Everything about The Dark Side Of The Sun totally explained
The Dark Side of the Sun is a
comic science fiction novel by
Terry Pratchett, first published in 1976. It has very little connection with Pratchett's other 1970's sci-fi novel
Strata or with his subsequent
Discworld series, featuring much less
comedy and
parody than these.
The Dark Side of the Sun makes many light-hearted references to famous
science fiction works, such as those of
Isaac Asimov.
Setting
The story is set in a portion of the galaxy populated by fifty-two different sentient species. All of these species, humanity among them, have evolved in the last five million years, and all of them have evolved in a spherical volume of space only a few dozen
light-years across centred on Wolf 429. The rest of the galaxy is sterile as far as anybody can tell.
Scattered irregularly across this "life-bubble" are ancient artifacts of a mysterious race called the Jokers, who became extinct long before any of the current races arose. These artifacts are usually astounding feats of engineering (such as a pair of stars shaped into rings and joined together like links in a chain), but leave no hints about the Jokers' physical form or day-to-day life. The only piece of translatable Joker text is a poem, which cryptically states that they've gone to their new home, which "lies at the dark side of the sun".
Plot
Dominickdaniel Sabalos is the son of the inventor of probability math, a science able to predict anything apart from anything to do with the Jokers, and the first person to have had his life fully quantified using p-math. Before being mysteriously assassinated, his father predicted that Dom too would be killed, on the day of his investiture as Chairman of his wealthy home planet of Widdershins.
However, not having been told of his father's prediction, and against incalculably distant odds, Dom survives the assassination attempt. When the recording of his father's prediction is played back, a time delay added specifically for this unlikely eventuality plays a little more of the recording, in which his father makes a further prediction - that Dom will discover the Jokers' homeworld.
Dom sets out, with Hrsh-Hgn (his tutor, a swamp-dwelling
phnobe), Isaac (his
robot Man Friday) and Ig (his pet swamp ig) in tow, on a
picaresque adventure to find the Jokers' world. He visits many corners of the "life-bubble", encountering Joker artifacts, his god-father, who is a sentient planet, and the sexless, octopoid
Creapii, among many other weird and diverse aliens and planets. At the same time he finds himself surviving - at increasingly improbable odds - numerous assassination attempts by a mysterious conspiracy which has long worked to prevent anybody from locating the Jokers, by assassinating anybody p-math predicted had a chance of doing so.
Ideas and Themes
A vital piece of background to the story is
probability math, a new field of science which - at great computational expense - allows one to predict the future path of a particular collection of matter, such as a person, to a quantifiable level of statistical certainty. According to probability math, the 'Jokers' in the novel never existed. It resembles
psychohistory, an extremely complicated predictive mathematical system created by
Hari Seldon in
Isaac Asimov's
Foundation series.
Continuity
Terminology from the novel, including "Hogswatchnight" and "
Small Gods" reappears with different significance in the
Discworld novels, and the planet name Widdershins reappears as a 'compass direction' on Discworld.
Translations
- La Face obscure du Soleil (French)
- Die dunkle Seite der Sonne (German)
- Ciemna strona Słońca (Polish)
- Temná strana slunce (Czech)
- Тъмната страна на слънцето (Bulgarian)
- Päikese Tume pool (Estonian)
- De donkere kant van de zon (Dutch)
- Тёмная сторона солнца (Russian)
Further Information
Get more info on 'The Dark Side Of The Sun'.
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