Strata

A Science Fiction, pre-Discworld novel written by Terry Pratchett. It explores the possibility of a Flat World, the concept that would go on to become the Discworld.

Kin Arad's job is building worlds. She works for a mysterious organisation called only the Company. But then one day she is contacted by a man claiming to be, essentially, an early space probe who was sent off into space. He enlists her to travel to a strange world that he claims to be flat. So Kin teams up with a kung (4-armed amphibious Proud Warrior Race Guy), Marco, and a shand (tusked, hungry and bear-like, but ultimately friendly), Silver, and they head off to investigate this world.

Once there, they find a world that pretty much matches with the old myths about the Earth -- it's flat, things go round it, stars are actually points on a sphere surrounding it, and so on. Also, the world is still in the dark ages, and demons very much exist.

It's also worth noting that the story actually takes place in a universe subtly different from our own, and that aside from the main story, the book also delves into the nature of humanity (comparing it to the three or four alien races that are mentioned), and reveals another long-dead alien race that manufactured worlds wholesale -- including, it is implied, Earth itself. Indeed, these had a previous ancestor who was even more advanced, and those too, right up the chain to Energy Beings. Anyway, this is evident from the use of alternate names for places, particularly Reme rather than Rome, and mentioning that Venus has a moon named Adonis. Furthermore, the main characters don't seem to have heard of Christianity, although Wicca and Buddhism exist. The flat world appears to match our own in all these points, except for being flat and only covering the equivalent of the Eastern Hemisphere. The implication is meant to be that our Earth is the one Kin agrees to build to replace the Disc near the end of the book.

It has very many parallels (or rather antiparallels) with Larry Niven's Ringworld.

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Tropes used in Strata include:

