Strata

Product Information

Strata is a 1981 science fiction comedy novel by Terry Pratchett. It is one of Pratchett's first novels and one of the few purely science fiction novels he wrote, along with The Dark Side of the Sun. Pratchett dreamed up The Carpet People as a teenager; a 1971 interview revealed that he was “putting the world to rights … with a friend one evening when the friend got up to emphasise a point and started to pace across the room. ‘Don’t do that’, said Terry suddenly, ‘You’ll disturb the carpet people.’” 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. Kin Arad is a high-ranking official of the Company. After twenty-one decades of living, and with the help of memory surgery, she is at the top of her profession. Discovering two of her employees have placed a fossilized plesiosaur in the wrong stratum, not to mention the fact it is holding a placard which reads "End Nuclear Testing Now", doesn't dismay the woman who built a mountain range in the shape of her initials during her own high-spirited youth.

This is used as a plot point in regards to the Shandi—they can't consume proteins from foods that don't originate on Shand, and are ritual cannibals. This proves a problem after their Dumbwaiter is destroyed. 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. humans are much more developed in the field of space travel and have met several other intelligent species, such as the tall, frog-like Kungs, and the bear-like Shandi Since only the Eastern hemisphere of Earth is represented, the continent of America is completely missing, so Kin, Marco, and Silver rescue a party of Vikings in the process of searching for Vinland, when their ship is about to sail over the edge of the world.

Synopsis

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. Bizarre Alien Locomotion: Ehfts are unipodal, resembling a bell that stands on its clapper. Their mode of movement isn't explicitly described, but it evidently involves a lot of tendrils.

The characters are similarly developed than in The Dark Side of the Sun, but there seems an edge to them here that you don't see in that one, but you do see in Discworld. We also have the wonderful camaraderie of a cosmopolitan world. The Disc has no aliens, but they all seem alien even on such a small world.Strata is very closely modelled on a "classic" science fiction story by Larry Niven, Ringworld. Niven designed a giant world in the shape of a wedding ring with a radius of one astronomical unit. That is, the ring was the same diameter as the Earth's orbit around the Sun. The ring spun fast enough to generate artificial gravity on the inner surface and was warmed by a sun similar to our own at the centre of the ring. The inner surface of the ring was an artificial world with mountains, seas and forests, and a habitable area one million times that of the 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.) 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. Kin Arad, over two centuries old, and a planetary designer and archaeologist, teams up reluctantly with Silver (a multi-skilled Shandi linguist, sociologist, historian and meat herder) and Marco (a full-blooded Kung pilot who believes as fervently as only a Kung can that he is human) to travel to a flat Earth. This discworld has been discovered by Jago Jalo, a surviving Terminus Probe pilot, who escaped from the disc and now wishes to return and plunder its marvels. 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:

I'm glad I had a headache the other night. I wanted to read something light and that I knew I would enjoy and this early gem from Sir Terry just sat on my shelf asking to be read.Vikings In America: North America on Kin's Earth is named "Valhalla" as it was colonized by Vikings instead of Spaniards and Italians. Humanoid Aliens: Kinda. One is a frog with four arms and the other is a bear with tusks (who is also a linguist). none of the Abrahamic religions ever developed in its history (a mixture of Buddhism and folk religion seems to have predominated, punctuated by an assortment of flash-in-the-pan religious cults) Valhalla rather than North America — the Vikings discovered the continent and colonized it, thinking it was heaven, unlike on our Earth where they abandoned it after a only a few tentative settlements. 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.

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.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. The narrative is difficult because it jumps around and it is a book that takes a lot of concentration to not lose your place in the story. It will be told from the point of view of one character, and you don't get the see the other character's reaction at all, you have to deduce it from the character that is currently narrating the story so it is an interesting style.