They evoke how their inspiration was flatland, which when I read it I found strikingly unimaginative. To explain, the characters are 2D objects; the book describes some of the problems these beings encounter, but doesn't really solve them, so the described society doesn't really hold up. One instance is that their field of vision is just a line with a dimension for color, so you need to see a form move into space to understand what it is (maybe I'm wrong, but I think the author does not say clearly that points do bear some 'depth' and 'texture' information, otherwise this wouldn't work). But there are creative ways to solve these problems: for example the beings could 'see' using a bat-like interpretations of echoes to get a sense of the space around them (we see in 3D, not in 2D). Life under different constraints ends up having different features than us humans. So in a sense, it is a bit like somebody who would stumble upon a mathematical paradox (say, the barber's one) and would just deduce 'how funny are words and numbers' (well, a bit like Lewis Caroll).