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. I love Pratchett's Disc World books. They are like literary potato chips to me, I can't read just one. I reread them when life is being particularly difficult and I need a safe and enjoyable place to park my brain. So, if you love Terry Pratchett, then you'll surely love this, not because its good, but it gives you further insight into the man and his writing. 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.

I'd read it before, probably twice, but as it turns out I seem to have remembered precisely 1% of this novel so this first re-read since Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency a year ago was much needed. Their ship is hit by one of the "planets" wandering on the interior of the sphere, so Kin, Marco, and Silver are forced to abandon ship. They land on the flat planet with the help of their "lift-belt" equipped suits, while their ship crashes. A return from the flat world now seems impossible, but hoping for assistance from the disc's mysterious builders, Kin, Marco, and Silver set off towards a structure they had spotted at the disc's hub. It is the only thing on the flat "Earth" which does not match the geography of the spherical Earth they left.And what a gem 'Strata' promised to be! One of his earliest books, written in 1981, exploring in infant form what would become the Discworld itself. What an opportunity to see an early foray into that universe. 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. 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. 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.

Strata was written before any of the Disc World books, and you can see the early incarnations of ideas that Disc World was based on. But only in the physical sense. Missing in Strata is the fiercely witty and finely honed writing that make Pratchett's later work such an addictive delight. And, of course, the characters who inhabit his later books. Interrupted Suicide: Marco's kung parents were stranded on Earth when he was born, and believed that a newborn kung acquires a soul from the nearest available dead individual. His father attempted to kill himself to provide his child with a soul of the right species, but was stopped by the shand he'd been meeting with when the news of his wife's labor reached him. A Science Fiction, pre- Discworld novel written by Terry Pratchett, published in 1981. It explores the possibility of a Flat World, the concept that would go on to become the Discworld. 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.In Kin's Earth America is called Valhalla and was colonized 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. 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.’” Stealth Pun: Pleading for its freedom, a captive demon offers to bid its fellow-demon, "TRESOLAY", to make her more beautiful. Tress Olay is a common name for hair salons. Jago Jalo is much, much older, having spent many centuries in cryogenic sleep on board a probe traveling at relativistic speeds.