Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions

I call our world Flatland, not because we call it so, but to make its nature clearer to you, my happy readers, who are privileged to live in Space.

Frame: narrator-Square recounts Flatland society, his dream of Lineland, encounter with Sphere, voyage to Spaceland; tour-with-detour structure, so plot scores 80.

Our Women are Straight Lines. Our Soldiers and Lowest Class of Workmen are Triangles with two equal sides, or Isosceles; the Middle Class consists of Equilateral Triangles.

'A. Square' narrator (lawyer, decent, slow learner); his granddaughter (Hexagon); Sphere (cold pedagogue); Light Point / Monarch of Lineland — types more than persons, but memorable, so cast scores 84.

By this I mean that a Woman must not only be a line, but a straight line; that an Artisan or Soldier must have two of his sides equal; that Tradesmen must have three sides equal; Lawyers, four sides equal.

Middle 'Concerning the Women' and 'Irregular Figures' chapters read as sociological essay; payoff chapters (Lineland, Spaceland) sharpen pace; the 2nd-edition preface then re-keys the read, so pace scores 84.

If our highly pointed Triangles of the Soldier class are formidable, it may be readily inferred that far more formidable are our Women. For, if a Soldier is a wedge, a Woman is a needle; being, so to speak, all point, at least at the two extremities.

Quaint didactic voice with dry wit deployed in service of geometry; Victorian paragraph-rhetoric that makes social satire legible, so prose scores 90.

The dangers to which we are exposed from our Women must now be manifest to the meanest capacity of Spaceland. If even the angle of a respectable Triangle in the middle class is not without its dangers.

Two-dimensional planar society organized by side-count (Isosceles → Equilateral → Square → Pentagon → … → Circle); color-class rules; women's line-danger; the world-coherence is the book's whole point, so world scores 97.

I call our world Flatland, not because we call it so, but to make its nature clearer to you, my happy readers, who are privileged to live in Space.

'I call our world Flatland' lands the conceit immediately; the social-rules-as-geometry joke is set in the first pages, so hook scores 90.

For the wise men in our country say that to see all things, or as they express it, omnividence, is the attribute of God alone.

Victorian satirical-mathematical hybrid that treats dimensionality as ethics & epistemology; precursor to Borges, Kafka's parables, much SF; class-and-gender satire via geometry, so innov scores 95.

Herein, he says, I see a fulfilment of the great Law of all worlds, that while the wisdom of Man thinks it is working one thing, the wisdom of Nature constrains it to work another, and quite a different and far better thing.

Author's 2nd-edition preface acknowledges narrator's partial conversion (Straight Lines > Circles on affection), invokes 'great Law of all worlds' — meta-recantation that extends the allegory, so ending scores 89.