• Absurdly Sharp Blade
• Action Girl: Kin.
• Age Without Youth: It's stated that with Day Bills to buy treatments offered only by the Company, you can get immortality, but nothing will stop you from looking your age.
  • While many men on the disc seem to be interested in Kin (if she looked 200 years this would not be the case), she worked for the company and so kept up her rejuvenation treaments. However, hair never gets past the first century.
• Allohistorical Allusion: In Kin's Earth America is called Valhalla and was colonised by the Vikings. However the resulting state uses a flag involving white and red stripes, just like our world's USA, but in this case they stand for blood and ice.
• Alternate History: Kin's Earth is mostly similar to ours, but many places have different names and Christianity apparently doesn't exist (because it's first discovered on the Flat Earth).
  • Although this is a bit inconsistent, because at one point Kin says the flat world looks like "the vision of some mediaeval monk".
    • Possibly Eastern traditions of monasticism spread into Europe in place of Christianity's?
• All Myths Are True: On Flat Earth. Apart from its shape, dragons, giant turtles and demons are shown.
• Artificial Gravity: On the entire Flat Earth. A lot of effort is put in by the main characters to find out why.
• Auto Kitchen: The dumbwaiter, which is built around a Matter Replicator and is apparently able to supply them endlessly with food and drink. The medieval priests denounce it as evil and try to destroy it.
• Beast Man: The Shandi, who have giant tusks and need to eat constantly to stop them from going berserk.
• Bizarre Alien Biology: Described in some detail, particularly the Kung, and Josh Kirby's illustrations on the front cover make it more obvious. Also the Ehfts, seen once near the beginning.
  • This is used as a plot point in regards to the Shandi; they can't consume proteins from foods that don't originate on Shand, and are ritual cannibals. This proves a problem after their Dumbwaiter is destroyed.
• Blue and Orange Morality: The Kung will become mindless, nigh-invulnerable killing machines if provoked, while the Shandi have a tradition of fighting to the death, with the winner allowed to feast on the corpse of the loser, and will go into a kind of feeding frenzy if deprived of food, but are not generally warlike. Humans are somewhere between them on the scale of violence. One major theme of the book is that the aliens can't be judged by human values, and vice-versa.
• Dark Age Europe
• Early-Bird Cameo: A bar called the Broken Drum features - that name was later reused for the Discworld series. Here it is explicitly explained - "You can't beat it".
• Earth Is Young: The main character designs planets for a living, and it is explained that it is important to give each planet a "history" to make it feel like something billions of years old rather than just a big lump of rock. At the end of the book it turns out that the entire Universe was constructed with this in mind and is only about seventy thousand years old.
• Earth That Used to Be Better: Earth's population was decimated by the Mindquakes (people spontaneously died from the psychic pressure of overpopulation), and there's now a larger population of robots. Also, all but a few hundred books were lost in the collapse of civilisation.
• Emotion Suppression: "Dissociation" is a type of meditation with this effect.
• Energy Beings: As part of Kin's great theory of the origins of man, there was a chain of Recursive Precursors -- ever more advanced aliens going back through the history of the universe, right back to something like this.
• Faster-Than-Light Travel: Through the "Elsewhere".
• Flat World
• Istanbul (Not Constantinople): A few on Kin's Earth -- on the Flat Earth they either don't exist or are the same as our Earth:
  • Reme rather than Rome -- Remus won the naming rights to the city.
  • Valhalla rather than North America -- the Vikings discovered the continent and colonised it, thinking it was heaven, unlike on our Earth where they abandoned it after a while.
  • Also applies to the solar system, as one of its outer planets is called Wotan. It's not clear which planet this refers to, or how many others use different names, e.g. Venus is still Venus.
• Jet Pack: Sort of; the suits that the three main characters wear are either jet packs, or keep them hovering in the air by some other means, and it's not quite made clear which.
• Horny Vikings: Kin is warned by Silver that she may have to "engage in sexual relations" with various men in order to gain acceptance, particularly the Vikings that they first encounter when landing on the Flat Earth. However, they're too afraid of someone who's just come flying in that they worship her instead of taking advantage.
• Humanoid Aliens: kinda. One is a frog with four arms and the other is a bear with tusks (who is also a linguist).
• Humanity Is Superior: Humanity rules the galaxy, and the few alien races we see in any detail have crippling physical or psychological problems. Kung are neurotically afraid of everything except immediate physical danger, go berserk if threatened; and the Chew Toy-like Shand are not only instinctively cannibalistic but turn into mindless eating machines if they don't feed regularly. The closest thing to a similar problem humans have is getting bored because they live too long.
• Humans Through Alien Eyes: Some elements of this, particularly when considering what the different races view as normal behaviour, and vice-versa.
• Hyperspace Is a Scary Place: Invoked everytime they travel through the Elsewhere, which is nothingness.
• Mars Needs Women: Inverted with male warrior-caste Kung, who are apparently so hypermasculine that some hetero human females feel compelled to jump their bones even in public. Kung males don't reciprocate this urge, and may use physical force to keep human women at arms' length.
• Medieval Morons
• The Middle Ages
• Multi-Armed and Dangerous: The Kung. It's mentioned several times that Marco is able to beat off humans in a 20:1 fight, or better.
• Named After Their Planet: The Kung and Shandi.
• One-Way Trip: The philosophy behind the Terminus probes, where convicted criminals were given the option of being cryogenically frozen and piloting exploration ships on one-way trips to other star systems in lieu of execution.
• Our Demons Are Different: They're artificial lifeforms that are teleported between their vats and the outside world hundreds of times a second, moving a small amount with each iteration, akin to a stop-motion film. The demons themselves aren't aware of this.
• Precision F-Strike: Kin's line "A fucking Valhalla machine" is quite a shock considering TP usually avoids swearwords of this calibre. It's also the only use even in this book.
• Proud Warrior Race Guy: The Kung.
• Raygun Gothic
• Really Seven Hundred Years Old: Kin. The Company's main currency is also lifespan, meaning that the richest people literally live the longest. It's implied that the oldest folk get bored and get more reckless.
• Recursive Precursors: An important theme in the book. As far as human archaeology knows, before the current four races there were the Spindle Kings, beings so prone to psychic pressure that they could barely stand to be within a mile of each other, and before them there were the Wheelers, aliens who trundled along on biological wheels. The Spindles were so shocked by the discovery of Wheeler artefacts -- previously having believed themselves to be the only race -- that the psychic shock killed them all. Kin theorises an even longer chain of Precursors stretching back endlessly, all using Strata Machines to remake planets in their image, and writes about it in her book Continuous Creation.
  • In the end it turns out that the Wheelers, Spindles and the others all never existed. There was only one race of Precursors, and they made the universe just seventy thousand years before, faking all the fossils and remnants of the others to make it look older.
• Running Gag: Every time she meets someone new, upon discovering that she really is that Kin Arad, they whip out whatever their local version of a copy of her book Continuous Creation is to have her autograph it.
• Single Biome Planet: Kung is a Swamp Planet where the rain never stops -- naturally, this implies an amphibious alien.
  • Arguably this is averted. There are mentions of areas of grassland, which humans would cultivate but the Kung view as desert.
• Starfish Aliens: The Ehfts are the only ones that we see -- they have one leg and move with tentacles.
  • The only anatomical example. Mentally, every race we see is innately weird to every other race.
• Subspace or Hyperspace: The "Elsewhere" -- described as an eternity of bleak despair.
• Sufficiently Advanced Aliens: The Spindles, referred to in the backstory, who are implied to have created Earth. It's also implied that human technology for creating worlds came from the Spindles.
  • Although it turns out the Spindles never existed, and the real Precursors in fact took on the form of humans and presumably the other modern races.
• Tomato in the Mirror: Kin is briefly 'awakened' by the technology of the Disc at the end and we discover that she, and presumably everyone else, are Precursors who deliberately forgot their origins 'because if One cannot forget, how can One learn?' This concept was also used in The Dark Side of the Sun.