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.
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