I've basically exhausted the US published works of Terry Pratchett and so I've had a couple of his books imported at great cost of life by a tribe of allied Amazonian aborigines that I've befriended via relatively frequent correspondences upon the vast world network of hydrodynamic tubing from the United Kingdom...

Strata is one of PTerry's earliest forays into some of the areas that became embellished and expanded in his seminal, fantasy, Discworld series. Only Strata's first voyage to the idea of a disc world was one from a science-fiction viewpoint. As a Sci-Fi concept exploration it is easy to invoke the Ringworld series from Niven as a comparison. It's a worthy comparison, but Ringworld is much more serious. To me Strata reads very much like one of Asimov's more experimental, whimsical tales (sort of an End of Eternity meshed against one of his younger reader works or his humor pieces); bad puns, universe full of whimsy and mystery. As a longtime fan of Asimov, it was quite refreshing. (The only obvious real counter-point to the comparison here being Asimov's long hesitancy to use "alien races", which Strata makes some use of...)