The Dark Side of the Sun

by Terry Pratchett

Paperback, 1988

Status

Available

Call number

823

Genres

Science Fiction

All Topics

Fiction

Collection

Accelerated Reader

Publication

Corgi Books (1988), Edition: New, 158 pages

Description

Dom Salabos has a lot of advantages. As heir to a huge fortune he has an excellent robot servant (with Man-Friday subcircuitry), a planet (the First Syrian Bank) as a godfather, a security chief who even runs checks on himself, and on Dom's home world even death is not always fatal. Things just couldn't be better. Why then, in an age when prediction is a science, is his future in doubt?

User reviews

LibraryThing member crazydave

Put simply Terry Pratchet's two science fiction novels are my favourite.
The Dark side of the Sun, is the story of a young man's search for the mystrious Jokers, whose artifects sprinkle the the corner of the galaxy where all known sapiant life has evolved. The p-math used in the book is a spoof on

the psycho-history from Asimov's Foundation Series.
Spolier. The "origin idea" is that the Jokers seeded the local are to evolve sapient life, to have someone with a different world view with whom to invetigate the universe better.

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13 more

LibraryThing member Lukerik

This really is a terribly good sf novel. It satirises the genre as does the later Colour of Magic with fantasy. Dune most often, though there are loads of references to other books too (and Star Trek I think). He also takes the mick out of exposition. At the end of one passage he says "Thank you

for your enquiry"! Cheeky git. Yet by satirising those very tropes he is also employing them and it all works very well. Readers of the Discworld novels will also be interested to see a number of words (Klatch / Hogswatch) that he was later to reuse

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LibraryThing member sloopjonb

Feeble SF parody included for completist reasons only; nothing to see here, move on, please.

LibraryThing member name99

Very very early Pratchett and man, it shows.

There are interesting ideas, and it seems like this is where Douglas Adams got a lot of his inspiration, but, honestly, it's pretty lame and not a patch on Pratchett's more recent stuff.

Not recommended unless you have lots of free time or are really

interested in seeing Pratchett's evolution as an author.

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LibraryThing member Darla

One of his early, pre-discworld books, about a world run by probability math

LibraryThing member verenka

This book is a non-discworld Terry Pratchett book, more science fiction than fantasy. There's space travel and funny alien races and planets and the search for the oldest people in the universe.

The story reminded me of Starship Titanic and Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. It has

elements of both and is similarly over the top, crazy and inventive. It might have been inspired by Douglas Adams but it's not a rip off. I liked it!

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LibraryThing member pauliharman

Disappointing, largely bland SF book by a giant of the fantasy genre. A few interesting ideas, but the ending was a bit of a let-down.

LibraryThing member ritaer

This early work by Pratchett contains some elements that will show up again in the Discworld series, such as Hogwatchnight. It is, however, more science fiction than fantasy, with robots, space travel, Earth colonies on alien planets, etc. The protagonist, Dom, is a member of the ruling family of

one such colony, a marshy planet shared with another race. He sets out on a quest to find the home of the mysterious Jokers, the earliest known race, who have left traces of their passing throughout the galaxies. He is accompanied by a sort of marsh rat pet and a robot servant with human level intelligence and a somewhat wiseguy persona. The plot is interesting, but somewhat predictable as Dom travels to exotic worlds, dodges a persistent assassin and meets mentors of a variety of races. The range of races, from carbon based swamp dwellers, intelligent bodies of water, living planets and sun dwelling creatures appears to have been influenced by the classic _Starmaker_ by Olaf Stapleton.

Fans of the Discworld witches will note the rather Zen style wicca known as Sadhim.

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LibraryThing member IAmAndyPieters

This is the first truly science fictiony book I've ever seen by Terry Pratchett. The narrative is clever and witty and there are the little bits and pieces that readers of the discworld series will recognise. The book is easily readable but I do find that many items are not sufficiently explained

and some items aren't explained at all. It deals with many races and it is not easy imagining them at time. I am glad for having read the book and will gladly do so again, but I feel that something is missing. Perhaps a prequel or a sequel in which more of the universe is explained...

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LibraryThing member clq

Getting into this book was harder than I'd like. Maybe it's my own fault, but usually when a book throws the reader into the middle of something completely new, it backtracks and spends a little time getting the reader up to speed. This book doesn't do that, making it a bit of a challenge.
That

said, once I got into The Dark Side of the Sun there was a payoff. The best thing about this book was the last few chapters. In hindsight it feels like the rest of the book was only there to lead up to the end, without providing much in itself. Yes, it's interesting and enjoyable a lot of the time, but I just don't feel like it gave back as much as I had to put into it, and for such a short book that is rare.

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LibraryThing member DLMorrese

This is one of Terry Pratchett's early science fiction novels. It's been years since I first read it, so I decided to do so again yesterday. It's quite good. You can see some of the ideas that evolved into Discworld elements in this. The scenes, however, are sparsely sketched, sometimes making it

difficult to visualize what is going on. Still, it is humorous and thought provoking. I recommend it.

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LibraryThing member JBarringer

This story has occasional nods to the rest of the fantasy world Pratchett built up for Discworld, but this is a sci-fi novel and not located in or near Discworld. In this book time and probability are in flux, as a young man goes off on a quest to find the world where a mysterious and ancient race

went after peppering part of the universe with life and occasional, odd towers and other artifacts.

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LibraryThing member fred_mouse

This is one of the earliest of Pratchett's works that I own, and oh, does it show. The cleverness of language, characterisation and world building that came as the stories of the Discworld developed and matured is sadly lacking. It is a very clever story, but in that way that reminds me of first

and second year philosophy students -- enough ideas to chew over, but not enough to have worked out how to present them well.

It is also possibly the most explicitly sf of Pratchett's stories that I've read so far. Set in a over the top 'everyone is watching you' far future space-opera dystopia, it had echoes of Harry Harrison's 'Stainless Steel Rat' series without the redeeming features. I was completely unable to invest in the setting, I really never warmed to any of the characters (in fact, none of them ever really felt like people, which was a surprise from Pratchett).

And while it was a pleasant read, I couldn't help the twin thoughts: 'other people have done this better', and 'there were better ways to spend that time'

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LibraryThing member paulmorriss

This is the first non-Discworld Terry Pratchett novel I've read in a long time, or ever. It's really interesting to see his wit (1) and inventiveness in a different setting. It's a "save the world" type plot, and manages to set up the plot in a believable way.

1 Though I miss the footnotes.

Fewer