Wotan rather than Jupiter — the Norse king of the gods rather than the Roman one. (Oddly enough, Venus is still Venus, but has a moon called Adonis). A lot of the writing is a bit inscrutable. Even if I was fully alert and not tired, I sometimes struggled to figure out what was going on and who was talking. It’s totally not readable if you’re anywhere near sleepy. Born Terence David John Pratchett, Sir Terry Pratchett sold his first story when he was thirteen, which earned him enough money to buy a second-hand typewriter. His first novel, a humorous fantasy entitled The Carpet People, appeared in 1971 from the publisher Colin Smythe. Strata is based in a post Earth universe in which immortality is possible and The Company in which Kin works, makes planets. Having nearly completed the planet she is currently working on, a mysterious man in an invisibility cloak tantalises her with hints of having found artifacts from a previous civilisation. Kin follows the lure, meets up with two other aliens who were likewise tempted and - then it gets truly unexpected. All Myths Are True: On Flat Earth. Apart from its shape, dragons, giant turtles and demons are shown.

Monstrous Cannibalism: Zigzagged with the Shandi, which have inborn cannibalistic tendencies but mostly make do with replicated meat, while some have formalized/civilized the practice via a dueling tradition (Silver admits to having been in a few duels herself, which she obviously won). They'll still become ravenous animals that eat anything that they can catch if they go hungry for long, but Silver is graciously willing to let Kin and Marco kill her before she can degenerate that far.

Single-Biome Planet: Averted; The Kung are a swamp-dwelling race that view the non-swamp areas of their world as uninhabitable, useless desert — but those places do exist.

The characterisation is poor and two-dimensional. Characters mainly exist as plot devices to drive the story to its conclusion. Scenes are rushed as Pratchett tries to manipulate his actors into the right places on stage before the next piece of 'business'. Artificial Gravity: On the entire Flat Earth. A lot of effort is put in by the main characters to find out why. The book implies that the reason for the historical discrepancies is that the readers' "Earth" is actually the replacement world created by Kin Arad for the inhabitants of the malfunctioning disc "Earth", to which the protagonists of the book travel early in the story. While the history and features of the flat "Earth" in Strata clearly is not the one we are familiar with, the history of the flat Earth is consistent with our own, up to the point where the expedition arrives. Earth That Used to Be Better: Earth's population was decimated by the Mindquakes (people spontaneously died from the psychic pressure of overpopulation), and there's now a large population of robots. Also, all but a few hundred books were lost in the collapse of civilization. My biggest critical complaint, from the point of view of the internal wranglings of the novel, is that the character of Jago Jalo is simply not used correctly. He comes in as a major character who is the whole reason for the story occurring at all, and is then written out, never to appear again. I was waiting for his denouement at the end and...it didn't happen, though he is briefly mentioned. It's annoying because this makes it obvious that he was just a vehicle to get the characters into place. It's all too contrived. Terry Pratchett would never make that mistake again.

This novel contains examples of the following tropes:

I was quite excited when this book came my way as I see it is an early version of the idea that later became the Discworld series so I was hopeful this would give me a good insight. Humans Through Alien Eyes: Some elements of this, particularly when considering what the different races view as normal behaviour, and vice-versa.

Strata was written before any of the Disc World books, and you can see the early incarnations of ideas that Disc World was based on. But only in the physical sense. Missing in Strata is the fiercely witty and finely honed writing that make Pratchett's later work such an addictive delight. And, of course, the characters who inhabit his later books. It's all very interesting from an anthropological point of view, seeing the evolution of a great author and I think that may be what carried me through with this book; the characters are actually interesting (in some instances more interesting and enjoyable than some early Discworld characters) and the way he crafts the universe of his story is very enjoyable but I think this novel falls down in the way it doesn't really know what it wants to be, an early Isaac Asimov type science fiction adventure or a humourous (of which there's not much to be found) fantasy novel which I have no examples of other than the Discworld because it's a genre I know little about.I love Pratchett's Disc World books. They are like literary potato chips to me, I can't read just one. I reread them when life is being particularly difficult and I need a safe and enjoyable place to park my brain. Bjorne Chang - Old timer who takes on the challenge of training Kingdom's new colonists how to survive in their new world. Kin and two aliens are recruited by the mysterious Jago Jalo for an expedition. One alien is a paranoid, four-armed, frog-like, muscular "Kung" named Marco. The other alien is a bear-like "Shand", historian and linguist named Silver. Jago Jalo is a human who returned from a relativistic journey he embarked on more than a thousand years ago, where he made a stunning discovery: A flat Earth. Starfish Aliens: The Ehfts — they have one leg and move with tentacles, record things with 'touch-books' and speak in translated broken English. (Of course, the other races are also more subtly weird to each other and humans, as part of the theme.) Ultimately it’s a bit ho-hum and the ending felt a bit flat. This is one only for the curious who want to see the development of Terry’s ideas that led to the Discworld.

Terry worked for many years as a journalist and press officer, writing in his spare time and publishing a number of novels, including his first Discworld novel, The Color of Magic, in 1983. In 1987, he turned to writing full time. Beast Man: The Shandi, who have giant tusks and need to eat constantly to stop them from going berserk.

Synopsis

Jago is also an obscure form of Jacob, appropriate for a manipulator who would like to set himself up as disc-ruler. Hyperspace Is a Scary Place: Invoked every time they travel through the Elsewhere, which is nothingness.