Flat World: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

 

If you walk far enough, you'll fall off the edge of the world. For this world is not round, but flat. What lies beyond the edge? No one knows.

 

 

 

Sadly, [http://theflatearthsociety.org/ some people] believe that this is [[Truth in Television]]. Less literally, the trope was considered to be truth in television in practice, up until World War 2, and Pearl Harbor was often treated as the edge of the world by both the Japanese and the Americans.

 

{{examples}}

* The [[Cyberspace|Digital World]] in ''[[Digimon Tamers]]'' consisted of seven discs stacked one on top of another.

 

== Comic Books ==

 

== Film ==

== Literature ==

* The ''[[Discworld]]'', as its name suggests, is a very slightly convex disc. It's also supported by four giant elephants on the back of an insanely vast turtle. It has a (spherical) tiny sun and a tiny moon, which travel in complex patterns to make seasons. (Sometimes, one of the elephants has to cock a leg to let them go by.) In fact, one novel concerns the bold efforts of religious fanatics who believe the world is round because God prefers perfect circles going about crushing dissent from any scientist who tries to prove the world is actually flat. Which it is.

* ''[[Narnia]]'' is also flat. The characters reach the edge in ''Voyage of the Dawn Treader''. The 3 children never do see what (if anything) lies beyond Aslan's Country (though it's implied that the dome of the sky comes down to meet the ground there). The Narnians are surprised to find out that the Pevensies come from a round world, and are delighted, because that's what ''their'' fantasy stories are about.

* In the ''[[The Lord of the Rings|Silmarillion]]'', it's revealed that Arda was originally flat. It was reshaped into a sphere by Eru Iluvatar to prevent humanity from attempting to sail to Valinor.

** In ''Flatterland'' a world is discovered that is a circular disk of finite size and infinite area. In the middle things are "normal" size and as you move toward the edge everything gets smaller, preventing anyone from ever reaching the edge.

** Dewdney's novel ''The Planiverse'' goes further, positing an entire 2-dimensional universe with its own physics, chemistry, and biology. Circular planets orbit circular suns, and life exists on the "surfaces" (i.e. circumferences) of those circular planets. Some of these life forms even build 2-dimensional houses for themselves.

* The novella ''Missile Gap'' by [[Charles Stross]] takes place on an Alderson disc big enough that {{spoiler|multiple copies of Earth}} have been flattened and placed on it.

* In ''The Deerslayer'' (the prequel to ''Last of the Mohicans''), Hawkeye tries to convince his [[Noble Savage]] friends that the world is round, but they don't buy his arguments, since they can see the sun rise and set each day.

* [[Philip Jose Farmer|Philip José Farmer's]] [[Alternate History]] short story " {{spoiler|Sail On! Sail On!}}" turns out to be the grimly amusing story of how {{spoiler|Christopher Columbus discovered that the world is flat.}}

* The poem "The Edge of the World", by [[Shel Silverstein]].

** The illustration on the cover of the book ''Where The Sidewalk Ends'' uses the illustration from the poem "The Edge of the World", [[Covers Always Lie|leading some to mistake the illustration to be for the specific poem "Where the Sidewalk Ends"]] (Which is actually about the grassy area between the sidewalk and the street).

** Before the Primordial War, Creation ''did'' have a defined boundary, in the form of an enormous river (one of the bodies of one of the Primordials).

* A Polish parody RPG called ''Nieboraki'' has described the world as flat and [[Breaking the Fourth Wall|lying down on a table]].

 

== Video Games ==

* In the ''[[Might and Magic]]'' series of games, one world, Xeen, is flat. One quest involves uniting the two halves. The player cannot fall off the edge, but can teleport to the nothingness and promptly die.

* The planet Albia in the ''[[Creatures]]'' games is a disc-shaped world- but life only occurs on the outer edge, so essentially this combines a disc-shaped and a ring-shaped world. (It doesn't encircle its sun like the other ring-worlds on this page.) The discovery by the [[Neglectful Precursors|Shee]] that most planets are round is a plot point.

