Tyler van Opstal "Rules and Secondary Worlds"

     In the creation of a secondary world, both Tolkien and Chesterton remark on the importance of having rules and forbidden things. These are important because they establish that the secondary world is "real." How much these rules align with the rules of our own world is irrelevant, because the rules of our world only make sense because we observe them regularly. If the inhabitants of a fantasy world observe the rules of their existence, then those rules are just as real there as ours are here for they are in their own primary world, to which ours is secondary.

    A wonderful example of this occurs in the 1884 novella Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin Abbott Abbott. The first half of the book features the main character describing in detail the many rules and facts of existence in the secondary world of Flatland, where there are only two dimensions upon which everything exists. The narrator describes the systems of Flatland not only in the way that someone on Earth might describe a culture in a foreign country (the social hierarchy, expectations, and geographies), but with an intended audience of those in an entirely different world than his own. Much of the description is of how life works in two dimensions, something that would be entirely unnecessary to any reader in the narrator's own primary world of Flatland but is indispensable to readers from other worlds such as our own.

    The rest of the book details how the narrator learned that there were other worlds, with him travelling to Lineland (which is a world in one dimension), Spaceland (three-dimensions) and Pointland (zero-dimensions). In each world, the native inhabitants are incapable of recognizing the outsiders from other worlds- when in Lineland the narrator is perceived as a line and in Pointland the Point is incapable of even recognizing the narrator as different than himself due to the lack of any dimension. 

    In Flatland, the theme of secondary worlds and the rules they experience- and that within each world, the only relevant rules are the world's own, with each world its own primary world- is brilliantly illustrated.

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