The Dark Side of the Sun (SF) - Terry Pratchett ***(*)

Terry Pratchett was a great writer of humorous fantasy novels, but not everyone knows he tried his hand at straight science fiction before starting on the Discworld books. I had a real problem rating this book - I really need to be able to give it four stars for ideas and three for quality of writing.

Pratchett takes us on a whirlwind trip (there's probably not more than about 50,000 words in the book, but he packs a huge amount in) around a future universe where there a few humanish species (plus intelligent robots and a couple of strange entities like a conscious planet that acts as a bank), living in the shadow of a much older, mysterious disappeared species known as the Jokers, who left behind vast, incomprehensible monuments. The central character, Dom Salabos, is about to take over his planet-wide family company... except first he has to survive increasingly frequent attempts on his life and to discover a destiny put in place by his father.

To get the less positive bits out of the way, it's not a particularly original plot, and Pratchett is still finding his feet as an author - it can sometimes be difficult to follow his writing, and the whole thing is incredibly rushed (the love interest, for example, is introduced so late in the book that she (one of the few female significant characters) is little more than a caricature. Equally, some really interesting settings which look designed to be the locations for interesting set pieces (a maze planet, for example) are just used in the background, suggesting this was perhaps intended to be a significantly longer book. Perhaps the weakest aspect is 'probability math', a version of Asimov's psychohistory on steroids, which is even more improbable (ahem) than the original and is tied into a kind of many worlds hypothesis universe.

However, on the plus side, there's loads of invention here. Although some aliens are classic humans in a different shape, others are genuinely alien-feeling. There's lots of fun technology (including a sarky robot that puts Marvin the paranoid android to shame) and Pratchett piles on the content, from an inverted society where the rich lead very spartan lives to the aforementioned one-of-a-kind conscious oddities. For Discworld fans, you will even find a couple of religious concepts (Hogswatchnight and Small Gods) that he reused in his fantasy books.

It's a fascinating period piece (first published in 1976), both for Pratchett fans to see how his writing evolved and as a piece of idea-packed, if imperfectly written, science fiction.

Paperback:

Kindle:

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

Six Maths Essentials - Terence Tao *****

This is a book in the 'compact collection of science/maths essays' category beloved of publishers because they can charge hardback prices for fewer than 80 pages of text - but don't let that put you off, because it's excellent. Terence Tao introduces six areas of mathematics: numbers, algebra, geometry, probability, analysis and dynamics. Each of these is descriptive rather than practical (there are only a couple of school-level equations in sight), done in a way that gets to the heart of 'what's the point of this subject' with precision and a good level of storytelling. It's a shame in a way that analysis and dynamics form the final third of the book (apart from a short epilogue), because they don't work as well as the other sections. For the first four, practically everyone will have a vague idea of what they are and what they do - but Tao is then able to open our eyes to their wonders and power. Because Tao has to stay away from any detail of what...

To Think Like a Statistician - Bradley Efron ****

An old advert had the tag line 'it does what it says on the tin'. There's a vagueness about the title of this book that requires Bayes' theorem to work out whether it really does what it says on the cover. If you think this book will tell you how to think like a statistician, it's unlikely that you will be satisfied. But if you think it will tell you how a statistician thinks, it is much closer to being true. Sadly this makes the tag line I've seen 'Why you don’t need to be a statistician to think like one' entirely wrong. In the book, Bradley Efron gives us plenty of detail on how statisticians apply probability to try to understand better what is happening in the world. He makes a great point that his high school mathematical education consisted primarily of algebra, geometry and trigonometry. While these 'proved invaluable to my subsequent scientific studies' they hardly ever crop up in the news, where the one mathematical subject that does oc...

Bradley Efron - Five Way Interview

Bradley Efron is Max Stein Professor emeritus of Statistics and of Biomedical Data Science at Stanford University. He is the inventor of the bootstrap method for assessing statistical accuracy and has published extensively on the theory and practice of data analysis. He has served as president of the American Statistical Association and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. A MacArthur fellow, he is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and received the National Medal of Science in 2005. His remarkable contributions to his field were recognized again with the 2018 International Prize in Statistics, which noted his influence on 'statistical thinking in every way, including new pathways in how we communicate and teach statistics to all.' His latest book is To Think Like a Statistician . Why mathematics? Abstract mathematics and I had an amicable divorce following my Caltech graduation. (I really wasn’t very good at it.) Statistics is a branch of applied mathematics...

Search This Blog