Strata (novel)

Last updated

Strata
StrataPratchett.jpg
First edition
Author Terry Pratchett
CountryUnited Kingdom
LanguageEnglish
Genre Science fiction comedy
Publisher Colin Smythe
Publication date
1981

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 .

Contents

Although it takes place in a different fictional universe and is more science fiction than fantasy, it could be said to be a kind of precursor to the Discworld novels, as it also features a flat Earth similar to the Discworld. It has been called a "preconsideration" of Discworld, though the plot and characters are modelled on (or parodies of) the novel Ringworld by Larry Niven. [1]

Plot summary

Kin Arad is a human planetary engineer working for "the Company", a human organisation that manufactures habitable planets using techniques and equipment salvaged from an extinct alien race, the "Spindle Kings", who excelled at terraforming.

The express purpose of the Company's planet-manufacturing business is to create dispersed branches of humanity, diverse enough to ensure the whole species' survival for eternity. The Earth's population in the past has been decimated due to the lethal "Mindquakes", epidemic mass deaths caused by too much homogeneity among the populace. [2] :  279 

All planets built by the Company are carefully crafted with artificial strata containing synthetic fossils, indistinguishable from the real thing. On occasion, however, mischievous Company employees attempt to place anomalous objects in the strata as practical jokes, like running shoes and other out-of-place artifacts, hoping to raise confusion among future archaeologists when the planets' beginnings have been long forgotten. However the Company forbids this, and secretly monitors the generated strata in order to detect embedded jokes, fearing such actions may cause the collapse of entire civilizations when the artifacts are eventually unearthed. [2] :  14–15 

Kin and two aliens are recruited by the mysterious Jago Jalo to join 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 nicknamed 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.

When the team rendezvous with Jago Jalo on the kung homeworld, the violent Jalo unexpectedly has a heart attack and dies. Kin Arad is shocked by the large store of weapons on-board Jalo's spaceship, and has misgivings about the expedition; Silver and Marco, however, see the possibility of reaping great technological rewards and launch the vessel on autopilot.

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.

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.

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.

What Kin Arad knows as "Reme" is called "Rome" on the disc, and there is a strange "Christos cult" that is completely unfamiliar to Kin. Also, Venus is conspicuously lacking its giant (lunar-sized) moon "Adonis", which dominates the sunset sky on the Earth Kin Arad came from, which was formative in leading humanity to an early heliocentric world view. [2] :  130–131 

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.

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.

The travelers eventually reach the structure at the hub and make contact with the disc’s automated control-systems. They are told that (aside from the recent damage) the sheer build-up of entropy in the old machinery has exceeded the capacity of its advanced robotic maintenance. Catastrophic failure threatens the disc’s further existence. The machines offer to exchange their advanced technology for the construction of a real (spherical) planet as a refuge for the disc "Earth" inhabitants. Kin, the planetary engineer, agrees. She is excited about the massive task at hand; just like the parallel character Louis Wu in Ringworld , Kin is over two hundred years old, and in danger of becoming tired of life.

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.

Interpretation

The history of the protagonists' home-planet "Earth" in Strata unfolded very differently from the readers' Earth:

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.

Humanity appears to be merely the latest of a long series of intelligent species who have evolved, altered the universe to better suit themselves, and then died out before the next species arose and started the cycle all over again. Before humans, there were the Great Spindle Kings, a race of acutely claustrophobic telepaths, who could live only a few hundred per planet and therefore built entire worlds from scratch to accommodate their population. Before them were the Wheelers, who were themselves preceded by increasingly alien races extending all the way back to the Big Bang.

All of what is known about the intelligent species who have lived before humans is revealed to be incorrect near the end of the book, when the Disc's computer system (built by the universe's actual creators) reveals to Kin that the entire universe is only 70,000 years old and that evidence and remains of long dead civilizations were fabricated by the universe's creators to make the universe appear older than it is (much like the Company-fabricated prehistoric fossils on their created worlds to make them appear older than they really were). Finally, the fact that the computer systems on the disc "Earth" need humans, implies that the universe was itself created by humans as a place for themselves to live.

Translations

Related Research Articles

Known Space is the fictional setting of about a dozen science fiction novels and several collections of short stories by American writer Larry Niven. It has also become a shared universe in the spin-off Man-Kzin Wars anthologies. The Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDB) catalogs all works set in the fictional universe that includes Known Space under the series name Tales of Known Space, which was the title of a 1975 collection of Niven's short stories. The first-published work in the series, which was Niven's first published piece, was "The Coldest Place", in the December 1964 issue of If magazine, edited by Frederik Pohl. This was the first-published work in the 1975 collection.

<i>Ringworld</i> 1970 science fiction novel by Larry Niven

Ringworld is a 1970 science fiction novel by Larry Niven, set in his Known Space universe and considered a classic of science fiction literature. Ringworld tells the story of Louis Wu and his companions on a mission to the Ringworld, an enormous rotating ring, an alien construct in space 186 million miles in diameter. Niven later wrote three sequel novels and then cowrote, with Edward M. Lerner, four prequels and a final sequel; the five latter novels constitute the Fleet of Worlds series. All the novels in the Ringworld series tie into numerous other books set in Known Space. Ringworld won the Nebula Award in 1970, as well as both the Hugo Award and Locus Award in 1971.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Terry Pratchett</span> English fantasy author (1948–2015)

Sir Terence David John Pratchett was an English author, humorist, and satirist, best known for his 41 comic fantasy novels set on the Discworld, and for the apocalyptic comedy novel Good Omens (1990) which he wrote with Neil Gaiman.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Earth in science fiction</span>

An overwhelming majority of fiction is set on or features the Earth, as the only planet home to humans. This also holds true of science fiction, despite perceptions to the contrary. Works that focus specifically on Earth may do so holistically, treating the planet as one semi-biological entity. Counterfactual depictions of the shape of the Earth, be it flat or hollow, are occasionally featured. A personified, living Earth appears in a handful of works. In works set in the far future, Earth can be a center of space-faring human civilization, or just one of many inhabited planets of a galactic empire, and sometimes destroyed by ecological disaster or nuclear war or otherwise forgotten or lost.

