Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions - Edwin Abbott

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Category: Mathematical fiction from the 1880's. Acquired: borrowed from the Todd & Betsy library Read: August 2008 Briefly: Glimpses of three imaginary worlds that are limited to one, two and three dimensions, respectively. As they interact, each has great difficulty grasping that there could be more to reality than what they're seeing.

Comments: I had heard of this book eons ago, but never ran across a copy until now (exploring T&B's library is always a highlight of our visits there). The story starts with the main character - a rectangle - explaining the basics of his flat world - a paper-thin world of length and width, but no height. He discusses what the inhabitants are like, how they live, and some of their history. In his world, people are geometric shapes: lower classes are thin triangles, with higher classes adding more and more sides (square, pentagon, hexagon, etc.) right up to the ruling classes, who are nearly circles. Homes are flat, multi-sided shapes with openings in the sides. He spends quite a bit of time explaining how they learn to recognize each other, given that, in a totally flat world, you observe everyone and everything from an edgewise viewpoint only, and thus see only straight lines.

Once you've wrapped your mind around that, the real gymnastics begin. The Flatland narrator encounters folks from Lineland, a one-dimensional world where everything exists along a single straight line. You can almost feel the frustration as the Flatlander tries to explain to the Linelanders that what they're seeing isn't all there is. The conversation is captivating and even amusing, but alas, the differences are too profound, and the Linelanders are never able to comprehend.

Then, in a later chapter, the Flatlander meets someone from Spaceland, a 3-dimensioned world like ours, who likewise tries to explain to him how much he's missing. The conversation goes much the same: "I'm not a circle, I'm a sphere"... "what's a sphere?"... "it's like a circle, but it has length, width and height"... "what is height?"... etc. So, the Flatlander ends up being on both the giving and the receiving end of futile attempts to explain an extra dimension that the other person has never experienced.

So, it's interesting and fun, but is it worthwhile? What struck me while reading is that maybe it's not so far-fetched. Here we are, living in three dimensions - four, if you include time. If there were Someone who lived outside those dimensions, perhaps a Being unconstrained by time, would we be able to really comprehend that? This book suggests that we'd have a hard time; we might accept the truth at face value, but we'd have great difficulty grasping what it really meant. As a result, we'd be puzzled by things like predestination, infant salvation and eternal security - all of which are problematic to our time-constrained way of thinking, but for Someone who resides entirely "outside" of time, they'd be complete non-issues.

Pretty deep stuff from an 80 page, 120-year old book.

The Martian Chronicles - Ray Bradbury

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Category: Fiction Acquired: borrowed from the Todd & Betsy library Read: August 5, 2008 - all in one day. Briefly: Earthlings colonize Mars in the early 21st century, and demonstrate that their ability to develop new technology far outpaces their ability to use it wisely. By the end of the book, they've basically snuffed out civilization on both planets.

Comments: I'm not really that much of a sci-fi fan. While the genre is good at bringing up interesting and even important questions about the future, the visions they present are so often dark and pessimistic that the stories can be real downers. Ray Bradbury is particularly like that.

So why do I feel that this is one of the best sci-fi books ever written? Maybe it's because I first read it at an impressionable age, somewhere around age 12. Maybe it's because it connected so well with the space-race fever we were all feeling in the 1960's. Maybe it's because the stories are just so darn good. Really - "Usher II" and "There Will Come Soft Rains" are still among my favorite all-time short stories. As I was reading them yesterday for the first time in ten years, I was literally finishing sentences in my head as I turned the pages.

The book was written in 1949, by the way, and Bradbury's idea of the 'far future' is the time span from 2002 to 2005, when most of the action occurs (each chapter begins with a date). His vision of where our technology would be in 50 years is overly-optimistic (often humorously so), while his vision of how badly we'd mess things up is likewise (thankfully) pessimistic. At least, Los Angeles hasn't been incinerated by a nuclear bomb yet, last I heard.

The DMZ - Jeanette Windle

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Category: Fiction Acquired: SPCC Church Library Read: August 2008 Briefly: Jungles, terrorists, kidnapings, escapes, snakes, bugs, bullets.

Comments: This book stands out from the typical Christian novel in a couple of ways. For one, the plot itself isn't totally implausible. OK, maybe it is, but at least it's interesting. Islamic terrorists form an alliance with Columbian guerrillas in order to strike at the US from the same hemisphere, yada yada. Hey, it's a lot more believable than some Romanian guy becoming dictator of the world.

Beyond that, I thought the characters had some decent depth to them. The woman (a journalist) grew up as a missionary kid, and had baggage - deep doubts and bitterness about whether the sacrifice was really worth it. The male protagonist (Army Special Ops) was a ghetto kid whose conversion to Christianity had re-formed his outlook on life. No quick fixes here - the author takes her time (and 500+ pages) gradually breaking down the cultural gulf that separates the characters, and leading them through lengthy conversations that eventually peel back the issues and create some honest confrontations. Part of this comes about as the journalist spends a month in a guerrilla camp, observing people whose commitment to a cause has driven them to even greater sacrifices than the ones she has made. It's well done, actually, and not hokey.

Best of all, the inevitable romance doesn't develop until the final 50 pages, and can be safely ignored because it's not that important to the plot. You can just skip right by it and give all your attention to the cool, shoot-em up finale.