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The Dark Side of the Sun

This article is about the Terry Pratchett novel. For other uses see The Dark Side of the Sun (disambiguation)

The Dark Side of the Sun is a comic science fiction novel by Terry Pratchett, first published in 1976. It has very little connection with Strata and with the Discworld series, featuring much less comedy and parody than these. The Dark Side of the Sun makes many light-hearted references to famous science fiction works, such as those of Isaac Asimov. Terminology from the novel, including "Hogswatchnight" and "Small Gods," reappears with different significance in the Discworld novels.

The story is set in a portion of the galaxy populated by fifty-two different sentient species. All of these species, humanity among them, have evolved in the last five million years, and all of them have evolved in a spherical volume of space only a few dozen light-years across centred on Wolf 359. The rest of the galaxy is sterile as far as anybody can tell.

Scattered irregularly across this "life-bubble" are ancient artifacts of a mysterious race called the Jokers, who became extinct long before any of the current races arose. These artifacts are usually astounding feats of engineering (such as a pair of stars shaped into rings and joined together like links in a chain), but leave no hints about the Jokers' physical form or day-to-day life. The only piece of translatable Joker text is a poem, which cryptically states that they have gone to their new home, which "lies at the dark side of the sun".

The other vital piece of background to the story is probability math, a new field of science which - at great computational expense - allows one to predict the future path of a particular collection of matter, such as a person, to a quantifiable level of statistical certainty. According to probability math, the Jokers never existed.

Dominickdaniel Sabalos is the son of the inventor of probability math, and the first person to have had his life fully quantified using p-math. Before being mysteriously asassinated, his father predicted that Dom too would be killed, on the day of his investiture as Chairman of his wealthy home planet of Widdershins.

However, not having been told of his father's prediction, and against incalculably distant odds, Dom survives the assassination attempt. When the recording of his father's prediction is played back, a time delay added specifically for this unlikely eventuality plays a little more of the recording, in which his father makes a further prediction - that Dom will discover the Jokers' homeworld.

Dom sets out, with Hrsh-Hgn (his tutor, a swamp-dwelling phnobe), Isaac (his robot Man Friday) and Ig (his pet swamp ig) in tow, on a picaresque adventure to find the Jokers' world. He visits many corners of the "life-bubble", encountering Joker artifacts, his god-father, who is a sentient planet, and the sexless, octopoid Creapii, among many others weird and diverse aliens and planets. At the same time he finds himself surviving - at increasingly improbable odds - numerous assassination attempts by a mysterious conspiracy which has long worked to prevent anybody from locating the Jokers, by assassinating anybody p-math predicted had a chance of doing so.

• La Face obscure du Soleil (French)
• Die dunkle Seite der Sonne (German)
• Ciemna strona Słońca (Polish)
• Temná strana slunce (Czech)
• Тъмната страна на слънцето (Bulgarian)
• Päikese Tume pool (Estonian)
• De donkere kant van de zon (Dutch)
• Тёмная сторона солнца (Russian)

• Annotations and quotations for The Dark Side of the Sun