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!

The Dark Side of The Sun is an early Pratchett work, and sees him doing the same sorts of things with SFnal cliches and tropes as he was to do later with fantasy in the first few Discworld books. Dom Salabos is the son and heir of John Salabos, former ruler of the planet Widdershins and master of the science called 'probably math' that allows for the prediction of future events with near, if not total, certainty. After miraculously surviving an assassination attempt that, before his own death, his father had predicted would almost surely kill him, Dom sets out on a quest to find the near-mythical 'Joker's World' - home to the vanished alien race that first seeded the galaxy with intelligent life.

Asimov readers will likely have already worked out that there's a lot of Foundation parody going on here (Dom even acquires a robotic companion called Isaac who quotes numbered Laws of Robotics at him), and indeed this (along with elements of Dune) are the main source of inspiration for the book.

The chief problem with The Dark Side of the Sun is simply that it's not very funny. In fact, I found myself reading it more as a (light-hearted) straight space opera than as an attempt at comedy. It's a pleasant enough distraction for a couple of hours, but Pratchett had really yet to develop his voice as an author, and (as well as the absence of much humour) none of the characters are really gripping. While there are a few good things to say about it - for one, it's a pleasant rarity to see a black lead character in any SF work, especially one published in 1976 - this is ultimately a book it's hard to recommend to anybody except the most enthusiastic Pratchett fan.

I've read this, and fairly recently, but I can't remember enough to give it a decent collection of tags: I tagged it "forgettable". From what I CAN remember, I'm not missing a thing. ( )

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

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. ( )