With a story about a “flat Earth” and published two years before the first of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels, Strata is a reasonably entertaining precursor to his famous fantasy series.

This story is set in a timeline where human beings can use gene surgery and memory enhancement technology to extend their life for centuries. The main protagonist is one such “centenarian”, Kin Arad is a 210-year-old high-ranking official of the Company that builds new worlds. Their advanced terraforming process uses Strata machines which are relics left by a former, extinct civilisation of world-builders known as the Spindle Kings.

Kin is visited by a mysterious 1100-year-old “Terminus Pilot” called Jago Jalo, who claims to have discovered a flat Earth created by the Spindle Kings. He enlists Kin together with fellow explorers, Marco (as Pilot) & Silver (a historian/linguist) for an expedition to visit the disc-world which he wants to loot of its many treasures.

The beginning of this book is not short of the kind of weird, wonderful and patently ridiculous extraterrestrials the renowned science fiction artist Wayne Douglas Barlowe would have enjoyed including in his famous guide published a few years prior. Marco is a bloodthirsty, paranoid Kung which resembles an upright frog with 4 arms, whereas Silver, a Shand, is described as a large thinking bear with tusks!

On approaching the disc-world the explorer’s spacecraft is struck by an unidentified projectile and they have to take an emergency shuttle down to the surface. The Shandi like eating their own kind, so the companions must drag around a dumbwaiter machine (like a Star Trek Replicator) to fabricate food containing Shand proteins for Silver as they search for a way off the strange flat planet.

Like the land in the Discworld novels, the flat Earth in Strata is populated by a mixture of parodic historical figures and fantasy creatures such as dragons, trolls, demons and even a djinn. Although it does not rest on the backs of four elephants being carried through space by a giant turtle, as described in the Discworld books, you can imagine such a mythological image being conjured up by its primitive inhabitants.

An example of some of the references to the Discworld series, and illustrating the humour in Strata, is the bar called “The Broken Drum” (motto: you can't beat it!). Fans of Pritchett’s books will recognise this as the name of a tavern in the Discworld city of Ankh-Morpork before it was destroyed in the Great Fire and then rebuilt as the “Mended Drum”.

Strata does not share the same level of creative parody found in Pratchett’s Discworld books, nor the laugh-out-loud string of jokes and bizarre images presented in comedic masterworks such as Douglas Adams’s “Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy” pentalogy. However, it is a pleasant, undemanding and light-hearted read.

With a single narrative that doggedly follows the main protagonists and without the regimentation of a standard chapter structure, the story is arguably a bit lightweight until about three-quarters of the way through when it finally finds an extra gear. The satisfying climax not only addresses the mysterious creation of the flat Earth but also the true origin of the whole cosmos.