Strata

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Bjorne Chang - Old timer who takes on the challenge of training Kingdom's new colonists how to survive in their new world. Jago Jalo is much, much older, having spent many centuries in cryogenic sleep on board a probe traveling at relativistic speeds. Counterfeit Cash: One of the first pieces of magical technology from the Disc that Kin sees is a bottomless purse that produces pieces of the local form of currency that pass every test — just with serial numbers that haven't been issued yet. Abu Ibn Infra - collector of disc hi-tech, aka "Gods Gifts", including people. Kin was a very brief guest in his seraglio. One edition of the book depicts bugs flitting about a bizarre alien landscape that doesn't appear anywhere in the story.

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. 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. 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). Otto - Senior priest who decides that the captive Kin should be held overnight and executed, rather than being immediately killed.

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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. Hufflepuff House: Only four races are named (and in such a way that implies they're the only four): humans, Kung, Shandi (who all get main characters)... and Efhts, who only get a brief appearance and are really weird. 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.

Na rozdíl od Zeměplochy, kde není nutné znát vše, na co zde Pratchett odkazuje, protože vás pobaví příběh jako takový, u Straty je vhodnější mít alespoň obecné znalosti dějin lidstva. V opačném případě je zde riziko, že čtenář nepochopí odkazy na alternativní historii našeho světa, které mají v této knize o něco významnější úlohu. 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. The implication of the denouement is that the conventional planet Kin Arad will build is in fact the readers' own " Earth". By the end of the story, Kin comes to the further suspicion that the builders of the flat world constructed the whole universe. The evidence of previous races would then be hoaxes, and the flat world itself would be a prank by the universe’s construction crew – analogous to the artificial strata Kin and the Company manufacture, and the occasional prankster employees inserting hoaxes in the artificial strata. The joy of this one is of course, once again, the fact that it pre-empts the Discworld so wonderfully. You can clearly see PTerry's mind cogs whirring and the imagination is startling. However, he isn't particularly adept at writing sci-fi: again, we have stuttering explanations and quite shoddy sci-fi elements where it feels like he was truly excited by this piece of technology but half-way through telling us about it he got a bit fed up. 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.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. Humans Through Alien Eyes: Some elements of this, particularly when considering what the different races view as normal behaviour, and vice-versa. There are over 40 books in the Discworld series, of which four are written for children. The first of these, The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents, won the Carnegie Medal.

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. 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.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.” 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. All Myths Are True: On Flat Earth. Apart from its shape, dragons, giant turtles and demons are shown. 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'.