Skip to main content

Flatterland - Ian Stewart ***

Ian Stewart's Flatterland has been around since 2001, but I've only just come across it. It is, of course a sequel to the famous novella Flatland by Edwin Abbott Abbott dating back to 1884. The original Flatland is perhaps the archetype of a book that is based on a brilliant idea, but be distinctly dreary to read. So the key question here is whether Stewart escaped this limitation in his sequel.

We start here with the (literally, not metaphorically) two-dimensional characters familiar to anyone who has read Flatland. The original both explored the nature of existing in two dimensions (and how the inhabitants would see a three-dimensional object), and provided Victorian social commentary, with female Flatlanders both physically different to males (lines, rather than polygons) and limited in what they can do by society. Stewart only mentions the social side in passing, but instead focuses on mathematical experiences.

Guided by a space hopper (the 60s bouncy toy), the central character Victoria Line is taken out of Flatland to experience a wide range of different mathematical spaces. They start off with the conventional three-dimensional space Vicky's ancestor came across (the original book was supposedly written by A. Square, who Stewart tells us was Albert Square) but then go on to a whole range of different mathematical spaces, from fractal space to topological space, finishing off by straying into physics by bringing in Schrödinger's cat, Minkowski space and time travel via the special and general theories of relativity.

All the way through, Stewart seems to be trying to outdo Abbott's weak attempts at humour by piling on cultural references (we've seen a couple above) and resorting to often excruciating puns. This can be distinctly wearing for the reader, though there are occasional gems such as 'he was the black shape of the family'.

If you can cope with the barrage of irritating humour, some parts of the book work really well at introducing concepts such as topology - this section is based in part on the Mad Hatter's tea party in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. In fact, Stewart clearly takes a significant lead from mathematician Lewis Carroll's approach, though unfortunately lacks Carroll's peak writing skills. This is more Sylvie and Bruno than Alice or Snark. Other parts of the book, though, fail to get the message across. We are dealing here with quite abstruse mathematical concepts and while the portrayal through various characters and their worlds make good use of those concepts in you already know them, they don't act as a useful introduction, leaving the reader potentially baffled.

Like the original Flatland, this is an interesting and innovative attempt. It has always seemed that fiction should be a good route to explain science or maths painlessly and entertainingly. But for me, the painful punning and the relentless jokiness was too much, while the exposition was often not clear enough to do the job. A for effort, though.

Paperback:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Target Earth – Govert Schilling *****

I was biased in favour of this great little book even before I started to read it, simply because it’s so short. I’m sure that a lot of people who buy popular science books just want an overview and taster of a subject that’s brand new to them – and that’s likely to work best if the author keeps it short and to the point. Of course, you may want to dig deeper in areas that really interest you, but that’s what Google is for. That basic principle aside, I’m still in awe at how much substance Govert Schilling has managed to cram into this tiny book. It’s essentially about all the things (natural things, I mean, not UFOs or space junk) that can end up on Earth after coming down from outer space. That ranges from the microscopically small particles of cosmic dust that accumulate in our gutters, all the way up to the ten kilometre wide asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. Between these extremes are two topics that we’ve reviewed entire books about recently: meteorites ( The Meteorite Hunt...

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Henry Gee ****

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...

The New Lunar Society - David Mindell *****

David Mindell's take on learning lessons for the present from the eighteenth century Lunar Society could easily have been a dull academic tome, but instead it was a delight to read. Mindell splits the book into a series of short essay-like chapters which includes details of the characters involved in and impact of the Lunar Society, which effectively kick-started the Industrial Revolution, interwoven with an analysis of the decline of industry in modern twentieth and twenty-first century America, plus the potential for taking a Lunar Society approach to revitalise industry for the future. We see how a group of men (they were all men back then) based in the English Midlands (though with a strong Scottish contingent) brought together science, engineering and artisan skills in a way that made the Industrial Revolution and its (eventual) impact on improving the lot of the masses possible. Interlaced with this, Mindell shows us how 'industrial' has become something of a dirty wo...