Strata

Product Information

One edition of the book depicts bugs flitting about a bizarre alien landscape that doesn't appear anywhere in the story. En route, the team encounter the superstitious Medieval inhabitants of the disc, who believe the end of the world is near, due to increasingly chaotic climate (caused by the disc's machinery breaking down), the recent disappearance of one of their planets, and the general devastation caused by the ship's crash. The three travelers also discover a number of other differences. Humans Through Alien Eyes: Some elements of this, particularly when considering what the different races view as normal behaviour, and vice-versa.

Fantastic Racism: Being a thousand years old, Jago Jalo is racist against non-humans. He's quite annoyed that Marco was listed as a human (due to Kung religious belief) when he hired him without meeting him first, and holds him at gunpoint while referring to him as "it", as well as using an obscure archaic slur that only Silver (a historian) recognises. 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.) Our Demons Are Different: They're artificial lifeforms that are teleported between their vats and the outside world hundreds of times a second, moving a small amount with each iteration, akin to a stop-motion film. The demons themselves aren't aware of this.Blue-and-Orange Morality: The Kung will become mindless, nigh-invulnerable killing machines if provoked, while the Shandi have a tradition of fighting to the death, with the winner allowed to feast on the corpse of the loser, and will go into a kind of feeding frenzy if deprived of food, but are horrified by the human concept of war. Humans are somewhere between them on the scale of violence. One major theme of the book is that the aliens can't be judged by human values, and vice-versa. In his author’s note for the revised edition, Pratchett wrote that the original story “had a lot of things wrong with it, mostly to do with being written by someone who was 17 at the time”. Rereading it, the then 43-year-old Pratchett thought: “Hang on. I wrote that in the days when I thought fantasy was all battles and kings. Now I’m inclined to think that the real concerns of fantasy ought to be about not having battles, and doing without kings. I’ll just rewrite it here and there.” But don't read this book if you aren't already a fan of the Disc World Series. And don't read it if you have a hard time carving out space to read fabulous books you can't wait to inhale.

Mars Needs Women: Inverted with male warrior-caste Kung, who are apparently so hypermasculine that some hetero human females feel compelled to jump their bones even in public. Kung males don't reciprocate this urge, and may use physical force to keep human women at arms' length. Strata does the wonderful British thing of being funny without seeming like it tries to be funny, and consists of a sci-fi, fantasy story with nuggets of wonderful absurdity and understated jokes throughout. I don't want to spoil anything, so I won't say much more. But unlike The Dark Side of The Sun, which had a pseudo-philosophical point which was really just silly, Strata concludes on a note which is actually quite profound. At least to me. There are also interesting points scattered throughout which made me stop for a second to think about them. Leiv Eriksson - pioneering Norseman from whose people Kin and company learn much about the disc, and about the effectiveness of a very direct style of management. Their ship is hit by one of the "planets" wandering on the interior of the sphere, so Kin, Marco, and Silver are forced to abandon ship. They land on the flat planet with the help of their "lift-belt" equipped suits, while their ship crashes. A return from the flat world now seems impossible, but hoping for assistance from the disc's mysterious builders, Kin, Marco, and Silver set off towards a structure they had spotted at the disc's hub. It is the only thing on the flat "Earth" which does not match the geography of the spherical Earth they left.

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The world was explained in great detail with all the mathematics worked out so that the world would be consistent. In addition, Niven coined the terms "Spinward" and "Antispinward" to replace the directions of North and South. Another funny thing is I couldn't help but wonder if Iain M. Banks hadn't read this before writing Matter. There are actual similarities to the plot! It hadn't occurred to me at the time but he must have been a fan. I have no evidence but choose to believe it. I am so glad that, when I was introduced to Terry Pratchett, the book I was given was the Colour of Magic and not thie one. It has very many parallels (or rather antiparallels) with Larry Niven's Ringworld; to some extent it was intended as a spoof of it. Niven thought it was a perfectly fine work of Big Dumb Object epic SF by itself. If you are new to Pratchett and are reading this, my recommendation would be to start with something more mature - anything with the witches in, for example.

In an in-Verse example, it's expected that planetary engineers will always slip something anachronistic (e.g. a dinosaur fossil with a wristwatch) into an otherwise-flawless artificial world, just to mess with future paleontologists' heads. This includes the flat planet itself. When the expedition arrives at Jalo's pre-programmed coordinates, they find a flattened version of the medieval Eastern hemisphere of the Earth they had originally departed from, before their disturbing rendezvous with Jalo. Clearly artificial, the disc rotates around its hub, and is contained inside a gigantic hollow sphere with tiny artificial "stars" affixed to the interior, augmented with a small meandering artificial sun, moon, and fake planets revolving around it. Every time she meets someone new, upon discovering that she really is that Kin Arad, they whip out whatever their local version of a copy of her book Continuous Creation is to have her autograph it. And will insist it's for whatever their species' equivalent of a "nephew" is. Vikings In America: North America on Kin's Earth is named "Valhalla" as it was colonized by Vikings instead of Spaniards and Italians.Covers tend to depict Kin as Caucasian. It's noted in the text that she can change her skin colour (including to colours outside the normal human range) but when they're exploring the Disc and get captured by the locals, Silver suggests that she should pose as an Ethiopian princess, implying that she's got dark skin at that point. Age Without Youth: It's stated that without Day Bills to buy treatments offered only by the Company, you can get immortality via other genetic treatments, but you'll look your true chronological age. While many men on the disc seem to be interested in Kin (if she looked 200 years this would not be the case), she worked for the company and so kept up her rejuvenation treatments. However, hair never gets past the first century. This book has me split, and by the looks of it, I'm not the only one. It seems there's 2 ways to approach Strata: The flat world is apparently an extremely old and sophisticated automated system. In addition, there are real magical creatures and objects on the disc – Demons, and magic purses, and flying carpets – all of which, the travelers deduce, are themselves highly advanced, sophisticated technological constructs, just like the disc.