History Literature / Strata

Kin Arad's job is building worlds for an The Company. One day she is contacted by Jago Jalo, a man claiming to be a 1,000 year old space traveller. He enlists her to travel to a strange world that he claims to be flat. Kin teams up with two aliens: Marco, a kung (four-armed amphibious ProudWarriorRaceGuy), and Silver, a shand (tusked, hungry and bear-like, but ultimately friendly).

Kin Arad's job is building worlds for an organisation called John's Company or simply the Company. One day she is contacted by Jago Jalo, a man claiming to be a 1,000 year old space traveller. He enlists her to travel to a strange world that he claims to be flat. Kin teams up with two aliens: Marco, a kung (four-armed amphibious ProudWarriorRaceGuy), and Silver, a shand (tusked, hungry and bear-like, but ultimately friendly).

Kin Arad's job is building worlds for a mysterious organisation called the Company. One day she is contacted by Jago Jalo, a man claiming to be a 1,000 year old space traveller. He enlists her to travel to a strange world that he claims to be flat. Kin teams up with two aliens: Marco, a kung (4-armed amphibious ProudWarriorRaceGuy), and Silver, a shand (tusked, hungry and bear-like, but ultimately friendly).

When the team arrives, they find a world that matches with the old myths about the Earth -- it's flat, things go round it, stars are actually points on a sphere surrounding it, and so on. The technology of the world is still in the dark ages, and demons very much exist. The flat world appears Earth in all these points, except for being flat and only covering the equivalent of the Eastern Hemisphere.

* FantasticDietRequirement: The Shandi have to eat a protein only found in other Shandi. If they don't they [[BerserkButton fly into a feeding rage]]. They can synthesise the protein with a [[PhlebotinumBreakdown Dumb Waiter]], but this leaves them in a bit of situation when it beaks down.

* AgeWithoutYouth: It's stated that without Day Bills to buy treatments offered only by the Company, you can get immortality via other genetic treatments, but you'll look your true chronological age. While many men on the disc seem to be interested in Kin (if she looked 200 years this would not be the case), she worked for the company and so kept up her rejuvenation treatments. However, hair never gets past the first century.

* ArtificialCannibalism: Silver is fed meat cultured from her own cells because there isn't anything else with a compatible biochemistry.

* AutoKitchen: The Dumbwaiter, which is built around a MatterReplicator and is apparently able to supply them endlessly with food and drink. [[spoiler:The medieval priests denounce it as evil and try to destroy it.]]

* DarkAgeEurope: the level of society on the Flat Earth.

* EmotionSuppression: "Dissociation" is a type of meditation with this effect.

%%* FlatWorld: How flat-out impossible such a world is turns out to be a major plot point.

* HumanoidAliens: Kinda. One is a frog with four arms and the other is a bear with tusks (who is also a linguist).

** Valhalla rather than North America -- the Vikings discovered the continent and colonized it, thinking it was heaven, unlike on our Earth where they abandoned it after a only a few tentative settlements.

* JetPack: Sort of; the suits that the three main characters wear are either jet packs, or keep them hovering in the air by some other means, and it's not quite made clear which.

** Jago is also an obscure form of Jacob, appropriate for a manipulator who would like to set himself up as disc-ruler.
* MedievalMorons: The Flat Earth natives are unable to comprehend Kin's future tech.

* TheMiddleAges: Flat Earth is in its middle ages when Kin arrives. [[spoiler: Around the year 1001 AD, since she ends up interfering with Leif Eriksson's expedition.]]

** In an in-Verse example, it's expected that planetary engineers will ''always'' slip something anachronistic (e.g. a dinosaur fossil with a wristwatch) into an otherwise-flawless artificial world, just to mess with future paleontologists' heads. [[spoiler: This includes the flat planet itself.]]

* {{Terraform}}: Kin's job, and arguably the job of all planetary engineers.

* WaterfallIntoTheAbyss: The flat-earth is ringed with a waterfall. The characters speculate on how the water gets replaced/retrieved, but never learn the exact mechanism.

* AllohistoricalAllusion: In Kin's Earth America is called Valhalla and was colonized by the Vikings. However the resulting state uses a flag involving white and red stripes, just like our world's USA, but in this case they stand for blood and ice.

