Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #74710 in Books
• Published on: 1988-04-22
• Binding: Paperback
• 158 pages

Synopsis
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?

From the Back Cover
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 a 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?

Customer Reviews

Agony
Reading this really was agonising.

I am a huge fan of Terry Pratchett, and all of his work, but reading this simply did not agree with me at all. The story is all over the place, and the language and dialogue is very jittery, and not in a good way.

I also found the ending very bizarre and ultimately lacking, given the upstream struggle I had to endure to get there.

Avid Pratchett fans should read it anyway, casual readers should definately not. If anything it is interesting to read a young Terry Pratchett stuttering and blethering his way into the world...

funky and furiously original
This Terry Pratchet novel is a hilarious, coming-of-age romp through a funky and furiously original galaxy populated by 52 intelligent races and beings with endearing quirks. Some of these beings are luckier than others and our hero, Dom Savalos, is one of them. On the eve of his ascension to the chairmanship of his planet, he finds out about something that has preoccupied some of he best minds around - the science of probability maths, which predicts both likely and seemingly inevitable outcomes of individual lives. Dom find himself in the position of being predestined to find the world on which the enigmatic jokers reside - a prehistoric, highly evolved race thought by many to be responsible for most of the other intelligent life in the galaxy. But the story only starts here...

The endless question
Young Dom Sabalos is about to become Chairman of an entire planet. That means giving up countless adolescent pleasures. He won't be able to make exploratory journeys into the marshes or ponder the mysteries of the Joker Towers. Of Old Earth ancestry, Dom's home is Widdershins, a planet producing a special pharmaceutical - pilac. The demand for this drug has made the Sabalos family powerful and rich beyond calculation. It says much that Dom's godfather is a bank. IS a bank - one that takes up an entire planet.

Being rich and powerful evokes enemies, even when your wealth is gratefully contributed to by all who take pilac. Which is nearly all sentient creatures. There are other species scattered about the universe, but they all appear to be approximately the same duration - four or five million years. Before that, there seem to have been The Jokers. As Dom flees Widdershins to thwart assassination, he seeks answers to the Joker mystery. The quest leads to endless adventures and opens many questions in the reader's mind. The main one being: "Who are we, and where did we come from?"

In today's world, "Dark Side" can occupy only a special niche. Older - sorry! "established" - Pratchett readers may look upon this book as an historical curiosity. The really established SF reader will see the obvious reliance on Isaac Asimov's "Robot" series. In "Dark Side", the very intelligent robot is named "Isaac". Douglas Adams' "probability math" is given place and complex problems are solved by a team of a poet and a "mad computer". The book's themes and characters are very "1970s SciFi". Yet the sparks of the later Discworld books shine brightly here. Beyond the carryovers of such ideas as Hogswatch Night, Small Gods and Widdershins itself, there are the usual touches of Pratchettean irony and insight. There is also the underlying foundation of Pratchett's capacity for bringing remote facts and ideas into his stories. There are Gypsy terms, ancient Philistine goddesses and touches of Classical Greek theatre.

These literary arabesques are what makes Pratchett a repeatable read, no matter what genre critics try to cram him into. Although nearly thirty years have passed since this was written, it remains worthy of a place on your bookshelf. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]