Strata

"So obviously Terry Pratchett is a name that almost everyone will know, but people may not know that before he became an enormous writing star with the Discworld books , he had written a few other very non-Discworld books, including a couple of genuinely fascinating hard sci fi books. They are written for younger readers. There’s one called The Dark Side of the Sun , which is also very good, but my absolute favourite is Strata . This book will always have a place close to my heart because it’s one of the first books I read as a teenager that just had a completely jaw-dropping reveal, that turns absolutely everything going on in the book completely on its head . Strata is one, and Diana Wynne Jones wrote the others. It was written before he started the Discworld books, but it is the proto Discworld book, weirdly enough, because it’s a hard science fiction book where the space explorers discover a flat earth. It’s not on an elephant on a turtle, alas, but it is a completely impossible flat earth that has patently been made by some unbelievably powerful elder civilization. And the main characters come from a civilization of terraformers who got their terraforming technology from a different incredibly powerful alien civilization, and that group itself was aware of a past civilization… There is this idea of continuous creation, where the idea of a natural universe may, in fact, be a complete fiction, because there appears to be this history of everything in the universe being changed artificially by various civilizations for their own conditions, even down to early stars. So these terraformers are aware that they’re working in that tradition. And they found this artifact that seems to point to some other creative civilization they were not aware of. Obviously, they want to go and explore it. It’s a flat Earth – it’s not just a flat world, it’s a flat Earth . It seems to be operating circa the ninth century: there are basically Vikings , there is a sort of church – there are recognizable cultures and nations and things like that. So what on earth is going on? That’s what the book is about. And when you find out what is going on – or certainly, when I found out what was going on when I was whatever-teen – it was such a gobsmacking moment of revelation, I have never forgotten it. It is genuinely fascinating. It’s big science fiction stuff, despite the fact that this flat Earth comes complete with medieval stuff like dragons. It is absolutely hard sci fi, and really thought-provoking. I can’t quite remember how old Pratchett was when he wrote this, but he was very young. You can see his trademark imagination, and also a lot of his trademark humour fully on display before he even gets as far as The Colour of Magic. It’s not the full-on comedy of the Discworld books. But there’s a lot of light-heartedness, it’s a very amusing read. The main character’s voice is wry and humorous, and there’s a certain amount of situational slapstick… There’s a tradition he’s writing in, the idea of ‘very advanced space-farers find medieval planet and have zany adventures’ – and honestly, I think he’s writing it considerably better than most of the established writers he’s bouncing off. But you’ve got a lot of that fun. And a lot of situations where, yes, you’ve got all this amazing technology, and then something goes wrong, and you suddenly find out how much you were relying on the amazing technology, once you have been divested of it. Also there are some very fun aliens; only one of the crew of the ship is human. A lot of fun aliens are fun because they’ve got some really interesting speculative biology behind them. In this case, they’re fun just because they are two very fun characters. There is an enormous bear thing, which is also a multilingual, very gentle scholar – up until she gets hungry. And then there is the last of a group of old feudal warriors, who no longer do that sort of thing. This is a character type that I have gone back to a few times myself, and it’s absolutely inspired by this character, who I remember loving at the time. The very quirky descriptive language that Pratchett is known for is there…. We go to a planet that’s very wet, with big tides, and everyone goes around in little boats. There’s one bit where he’s describing a community of these people punting about in little coracles as a ‘regatta for golems’, which I just love and has stayed with me."