Strata

I first read this book in 1982, when no Discworld books had been published, and Terry Pratchett was an unknown author. As far as I remember, I thought it wasn't a bad book, but it was an obscure oddity; I put it aside and didn't think again about the book or its author for years.At last I decided to read it again in 2024, and it's better than I remembered; indeed, it seems surprisingly better thought out and more coherent than the first two Discworld books. The story has a beginning and an end, and the plot travels from one to the other with only minor digressions.It's vaguely reminiscent of Larry Niven's [b:Ringworld 7987601 Ringworld Larry Niven https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1270514178l/7987601.SY75.jpg 924711], and could be considered as a sort of Terry Pratchett cover version of the same general idea, like the Jimi Hendrix version of Bob Dylan's “All Along The Watchtower”.[b:Ringworld 7987601 Ringworld Larry Niven https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1270514178l/7987601.SY75.jpg 924711] is quite a good book, but it's not my favourite of Larry Niven's books. This cover version is not necessarily better, but it's interestingly different. We're not talking about plagiarism here, but about creative reworking of a roughly similar idea.The early chapters are promising. The later chapters have a plot and a central concept, but they don't come over clearly enough, being somewhat obscured by details. At this early stage of his career, Pratchett didn't have quite the right skills to make a success of this kind of story, although he made a good try at it. Would he have been able to do better later on? I don't know. Although he started off writing science fiction (which this is), perhaps he was always better suited to fantasy.