Flat World: Difference between revisions

== 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.

** The Moon at least, as shown in ''The Last Hero'', is a globe shape.

** There's also [[Terry Pratchett]]'s earlier novel ''Strata'', which has an (artificially constructed) flat world with an orbiting sun designed to look like a Ptolemaian world map.

* ''Pyramid Scheme'', despite its title, features the flat world of Greek mythology -- Europe and northern Africa, girdled by the River Ocean.

* 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.}}

* Technically, the landscape of the [[Ring World]] is a Flatworld, as it only has one side and has edges walled off with hundred-thousand-mile high walls.

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

** 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!")