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Strata

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Logic Bomb: Marco insists he's a human because Kung believe that when they're born, the nearest soul of a dead person occupies their body, and his mother went into labour when they were among humans (apparently his father had to be stopped from killing himself so he could get to him first). Silver points out to Kin that humans don't believe such superstitions and therefore Marco has to be a pure Kung, and Marco overhears their conversation, causing a brief crisis of identity before he miserably admits Silver is right. I Like Those Odds: As Marco puts it, he outnumbers his human adversaries one to thirty. He is deadly serious about it, too. In Dec. of 2007, Pratchett disclosed that he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. On 18 Feb, 2009, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II.

Pratchett dreamed up The Carpet People as a teenager; a 1971 interview revealed that he was “putting the world to rights … with a friend one evening when the friend got up to emphasise a point and started to pace across the room. ‘Don’t do that’, said Terry suddenly, ‘You’ll disturb the carpet people.’” The characters are similarly developed than in The Dark Side of the Sun, but there seems an edge to them here that you don't see in that one, but you do see in Discworld. We also have the wonderful camaraderie of a cosmopolitan world. The Disc has no aliens, but they all seem alien even on such a small world. Starfish Aliens: The Ehfts — they have one leg and move with tentacles, record things with 'touch-books' and speak in translated broken English. (Of course, the other races are also more subtly weird to each other and humans, as part of the theme.) Early-Bird Cameo: A bar called the Broken Drum is featured. A similarly named bar later appears in the Discworld series. Here the name is explicitly explained — "You can't beat it".

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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.

A lot of the writing is a bit inscrutable. Even if I was fully alert and not tired, I sometimes struggled to figure out what was going on and who was talking. It’s totally not readable if you’re anywhere near sleepy. It's also worth noting that the story seems to takes place in a universe subtly different from our own. 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. 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. The alien creator race was in turn preceded by another alien race even more advanced, and and so on, right up the chain to Energy Beings. 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. 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 characterisation is poor and two-dimensional. Characters mainly exist as plot devices to drive the story to its conclusion. Scenes are rushed as Pratchett tries to manipulate his actors into the right places on stage before the next piece of 'business'. All Myths Are True: On Flat Earth. Apart from its shape, dragons, giant turtles and demons are shown.

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. Valhalla rather than North America — the Vikings discovered the continent and colonized it, thinking it was heaven, unlike on our Earth where they abandoned it after a only a few tentative settlements.

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Wotan rather than Jupiter — the Norse king of the gods rather than the Roman one. (Oddly enough, Venus is still Venus, but has a moon called Adonis). I was quite excited when this book came my way as I see it is an early version of the idea that later became the Discworld series so I was hopeful this would give me a good insight.

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