The Dark Side of the Sun

Terry Pratchett's The Dark Side of the Sun is dense, demanding science fiction for 11 year olds, about an heir who discovers somebody wants him dead.

What happens

Tomorrow Dom Sabalos becomes Chairman of the Board of Widdershins. Today is his last go at being nobody, so he has squashed the robot insects that sit in his bedroom spying on him for his own protection, and gone out into the marsh alone.

He's riding a windshell. It's a huge semi-vegetable thing with a papery sail and trailing tendrils, some of which will kill you. You grab the prow, swing your legs clear, find the nerve knot and stroke it until the creature calms down. It only counts if you stand up afterwards. The really good fishermen dance on theirs and juggle torches.

Then he goes to touch the Tower.

Joker's Tower is a milkwhite pyramid five miles high with its top permanently inside the cloud. The Jokers built it and a lot of others, then died out before people existed, and nobody has ever got one open. One lot dropped a bomb on theirs. Three neighbouring star systems were wrecked. The tower was fine.

The tower is coldest at noon, when it drinks in heat. Dom touches it and it burns his fingers with cold.

And then somebody starts shooting at him.

He wakes up forty kilometres away on a floating reed island belonging to a phnobe smuggler, who has a double-bladed knife, tosses it thoughtfully from hand to hand, and is waiting for an omen to tell him whether to kill Dom or not.

Two honest warnings. The first is that it's hard. You get fifty-two alien races, the Humanity Act, probability maths and about nine invented nouns a page before anyone slows down to explain, and a lot of the time nobody ever does. A reader who already eats adult science fiction will love that. A reader who came expecting comic fantasy will struggle.

The second is that it doesn't soften anything. Dom is shot three times, the third blast burning across his chest. He wakes up with nothing on. The smuggler discusses killing him as a straightforward question of the day's omens, then throws his knife through a flamingo instead and sits down to pluck it.

What's very good is the sentence-level writing. The sun hanging overhead like a gong. A smuggler weighing up dying on other time lines and wondering what skill even means. It's ambitious and a bit wild, and the writing is doing far more than the plot strictly needs.

What to read next

If they want him at his most welcoming instead, Only You Can Save Mankind starts with a boy at a keyboard whose computer-game aliens stop fighting and surrender.