<i>The Dark Side of the Sun</i> 1976 novel by Terry Pratchett

The Dark Side of the Sun is a science fiction novel by Terry Pratchett, first published in 1976.

<i>The Colour of Magic</i> 1983 Discworld novel by Terry Pratchett

The Colour of Magic is a 1983 fantasy comedy novel by Terry Pratchett, and is the first book of the Discworld series. The first printing of the British edition consisted of only 506 copies. Pratchett has described it as "an attempt to do for the classical fantasy universe what Blazing Saddles did for Westerns."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pierson's Puppeteers</span> Fictional species

Pierson's Puppeteers, often known just as Puppeteers, are a fictional alien race from American author Larry Niven's Known Space books. The race first appeared in Niven’s novella Neutron Star.

<i>Thief of Time</i> 2001 Discworld novel by Terry Pratchett

Thief of Time is a fantasy novel by British writer Terry Pratchett, the 26th book in his Discworld series. It was the last Discworld novel with a cover by Josh Kirby.

<i>The Science of Discworld</i> 1999 book by Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen

The Science of Discworld is a 1999 book by novelist Terry Pratchett and popular science writers Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen. Three sequels, The Science of Discworld II: The Globe, The Science of Discworld III: Darwin's Watch, and The Science of Discworld IV: Judgement Day, have been written by the same authors.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alderson disk</span> Hypothetical artificial solar megastructure

An Alderson disk is a hypothetical artificial astronomical megastructure, like Larry Niven's Ringworld and the Dyson sphere. The disk is a giant platter with a thickness of several thousand miles. The Sun rests in the hole at the center of the disk. The outer perimeter of an Alderson disk would be roughly equivalent to the orbit of Mars or Jupiter. According to the proposal, a sufficiently large disk would have a larger mass than its Sun.

<i>Halo: The Flood</i> 2003 novel by William C. Dietz

Halo: The Flood is a military science fiction novel by William C. Dietz, based on the Halo series of video games and based specifically on the 2001 video game Halo: Combat Evolved, the first game in the series. The book was released in April 2003 and is the second Halo novel. Closely depicting the events of the game, The Flood begins with the escape of a human ship Pillar of Autumn from enemy aliens known as the Covenant. When the Pillar of Autumn unexpectedly discovers a massive artifact known as "Halo", the humans must square off against the Covenant and a second terrifying force in a desperate attempt to uncover Halo's secrets and stay alive. Though the book roughly follows the same events of the Xbox game, featuring identical dialogue, Dietz also describes events not seen by the game's protagonist, the super-soldier Master Chief.

Louis Gridley Wu, a fictional character, is the protagonist in the Ringworld series of books, written by Larry Niven.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Megastructure</span> Very large artificial object

A megastructure is a very large artificial object, although the limits of precisely how large vary considerably. Some apply the term to any especially large or tall building. Some sources define a megastructure as an enormous self-supporting artificial construct. The products of megascale engineering or astroengineering are megastructures.

<i>The Science of Discworld III: Darwins Watch</i> 2005 book by Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen

The Science of Discworld III: Darwin's Watch (2005) is a book set on the Discworld, by Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen. It is the sequel to The Science of Discworld and The Science of Discworld II: The Globe.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Discworld (world)</span> Fictitious setting in the Discworld franchise

The Discworld is the fictional setting for all of Terry Pratchett's Discworld fantasy novels. It consists of a large disc resting on the backs of four huge elephants which are standing on the back of an enormous turtle, named Great A'Tuin as it slowly swims through space. Magic is an everyday feature of life on Discworld, whilst even science has unearthly qualities. The similarities to Planet Earth only exacerbate the strangeness of Discworld itself.

Planets outside of the Solar System have been featured as settings in works of fiction. Most of these fictional planets do not vary significantly from the Earth. Exceptions include planets with sentience, planets without stars, and planets in multiple-star systems where the orbital mechanics can lead to exotic day–night or seasonal cycles.

<i>The Long Earth</i> 2012 science fiction novel by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter

The Long Earth is the first novel in a collaborative science fiction series by British authors Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter.

"Bigger Than Worlds" is an essay by the American science fiction writer Larry Niven. It was first published in March 1974 in Analog magazine, and has been anthologized in A Hole in Space (1974) and in Playgrounds of the Mind (1991). It reviews a number of proposals, not inconsistent with the known laws of physics, which have been made for habitable artificial astronomical megastructures.

References

  1. ↑ The Annotated Pratchett File v9.0 - Strata
  2. 1 2 3 Pratchett, Terry (1988). Strata. Corgi Books.
  3. ↑ Original publisher's homepage Archived 2005-08-28 at the Wayback Machine
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.