Opinion And that’s flat!
In defiance of roundness, flat earthers are embarking on a cruise that Terry Pratchett would have liked to captain
Country needs to evolve well-rounded protocols for managing disasters, not look at them as only administrative problems. 
Whether their politics is turnwise or widdershins, all flat earthers should feel at home in Pratchett’s world.
The Flat Earth International Conference has proposed its “biggest, boldest, best adventure yet”, a cruise on a flat sea in 2020. But it won’t be plain sailing, because navigational charts are founded on the certainty that the earth is round, which is anathema to flat earthers. Besides, their voyage will not be the “boldest” ever, since they will be secure from the leading anxiety of pre-modern sailors — the fear of falling off the edge of the world.
The first mover of flat earthing, the Englishman Samuel Rowbotham, had taken out insurance against mishaps by conceiving of the earth as a flat disc centred on the North Pole, and bounded at the circumference by an Antarctic ice wall. The Conference has inherited this fail-safe world-view, but spurned all else. Its website strongly assert that it has nothing to do with the fons et origo of all things flat — the Flat Earth Society, which Rowbotham established informally in the late 19th century. It appears that even in the extremely niche territory of a flat earth, there is room for rivalry.
But there can be no division on the reading material that fans of flatness should take with them on the cruise. It’s obviously Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, published by the schoolteacher Edwin Abbott Abbott in 1881. While a flat earth exists in three dimensions, Abbott smashed the universe down to two dimensions, in which men and women were reduced to polygons and straight lines (the dimensions permitted to the sexes had political significance). Flatland faces competition only from the sorely missed Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, which existed in three dimensions. Whether their politics is turnwise or widdershins, all flat earthers should feel at home in Pratchett’s world. Except that it is entirely possible to fall off its edge.
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