** Evidently, the faces ''would'' be able to support life, if not for the fact that while the planet itself is disc-shaped the gravitational pull acts as though it were spherical, so if you tried to stand on the faces, you'd discover that the gravity pulls you towards the hub and slightly presses you against the face itself, so the net effect is akin to holding your enemy against a passing train in a subway station.

* Played straight in the Burning Crusade expansion of ''[[World of Warcraft]]''. The world of Outland is considered to be the largest fragment of a shattered world, and players in the game can fall off the edge and die (dying in such a way causes you to be resurrected at the nearest graveyard from the point you fell off)

* ''[[Minecraft]]'' has an option that lets you play a world that is literally flat, being made up of nothing but grass, two layers of dirt, and bedrock right below it. The main purpose of playing on a flat world is to assist in players that wish to build something without having to terraform the landscape.

 

 

* ''[[Rice Boy]]'' and ''[[Order of Tales]]'' both take place on Overside, the top half of a flat world. Travel between the two sides was possible in the past, though it is now restricted, but {{spoiler|Rice Boy himself eventually travels to Underside, where he meets his (for lack of a better word) parents}}.

* ''[[Unicorn Jelly]]'' has Tryslmaistan, a universe where all worlds are flat triangular plates of extremely regular shape and size, justified due to having different laws of physics than our world. Each worldplate also has its own greater and lesser light source in a complex orbit, a "sun" and "moon". Since only objects of worldplate size are suspended against the omnipresent unidirectional "gravity", any time a plate breaks up or wears down too small, it falls, breaking others until Tryslmaistan is consumed in a "stormfall" of matter that eventually spreads throughout the entire universe (wrapping all the way around the universe's finite but unbounded vertical plane and likewise expanding horizontally until it meets itself). Then the debris is eventually clumped into triangular shapes by the natural forces of that world, and it all starts over again. Its sequel, ''[[Pastel Defender Heliotrope]]'', takes place in Pastel, a similar universe of rectangular worldplates.

* ''[[Our Little Adventure]]'' takes place on the plane of Manjulias, which is flat.

 

 

== [[Web Original]] ==

* Pandora, from the ''[[Dominion and Duchy]]'' canon is a flat world that is somewhat unique in that it exists, possibly naturally, in a space opera setting.

* In part 4 of ''The Sick Kids'', the sequel to ''[[The Intercontinental Union of Disgusting Characters]]'', we learn that Central Earth is flat. ("What did you think it was anyway, round? Hah, we'd all fall off then!")

* [http://www.rogermwilcox.name/square_earth.html The International Square Earth Society] is an extremely deadpan parody of flat-earthers. It uses Bible verses to prove that the Earth is not only flat, it's square like a saltine cracker.

 

 

== [[Real Life]] ==

* The idea of everyone thinking the world was flat wasn't universal. Through history some people thought it was flat, some thought it may be round, but for the most part people probably didn't worry themselves about it much. While many people cite the idea that when a ship sailed to sea the mast was the last thing to disappear to the observer, the problem is that by the time a ship is that far out at sea (several miles for a 5.5-foot-tall person), the ship is so small to the unaided eye it's hard to make out the mast - and telescopes weren't developed until 1608 - a time when the fact that the Earth was round had been proven practically.

** The first person recorded to measure the circumference was Eratosthenes in 240 BC. Using the angles of shadows at noon he was within a 2%-20% margin - pretty good for what he had to work with.

** By the time of Columbus (1492) the earth was understood to be round by most educated people. There was less fear of Columbus sailing off the edge of the earth than the simple fact that it was ''uncharted waters'' he was sailing into, and no one knew when/if he would run into land. Also, Columbus had far underestimated the actual size of the Earth, and combined that with the largest estimation of how far Asia stretched eastward to conclude that the distance from Europe to Asia westward was only about 2,500 miles (in reality, it's closer to 15,000 miles). See analysis by Samuel Eliot Morison in ADMIRAL OF THE OCEAN SEA.

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Settings]]

[[Category:Otherworld Tropes]]

[[Category:Speculative Fiction Tropes]]

[[Category:This Index Earth]]