Overview

When The Planiverse ?rst appeared 16 years ago, it caught more than a few readers off guard. The line between willing suspension of dis- lief and innocent acceptance, if it exists at all, is a thin one. There were those who wanted to believe, despite the tongue-in-cheek subtext, that we had made contact with a two-dimensional world called Arde, a di- shaped planet embedded in the skin of a vast, balloon-shaped space called the planiverse. It is tempting to imagine that those who believed, as well as those who suspended disbelief, did so because of a persuasive consistency in the cosmology and physics of this in?nitesimally thin universe, and x preface to the millennium edition in its bizarre but oddly workable organisms. This was not just your r- of-the-mill universe fashioned out of the whole cloth of wish-driven imagination. The planiverse is a weirder place than that precisely - cause so much of it was “worked out” by a virtual team of scientists and technologists. Reality, even thepseudoreality of such a place, is - variably stranger than anything we merely dream up.

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A conscious tribute to, and modern reinterpretation of, Edwin Abbott's famous 19th-century fantasy Flatland: science fiction, cast as non-fiction, exploring a theoretically possible but again hard-to-visualize two-dimensional universe. The scenario begins when Dewdney (a real-life computer-science prof) and his students construct, for didactic purposes, a computer program, 2DWORLD, which attempts to simulate the characteristics of two-dimensional space - i.e., a place that has no thickness, like a mathematical circle. Presently they are surprised to discover an unprogrammed intruder, Yendred, a citizen of the real two-dimensional planet Arde - who resembles an intelligent four-armed hydra with, naturally, all his internal organs visible. So the story, such as it is, follows Yendred among his fellow-Ardeans as he travels from one side of Arde's only continent to the other in search of knowledge. Arde boasts many fantastic constructions - lifeforms, houses, boats, steam engines, computers - based on reputable research into the characteristics of two-dimensional atoms, gravity fields, electromagnetic waves, etc. And these phenomena, in turn, give rise to a number of fairly obvious philosophical questions. (E.g., are we being observed by imperceptible four-dimensional beings?) In all: an ingenious intellectual exercise - amusing, edifying, sometimes tedious - for those curious about the oddly circumscribed two-dimensional universe and its even odder mechanics. (Kirkus Reviews)

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