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

Rakhat-Bi Abdyssagin Five Way Interview

Rakhat-Bi Abdyssagin (born in 1999) is a distinguished composer, concert pianist, music theorist and researcher. Three of his piano CDs have been released in Germany. He started his undergraduate degree at the age of 13 in Kazakhstan, and having completed three musical doctorates in prominent Italian music institutions at the age of 20, he has mastered advanced composition techniques. In 2024 he completed a PhD in music at the University of St Andrews / Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (researching timbre-texture co-ordinate in avant- garde music), and was awarded The Silver Medal of The Worshipful Company of Musicians, London. He has held visiting affiliations at the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge and UCL, and has been lecturing and giving talks internationally since the age of 13. His latest book is Quantum Mechanics and Avant Garde Music . What links quantum physics and avant-garde music? The entire book is devoted to this question. To put it briefly, there are many different link...

Should we question science?

I was surprised recently by something Simon Singh put on X about Sabine Hossenfelder. I have huge admiration for Simon, but I also have a lot of respect for Sabine. She has written two excellent books and has been helpful to me with a number of physics queries - she also had a really interesting blog, and has now become particularly successful with her science videos. This is where I'm afraid she lost me as audience, as I find video a very unsatisfactory medium to take in information - but I know it has mass appeal. This meant I was concerned by Simon's tweet (or whatever we are supposed to call posts on X) saying 'The Problem With Sabine Hossenfelder: if you are a fan of SH... then this is worth watching.' He was referencing a video from 'Professor Dave Explains' - I'm not familiar with Professor Dave (aka Dave Farina, who apparently isn't a professor, which is perhaps a bit unfortunate for someone calling out fakes), but his videos are popular and he...

Everything is Predictable - Tom Chivers *****

There's a stereotype of computer users: Mac users are creative and cool, while PC users are businesslike and unimaginative. Less well-known is that the world of statistics has an equivalent division. Bayesians are the Mac users of the stats world, where frequentists are the PC people. This book sets out to show why Bayesians are not just cool, but also mostly right. Tom Chivers does an excellent job of giving us some historical background, then dives into two key aspects of the use of statistics. These are in science, where the standard approach is frequentist and Bayes only creeps into a few specific applications, such as the accuracy of medical tests, and in decision theory where Bayes is dominant. If this all sounds very dry and unexciting, it's quite the reverse. I admit, I love probability and statistics, and I am something of a closet Bayesian*), but Chivers' light and entertaining style means that what could have been the mathematical equivalent of debating angels on...

Search This Blog