“I’m sorry to say I’ve never heard of A Noble Circle before” Oh, It’s a pretty good game by the guy who made A Dark Room and The Ensign, both of which are phenomenal if you haven’t heard of them. It’s about a circle’s journey through Flatland, and a big part is about jumping above obstacles because Flatland is 2 dimensional. I assumed you were referencing it when you said “That would explain how they can appear gradually out of nowhere like a sphere descending into Flatland” in a previous post.
Oh! It sounds like the game is referencing the same thing I was, namely the 1884 satirical novella “Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions” by Edwin Abbott Abbott (I guess
one abbot wasn’t holy enough), under the pseudonym A. Square. It can be read here.
The former half of the book goes into detail about the social and biological structure of the (horizontally) two-dimensional world of Flatland, in a way that satirizes Victorian-era English culture, and the latter half details A. Sphere teaching the protagonist about the one-dimensional Lineland, zero-dimensional Pointland and, most importantly, the three-dimensional Spaceland.
Notably, two-dimensional beings see a horizontal line. That’s the extent of their visual input in Flatland, though they also have a sort of fog that gives them depth perception (much like we see a two-dimensional image and use perspective to determine distances along the third dimension). So when A. Sphere descends into Flatland, A. Square sees him as a line increasing in length, and through depth perception and touch, he determines A. Sphere to be a size-changing circle, a priest, the noblest of shapes.
(Similarly, there’s a scene where A. Square enters Lineland and is perceived as a series of points along the line.)
So when I brought up this scene from Flatland in relation to the tesseractids / dandelions, it was in the sense that these four-dimensional (or more) beings “descend” along the fourth dimension into the Wormverse’s three-dimensional section of four-dimensional space, and the portions that intersect that three-dimension space are perceived there as three-dimensional beings that seem to shift and change in ways that don’t seem to make sense for such a being. (…I hope that sentence made sense.)
Flatland is an interesting read, though without the context that it was satire of Victorian culture, which I only learned this morning, the in-depth information about the two-dimensional world’s social structure might get a bit tedious.
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