Joshua Bell
Wed, 23 May 2001 09:45:01 -0700
Julia Thompson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > On a related tangent*, while I was away on vacation for the last two > > weeks (anyone notice?) I read "Flatterland" by Ian Stewart - yet > > another sequel to Flatland. Anyone else tried it out? > >Nope. I saw it in the bookstore last week. I ended up getting a Stephen >Jay Gould book instead. Would you recommend it? How does it compare with >_Sphereland_, or have you read that one? My view of Sphereland is biased since I read both Flatland and Sphereland together at a young age. It always seemed the "canonical sequel" to me. Flatterland is also a sequel to Flatland both in terms of plot and intent, and definitely a product of the early 21st Century. Flatland uses a (contemporary) Victorian setting to introduce the hot topic of the day - the notion of abstract higher and lower dimensions. The inhabitants of the 2D world and their culture are depicted through a social satire on the world of that day. It's a very concise book in that it doesn't actually try to teach you much, but - very much in the writing style of the day - merely slips a few new ideas in while you're enthralled by the tale. Sphereland takes a "gentle" sequel approach; the story updates the setting with social reforms, bringing a (mostly) 20th Century equality, knowledge-base and technology to the culture, but plays the lessons it intends to teach about higher-spatial geometry against the strict environment of scientific dogma. Whereas Flatland, boiled down to the core, teaches the single lesson that other dimensions are conceivable as mathematical constructs, Sphereland introduces the notions of curved and expanding space and how they apply to the real world. Directly after reading Flatland, Sphereland seems the "obvious" sequel; same sort of tone, same sort of pacing, same use of analogy to introduce concepts. Flatterland takes a "radical" sequel approach; it's a "hip and with it" 21st Century sequel; the protagonist isn't a lone scribe but a teenage girl who emails friends on the InterLine and gripes about her parents. The story moves quickly and is a wide-ranging overview of different geometries and even questions like "what the heck is a geometry anyway?", as well as diving into notions like spacetime, quantum mechanics, etc. Rather than a gentle analogy or investigation by the characters, a helpful guide gives lessons about each new facet of mathematics. Sphereland feels more like a timeless sequel to Flatland, but having had a week to ponder, I think Flatterland is the true contemporary follow-on; it addresses pertinent questions now and using concepts familiar to the current audience. Put another way: Would you write Flatland the same way now? No - the protagonist fighting a repressive and close-minded system was a valuable tool at the time, but it's not the culture of the educated elite today and would get in the way of the lesson. So Flatland-the-book is an artifact of the 19th Century; Flatterland is a artifact of the 21st* and does it rather well. On the down side, it's so hip and with it that it won't age as gracefully. Already some of the cute bits are strained - the Space Girls, for example. In another year or so no-one will even get the joke. That's a problem affecting our entire cultural output at the moment, however - c.f. the signalling protein named sonic hedgehog. Also, it attempts to do too much and in not enough detail. I'd love to have spent more time visiting Platterland, visiting the Moobius Cow or pondering the plight of the two-and-a-half-gon and less time talking with the quantum cat or bartering with the Hawk King for a wormhole. But that's the 21st Century for you - the solution is left as a problem for the reader. Joshua * Flatterland was actually published in 2000; please forgive me for slipping it into this century. _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com