the pseudonym "A Square."
It depicts a society of two-dimensional geometric shapes whose perception is literally limited to their plane of existence. When protagonist Square encounters a Sphere from the third dimension, his understanding of reality shatters. But his attempts to share his revelation lead to persecution.
Flatland was a mathematical curiosity and a multilayered critique blending math, satire, and social commentary.
Abbott’s clever take on a two-dimensional world, where shapes navigate rigid social hierarchies, caught the attention of intellectuals and mathematicians, but it didn’t exactly fly off shelves. Those who grasped the originality of its geometric and philosophical layers loved it. General audiences struggled with the dense math and abstract concepts, so it stayed a cult favorite among academics and curious thinkers.
For those of us who stare at flat screens and think with algorithms, it is highly relevant.
Be the Heretic in a Flat Media World
"Resolution of the Council...enjoining the arrest, imprisonment, or execution of anyone who should pervert the minds of the people by delusions, and by professing to have received revelations from another World."
Square was jailed for preaching Spaceland’s third dimension to a world that wasn’t ready. He was a heretic, his sin daring to see beyond the dogma of length and width.
Today, we’re trapped in a “Flatland” of digital tools and English-language media.
Outlets like BBC, CNN and the New York Times frame global stories (climate, conflict, culture) through a narrow lens, holding court like Flatland’s ruling polygons. Still it’s easier than ever to glimpse a “Spaceland” of diverse views. Local language sources pulse with insights that expand our worldview and deepen our understanding.
Step into Spaceland. Challenge the hierarchy of sides. Smash the Polygon gatekeepers.
Flatland’s 2D world mirrors our screen-obsessed lives. The book challenges us to look up, to seek depth in unfiltered experience and human connection. Digital “Flatland” can’t hold the richness of a 3D world: empathy, spontaneity, or even a real sunset.
The dimensional tyranny of the moment is our belief in the superiority of technology, a supposed oracle of convenience.
Perceptual Prison Break
Truly, our world is flat.
Not like the Flat Earth believers. Not like Tom Friedman’s book. Our perception of the world is flat. One dimensional. Rigid and limited by belief.
We humans are hardwired to resist contradictory evidence.
We cling to established beliefs even when facts prove us wrong. Psychologists call it confirmation bias. Our mental shortcuts, once essential for survival, have become our own worst handicaps. We are modern Flatlanders, convinced we see the whole picture while missing entire dimensions of reality.
Dismissing scary climate data or rejecting medical consensus because it cramps our lifestyle, our minds instinctively filter reality for cognitive comfort.
Digital life reinforces our natural biases through algorithmic curation. Large language models (LLMs) inherit cognitive biases from training data. Biases like the threshold priming effect affect relevance judgments.
Even the "enlightened" Sphere, who patiently taught the Square about the third dimension, immediately dismisses the possibility of a fourth.
The Sphere demonstrates conceptual conservatism: the tendency to preserve existing knowledge in the face of new evidence. It’s why experts reject revolutionary ideas outside their framework, from quantum physics to market orthodoxy.
The Council's reaction to Square is what psychologists call worldview defense, the aggressive rejection of information that threatens core beliefs about how reality operates.
“You, who are blessed with shade as well as light, you, who are gifted with two eyes, endowed with a knowledge of perspective, and charmed with the enjoyment of various colors, you, who can actually see... how could I make clear to you the extreme difficulty which we in Flatland experience in recognizing one another's configuration?”
Ripples through Science & Culture
When Einstein's theories of relativity introduced time as a fourth dimension in the early 20th century, Flatland suddenly appeared prophetic.
In 1920, physicist William Garnett praised Abbott's foresight about the importance of additional dimensions in explaining physical phenomena.
Carl Sagan famously used Abbott's approach in his Cosmos television series to explain higher dimensions, introducing millions to the concept of "dimensional thinking." Most viewers missed the Victorian origins of his pedagogical technique.
Flatland also quietly influenced the philosophy of mind and epistemology.
Thomas Nagel's influential 1974 paper "What is it like to be a bat?" wrestles with the same fundamental problem as A. Square: the impossibility of truly comprehending experiences outside our cognitive framework.
In literature, Abbott created a micro-genre of "dimensional fiction."
Sequels and homages appeared throughout the 20th century, including Dionys Burger's Sphereland (1965) and A.K. Dewdney's The Planiverse (1984), extending Abbott's insights into new scientific and social contexts.
Just as a square cannot directly perceive a cube's full reality, we may be structurally incapable of grasping certain truths. It’s humbling when complex systems challenge the limits of intuitive understanding.
The Danger of Intellectual Certainty
Where is your personal Spaceland?
What is one thing you struggle to wrap your head around, and choose to ignore?
What have you seen that makes you a heretic?
Leave a comment below.
Ink & Time curates ideas from lost or forgotten authors to expand your view, inspire reading, and help make sense of the complexities of society in 2025
If you like Flatland, you might want to check out…
"What Is the Fourth Dimension?" by Charles Howard Hinton (1880s) – A contemporary of Abbott, Hinton coined the term "tesseract" and used the idea of lower-dimensional beings trying to comprehend higher dimensions as a teaching tool.
The Country of the Blind by H.G. Wells (1904) – This short story depicts a sighted man in a valley of the blind who cannot convince its inhabitants that sight exists.
We by Yevgeny Zamyatin (1924) – Though written decades later, this dystopian novel continues the tradition of using geometric metaphors (the characters have numbers instead of names) to critique social conformity and limited perception.