Skip to main content

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

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Who Invented the Computer? – Ian Watson

Ian Watson is the author of  The Universal Machine  and featured in a recent  Four Way Interview . Saturday June 23 2012 was the centenary of the birth of Alan Turing, the troubled genius who invented the modern computer. Why though do so few people recognize his name and his great achievements? In 1936 English mathematician Alan Turing, published a paper,  On Computable Numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem . This became the foundation of computing. In it Turing presented a theoretical machine that could solve any problem that could be described by instructions encoded on a paper tape. A Turing Machine could calculate square roots, whilst another might solve Sudoku puzzles. Turing demonstrated you could construct a single  Universal Machine  that could simulate any Turing Machine. One machine solving any problem for which a program could be written – sound familiar? He’d invented the computer. Then,  computers  were peop...
Post a Comment
Read more

Ignorance: How it drives science – Stuart Firestein *****

This is a delightful little book that really gets you thinking. I stress the ‘little’ part not as a negative, but as a good thing. There is nothing worse than fat, bloated popular science books where the author feels they have to get 120,000 words to be taken seriously. This is the sort of book that can be read in a couple of hours – but you will get so much more out of it than one of those tedious doorstops. The premise underlying the book is in once sense extremely simple, yet is fundamental to an understanding of what science is and what scientists do. And it is an understanding that is totally at odds with the typical way science is portrayed both in university lectures and popular science books. As Stuart Firestein points out, what is important is not the facts, but rather the area of ignorance. The interesting part and the fundamental heart of science is not about what we know, but about what we don’t know and where we want to look next. Take this lovely quote: ‘Working ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Star Book – Peter Grego ****

This attractive landscape format book combines an excellent introduction to the stars and basic astronomy with a set of star maps, plus in depth looks at some of the stars featured, with a  bonus section on the solar system. Amazon says it’s a hardback, but in fact it’s a paperback with a rather ingenious cover – you can’t tell from the photo, but the words ‘The Star Book’ are punched through as a series of holes that show the white paper of the next page beneath. Like many astronomy/space books, the cover lacks shelf appeal because it is mostly black, but at least there is some original thought here. Unlike many books in this format which tend to concentrate on the pictures, there is a good deal of excellent text by Peter Grego, so there was no feeling that you were only getting the star maps and star ‘biographies’, something these days much more suited to an iPad or smartphone app. Instead, the opening 30 or so pages give a very good introduction that would be valuable to ...
Post a Comment
Read more