 I was very much looking forward to reading both of these books and they both turned out to be real disappointments. Both were inspired by the classic science and social satire book Flatland, which I reviewed last year. Both of them started out strong, but both became tedious and pedantic. I finished Planoverse and I have a lot to say about it. I'll talk about it after the break. But this one, after the first two chapters, became a series of mathematics lectures, and I just had to stop reading. Okay, about Flatland, like I was saying, it started off very strong. The first couple of chapters are about one of A Square's granddaughters who has grown up in a society where women are much more liberated than they were in A Square's time. It's some of the most laugh-out-loud satire that I've ever read. I was sitting reading this with a smile on my face, just chuckling about how funny it was, and then, like I said before, it quickly devolved into math lectures. Just chapter after chapter after chapter of just lectures that were not at all entertaining and didn't really have anything to do with the realities of a two-dimensional world, and I just stopped reading. As for the Planoverse, it is a fictionalized account of college professor who instructs a computer class in the early 80s where he and the students are constructing a two-dimensional simulated world that is substantially different from the two-dimensional world that A Square, they are attempting to duplicate the kind of biology that we're familiar with here on earth, and they end up, because of some sort of harmonic similarities with a real two-dimensional world somewhere, they end up actually communicating with this two-dimensional world. In the world of Flatland, A Square and his people are not at all related to earth life. They are geometric shapes floating in a flat two-dimensional plane, while the people in the Planoverse are walking along the outer edge of a circle, which is their planet, so life is dramatically different. In order to walk anywhere, they have to walk over each other, because they can't walk around each other, and this one particular character named Yendred, who they're in communication with, he takes a long trek to another part of the planet, and of course, taking a long trip, he has to, by the nature of the world, encounter everything and everybody that exists between him and his goal. There are these rather contrived and uninteresting scenes where he comes across a university, and a science research facility, and they have conversations that explain the science of the world. It's too contrived, and it's uninteresting, and then the story ends very abruptly, and in my opinion, very out of character with the rest of the book. There are a series of appendices at the end of the book that go into detail about the physics of the world, like the nature of gravity, and how the gravity that we're familiar with in our world when applied to a two-dimensional world would not allow space travel, because it would be impossible to achieve escape velocity. There are a lot of little details like that in the appendix that I was interested in. There was no need for this lengthy fictionalized tale that bogged down in details. I'm glad that I read these books. I enjoyed the opportunity to experience them. I can't say that they were great or even particularly good, although they had good points, and I recommend them only in the instance that you're interested in Flatland and books inspired by Flatland.