The Planiverse

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.

A.K. Dewdney is well known for his columns in Scientific American magazine, as well as his recent Copernicus book, Hungry Hollow. The Planiverse is being brought back into print, in a revised and updated edition, and to the delight of its many fans and loyal devotees.

1 Arde.- 2 A House by the Sea.- 3 On Fiddib Har.- 4 Walking to Is Felblt.- 5 City Below Ground.- 6 The Trek.- 7 The Punizlan Institute.- 8 Traveling on the Wind.- 9 High on Dahl Radam.- 10 Drabk the Sharak of Okbra.- 11 Higher Dimensions.- Ardean Science and Technology.- Acknowledgments.

The Planiverse is a classic book about life in a two-dimensional universe. A.K. Dewdney is a well-known author, and this is a well-known book, which is now brought back into print in a revised and updated edition. The book is written within the great tradition of Abbott's Flatland, and Hinton's famous Sphereland. Accessible, imaginative, clever, the book will appeal to a wide array of readers, from serious mathematicians and computer scientists, to science fiction fans.