Despite name and date this is not apparently related to the more famous [b:Flatland|433567|Flatland A Romance of Many Dimensions|Edwin A. Abbott|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1435435775l/433567._SY75_.jpg|4243538] book. Its also rather terrible, however its still more interesting than a lot of stuff i’ve read so i’m going to give it a low 3-stars.

Some problems include:
The narrator does not interact in anyway with the story.
Its set in a two-dimensional world but a lot of scenes are impossible to imagine working in two-dimensions.
It has an insipid love story stuck in it.
It often uses a very conversational style, a sort of witty repartee, that's really hard to pull off successfully in any book frankly.
Its philosophising only rarely works.

But its main problem is related to that old adage, ‘don’t put a cannon on stage in the first act unless your going to fire it in the final act’. This story has an entire armada of cannons NONE of which go off.
Or to put that plainer, this book sets up a lot of plots and none of them pay off.

Still, on the upside its got a lot of interesting ideas. The whole thing feels quite dystopian to start with, then breaks into a kind of environmental disaster film with sci-fi undertones.

The main premise (which to reiterate goes no where, but still) is that the world is threatened by catastrophe and the only scientist who can save it, is ignored by the politicians and his fellow scientists.
So he’s forced to turn to the church and use its power to save people from themselves.

There are a lot of cool ways that plot could have gone..... and then it didn’t ;) .

Made available by the Merril Collection. ( )

Flatland by Edwin A. Abbott is one of my favorite books. It harbored in me, early on, a liking of mathematics. And since it’s in the public domain, so many books, movies, and other adaptations have been made to at least reference it in part.

I’ve made it one of my goals to track down and read as many of the books that are in some part inspired by Abbott’s Flatland, which is how I came across Charles Howard Hinton’s An Episode of Flatland.

Don’t be confused, this does not take place in the same Flatland, but in a world called “Astria,” which, as opposed to Abbott’s flatland, which has a north, east, south, and west, but no up and down, has instead east, west, up, and down, but no north and south. If you’re confused, imagine a side-scrolling video game.

I initially had high hopes for this book, as Hinton had written extensively on mathematics and a higher dimensions, acting as a co-inspirator with Abbott on extradimensional thinking. He does a great job of introducing a two-dimensional world, albeit not perfectly, and goes to extra lengths to make the physiology, history, and culture of the people well known to the reader before delving in and letting us live out their lives. However, I found that after we got over the neat aspects of the world, particularly its two-dimensionality, all this was soon forgotten in the prose, giving a story in which regular people seem to have simply forgotten about that third-dimension.

Having been spoiled, I suppose, on books that take pains to develop their two-dimensional worlds, including the necessary technology like oxygen tanks in every room with a door, I found Hinton’s adherence to these laws a bit lax, or at least his efforts to maintain a somewhat believable two-dimensional world were not as important as the story he was trying to tell.

In the end, the book reads more like any other early 20th centure book that deals with the social problems of the day, and, I suppose that’s not so bad. For setting his book in a two-dimensional world, the characters are anything but, having depth, history, prejudices, and the like.

I suppose, my only complaint is that I went into it expecting something like Flatterland, The Planiverse, or Sphereland, and instead got a story in which people couldn’t turn to their right or their left. ( )