The Planiverse: Computer Contact with a Two-Dimensional World

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 a mathematician, computer scientist, astronomer, engineer, and biologist. A member of the computer science department at the University of Western Ontario for 27 years, he retired in 1997, only to be appointed professor of Zoology at the same university in 1998 in recognition of his important biological work. Dewdney is the author of 11 books. He has been increasingly involved in environmental issues, mainly the habitat loss created by the expansion of human populations. Currently, most of the author's spare time is taken up by his work in a natural area close to his home, a 100-acre complex of forest and ponds. He and his wife are managing an ambitious bio-inventory of the area and have logged over 1,000 species.