Flatterland

[Dudicon]

Wandering the Visitor's Guide to Verduria today, I came across this quote, describing one way to get to Almea:

Improbaballistics. The science of travel along a secondary temporal dimension to alternative universes is not well understood--indeed, it's not understood at all by terrestrial or Almean physics, and the traveler's best bet is to arrange passage with beings from an intermediate universe. Be careful; there are unscrupulous operators who, rather than sending you through a wormhole, will simply send you into a black hole.

Now, I don't know if you've ever read Flatterland by Ian Stewart (the modernized "sequel" to Edwin Abbott Abbott's Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions), but this last bit (about being sent into a black hole instead of a wormhole) is exactly what happens in it. As Flatterland is my favorite book on non-Euclidean geometry, and as I've read it several times, I wonder: was this intentional?

[zompist]

I'm afraid not; it looks like the idea occurred independently to both of us.

(I haven't read Flatterland, though I've read two other sequels to Flatland, one of them called Sphereland. Also good is The Planiverse, which attempts to create a chemistry and biology for flatlanders.)

[Warmaster]

that begining is funny, about the english guy and the Dhekhenami sorcerer - i cracked up the first time i read that!