The Dark Side of the Sun
ISBN: 9780552133265
Description
Dom Salabos had a lot of advantages. As heir to a huge fortune, he had an excellent robot servant (with Man-Friday subcircuitry), a planet (the First Syrian Bank) as godfather, a security chief who even ran checks on himself, and on Dom's home world even death was not always fatal. Why, then, in an age when prediction was a science, was his future in doubt?
Reviewed on 14th June 2025
I have been a Terry Pratchett fan for many years, and now occasionally find myself able to pick up one of his earlier novels that I’ve not yet read. This is the earliest.
It’s the story of a young hereditary ruler of a planet in a universe of Humans and non-Humans, struggling as he’s caught between two different destinies, and also his grandmother.
Although it’s short, I found it a challenge to read. It feels of its time in many ways - there’s a dense style to 70s science fiction and fantasy that I find hard to navigate, and I think Pratchett at this point was early in his learning curve for what would become his later style. It’s also ahead of its time in many way as well - there’s elements of the classic turning of things on their head, which he comes back to again in the early Discworld novels. There’s also a surprising number of things that later turn up, recycled and repurposed, in the Discworld series.
It was an interesting read, but I think if I’d started reading here instead of with his later novels, I’d probably not have come back to Pratchett, and would have missed out on his other brilliant output.