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One of Pratchett’s illustrations in the original edition of The Carpet People. Photograph: Terry Pratchett The further along it went, it felt more and more familiar to Terry’s Discworld style of writing and action.

Described in some detail, particularly the Kung, and Josh Kirby's illustrations on the front cover make it more obvious. Also the Ehfts, seen once near the beginning. Stealth Pun: Pleading for its freedom, a captive demon offers to bid its fellow-demon, "TRESOLAY", to make her more beautiful. Tress Olay is a common name for hair salons.

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Hufflepuff House: Only four races are named (and in such a way that implies they're the only four): humans, Kung, Shandi (who all get main characters)... and Efhts, who only get a brief appearance and are really weird. Meaningful Name: "Marco" derives either from Latin Mars, and therefore means war-like, or from Greek and means polite. Both suit. In his author’s note for the revised edition, Pratchett wrote that the original story “had a lot of things wrong with it, mostly to do with being written by someone who was 17 at the time”. Rereading it, the then 43-year-old Pratchett thought: “Hang on. I wrote that in the days when I thought fantasy was all battles and kings. Now I’m inclined to think that the real concerns of fantasy ought to be about not having battles, and doing without kings. I’ll just rewrite it here and there.” Subverted in that it's implied humans only predominate because they had an advantage which had nothing to do with their qualities as a species: Kin's Earth happened to have a neighboring planet (Venus) with a large orbiting moon (Adonis) that her ancestors could see, thus giving them a visual aid to the laws of astrophysics.

En route, the team encounter the superstitious Medieval inhabitants of the disc, who believe the end of the world is near, due to increasingly chaotic climate (caused by the disc's machinery breaking down), the recent disappearance of one of their planets, and the general devastation caused by the ship's crash. The three travelers also discover a number of other differences. Ultimately it’s a bit ho-hum and the ending felt a bit flat. This is one only for the curious who want to see the development of Terry’s ideas that led to the Discworld.Istanbul (Not Constantinople): A few on Kin's Earth — on the Flat Earth they either don't exist or are the same as our Earth: 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. Hyperspace Is a Scary Place: Invoked every time they travel through the Elsewhere, which is nothingness. In 2008, Harper Children's published Terry's standalone non-Discworld YA novel, Nation. Terry published Snuff in October 2011. Fantastic Racism: Being a thousand years old, Jago Jalo is racist against non-humans. He's quite annoyed that Marco was listed as a human (due to Kung religious belief) when he hired him without meeting him first, and holds him at gunpoint while referring to him as "it", as well as using an obscure archaic slur that only Silver (a historian) recognises.

The joy of this one is of course, once again, the fact that it pre-empts the Discworld so wonderfully. You can clearly see PTerry's mind cogs whirring and the imagination is startling. However, he isn't particularly adept at writing sci-fi: again, we have stuttering explanations and quite shoddy sci-fi elements where it feels like he was truly excited by this piece of technology but half-way through telling us about it he got a bit fed up. Pratchett described The Carpet People as “not exactly the book I wrote then. It’s not exactly the book I’d write now. It’s a joint effort but, heh heh, I don’t have to give him half the royalties … This book had two authors, and they were both the same person.”Since only the Eastern hemisphere of Earth is represented, the continent of America is completely missing, so Kin, Marco, and Silver rescue a party of Vikings in the process of searching for Vinland, when their ship is about to sail over the edge of the world. Raised by Humans: Marco's ambassador parents got stranded on Earth shortly before his birth. As kung believe in reincarnation, they assumed that Marco must have received a human soul rather than kung, so left him with an adoptive family to be raised by "his own kind".