* ActionGirl: Kin. (A 200 year old "girl", but still..)
* AgeWithoutYouth: It's stated that without Day Bills to buy treatments offered only by the Company, you can get immortality via other genetic treatments, but you'll look your true chronological age.
** While many men on the disc seem to be interested in Kin (if she looked 200 years this would not be the case), she worked for the company and so kept up her rejuvenation treatments. However, hair never gets past the first century.

* FasterThanLightTravel: Through the "Elsewhere".
* FlatWorld: How flat-out impossible such a world is turns out to be a major plot point.
* FTLTravelSickness: Travelling FTL above a certain speed causes "soul-lag" — some part of a sapient mind has a fixed maximum speed, and if you exceed it you end up experiencing apocalyptic despair until you reach your destination and your soul has time to catch up with you.

* AbsurdlySharpBlade

* AlternateHistory: Kin's Earth is mostly similar to ours, but many places have different names and Christianity apparently doesn't exist (because it's first discovered on the Flat Earth).
** Although this is a bit inconsistent, because at one point Kin says the flat world looks like "the vision of some medieval monk".

* EarlyBirdCameo: A bar called the Broken Drum is featured. A similarly named bar later appears in the Discworld series. Here the name is explicitly explained — "You can't beat it".

* EarthIsYoung: [[spoiler: The main character designs planets for a living, and it is explained that it is important to give each planet a "history" to make it feel like something billions of years old rather than just a big lump of rock (These fictional histories are the titular "strata."). At the end of the book it turns out that the entire Universe was constructed with this in mind and is only about seventy thousand years old.]]

* NamedAfterTheirPlanet: The Kung and Shandi.
* NoBiochemicalBarriers: Averted with the Shandi, who can't digest proteins from human or kung worlds.

* ProudWarriorRaceGuy: The Kung.

* RaygunGothic
* ReallySevenHundredYearsOld: Kin. The Company's main currency is a propriatory youth extension proces, meaning that the richest people literally live the longest. It's implied that as people get older, they get more reckless due to boredom.

* RecursivePrecursors: An important theme in the book. As far as human archaeology knows, before the current four races there were the Spindle Kings, beings so prone to psychic pressure that they could barely stand to be within a mile of each other, and before them there were the Wheelers, aliens who trundled along on biological wheels. The Spindles were so shocked by the discovery of Wheeler artefacts -- previously having believed themselves to be the only race -- that the psychic shock killed them all. Kin theorises an even longer chain of {{Precursors}} stretching back endlessly, all using Strata Machines to remake planets in their image, and writes about it in her book ''Continuous Creation''.
** [[spoiler:In the end it turns out that the Wheelers, Spindles and the others all never existed. There was only one race of Precursors, and they made the universe just seventy thousand years before, faking all the fossils and remnants of the others to make it look older]].
* RunningGag: ''Every'' time she meets someone new, upon discovering that she really is ''that'' Kin Arad, they whip out whatever their local version of a copy of her book ''Continuous Creation'' is to have her autograph it. And will insist it's for whatever their species' equivalent of a "nephew" is.

* SingleBiomePlanet: Kung is a Swamp Planet where the rain never stops -- naturally, this implies an amphibious alien.
** Arguably this is averted. There are mentions of areas of grassland, which humans would cultivate but the Kung view as desert.

** Also applies to the solar system, as one of its outer planets is called Wotan. It's not clear which planet this refers to, or how many others use different names, e.g. Venus is still Venus (but has a moon called Adonis).
*** Logically, Wotan would be Jupiter -- Norse King of the Gods rather than Roman. Alternatively, Mercury, since that is the traditional equivalence.

** Covers tend to depict Kin as Caucasian. It's noted in the text that she can change her skin colour (including to colours outside the normal human range) but when they're exploring the Disc and get captured by the locals, Silver suggests that she should pose as an Ethiopian princess, suggesting that she's got dark skin at that point.

* CoversAlwaysLie: One edition of the book depicts bugs flitting about a bizarre alien landscape that doesn't appear anywhere in the story.

* BaldWomen: Despite her conventionally attractive body, Kin is bald because the company's rejuvenation process can't preserve hair. She wears wigs to compensate.