Delven (Dutch) (published together with The Dark Side of the Sun in one volume in 1982: republished separately as Strata in 1994) [3]

Kin Arad is a high-ranking official of the Company. After twenty-one decades of living, and with the help of memory surgery, she is at the top of her profession. Discovering two of her employees have placed a fossilized plesiosaur in the wrong stratum, not to mention the fact it is holding a placard which reads "End Nuclear Testing Now", doesn't dismay the woman who built a mountain range in the shape of her initials during her own high-spirited youth. Artificial Gravity: On the entire Flat Earth. A lot of effort is put in by the main characters to find out why. 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. That's more like it! Reading Pratchett chronologically, I was disappointed by the first two books. They were funny, but chaotic and disjointed. Strata wraps all the chaos and absurdity into a story which successfully holds it together, and stays strong throughout. The further along it went, it felt more and more familiar to Terry’s Discworld style of writing and action.Age Without Youth: It's stated that without Day Bills to buy treatments offered only by the Company, you can get immortality via other genetic treatments, but you'll look your true chronological 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 treatments. However, hair never gets past the first century. The history of the protagonists' home-planet "Earth" in Strata unfolded very differently from the readers' Earth: Tuhle knihu Pratchett vydal ve stejném roce jako první Zeměplochu Barva kouzel. To je znát i na dosud nevypsaném Pratchettově stylu, ale také na tématu tohoto románu, které evidentně nešlo autorovi z mysli. Strata is very closely modelled on a "classic" science fiction story by Larry Niven, Ringworld. Niven designed a giant world in the shape of a wedding ring with a radius of one astronomical unit. That is, the ring was the same diameter as the Earth's orbit around the Sun. The ring spun fast enough to generate artificial gravity on the inner surface and was warmed by a sun similar to our own at the centre of the ring. The inner surface of the ring was an artificial world with mountains, seas and forests, and a habitable area one million times that of the Earth.

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.Monstrous Cannibalism: Zigzagged with the Shandi, which have inborn cannibalistic tendencies but mostly make do with replicated meat, while some have formalized/civilized the practice via a dueling tradition (Silver admits to having been in a few duels herself, which she obviously won). They'll still become ravenous animals that eat anything that they can catch if they go hungry for long, but Silver is graciously willing to let Kin and Marco kill her before she can degenerate that far. I'm glad the local library had Strata, and that I read it. The archeology of a favorite author's writing can be interesting, especially if you It has very many parallels (or rather antiparallels) with Larry Niven's Ringworld; to some extent it was intended as a spoof of it. Niven thought it was a perfectly fine work of Big Dumb Object epic SF by itself.