Flatland

This Bitsy3D art game offers a retelling of Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884) by Edwin Abbott Abbott. Flatland is a notable early scientific romance that combines then-contemporary speculations on a fourth spatial dimension with a satirical depiction of the stringent social hierarchies characterising Victorian Britain. The story is told from the complacent standpoint of its protagonist, A. Square, who inhabits a purely two-dimensional "flat" world, but soon receives the shock of his life...

Content Notes

This piece directly quotes the original text of the story. Nevertheless, even though it is relatively short, Flatland is highly verbose, and so, to make it fit within the reasonable limits of Bitsy, much had to be omitted entirely or abridged drastically. Even then, this piece is heavily text-driven, and is best viewed as such (bootnote: I would like to try and abridge it further one day).

Flatland uses its fictional premise to highlight some of the most reductive and discriminatory attitudes to be found in Victorian Britain. The unalloyed bluntness with which Abbott reimagines the varied classisms, sexisms, and eugenic ableisms of his time - all approvingly voiced by A. Square - did attract some critique after publication, even though it was done to expose and satirise these very attitudes. It remains an interesting text that is, nevertheless, a direct response to the ideas and languages of its time. Please bear this in mind before playing.

Further Information and Credits

With its esoteric narrative and circumlocutory prose, Flatland may well be thought of as rather quaint. Nevertheless, it engages mathematical debates which, eventually, yielded the transformative advances of relativity and quantum mechanics a few decades later. Moreover, Abbott's social commentary starkly presages the pseudoscientific arguments whose darkest implications would come fully to bear in the first half of the twentieth century. Little read in its own time, Flatland has enjoyed something of a reappraisal in recent years, offering an early precis of the links between ontology, epistemology, and social imperatives.

The full text of Flatland is public domain, and can be enjoyed, with its variety of charming illustrations, via Project Gutenberg. You may also enjoy this suitably jazzy (and somewhat surreal) 1965 animated adaptation on YouTube.

Music is Stories of Seville by Paul Michael Harris, courtesy of AudioNetwork.