Flatland

Edwin A. Abbott, an English schoolmaster, theologian and Anglican priest, published this satirical novella in 1884 under the pen name A Square. It describes a two-dimensional world of geometric figures in which women are line segments and men are polygons, a setup Abbott uses to mock the gender and class hierarchies of Victorian England. The narrator, a square from the caste of gentlemen and professionals, dreams of the one-dimensional Lineland and fails to persuade its monarch that a second dimension exists. He is then visited by a Sphere from three-dimensional Spaceland. Isaac Asimov called it the best introduction to perceiving dimensions, and it remains popular with students of mathematics, physics and computer science.

Neil deGrasse Tyson read it in middle school and called it an entertaining trip into higher-dimensional thinking, in which two-dimensional creatures are rattled by a glimpse of three-dimensional beings.