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Strata is a comic science fiction novel by Terry Pratchett. Published in 1981, it is one of Pratchett's first novels and one of only two purely science fiction novels he has written.
Kin Arad is a human planetary engineer working for the Company, a human organisation which builds planets like the Spindles (a now extinct race of planet manufacturers), with the intention of creating diverse enough branches of humanity to ensure the whole species' survival for eternity.
Kin Arad is a high-ranking official of the Company. After twenty-one decades of living, and with the help of memory surgery, she is at the top of her profession. Discovering two of her employees have placed a fossilized plesiosaur in the wrong stratum, not to mention the fact it is holding a placard which reads, 'End Nuclear Testing Now', doesn't dismay the woman who built a mountain range in the shape of her initials during her own high-spirited youth. But then came discovery of something which did intrigue Kin Arad. A flat earth was something new.
She, a four-armed warrior kung named Marco and a shandi historian/linguist named Silver are led by a mysterious human named Jago Jalo to a flat Earth.
This planet is artificial, a flattened version of the medieval Eastern hemisphere of Earth. It rotates inside a gigantic hollow sphere with tiny "stars" affixed to the interior, with a small sun, moon and planets orbiting it.
After their ship is hit by an orbiting "planet", Kin, Marco and Silver are forced to land on the flat Earth. A return from the flat Earth seems impossible, unless they are able to find its mysterious builders, so they embark on a journey to the structure at the hub of the disc, the only thing which does not match geographically with the Earth they know. En route, they encounter the superstitious Middle Ages inhabitants of the disc, who believe the end of the world is coming about, due to the disappearance of one of their planets and the devastation caused by the ship's crash. They also discover a number of other differences. Rome exists - but only since in this universe our 'real' Rome was named Reme. Since only the Eastern hemisphere of Earth is represented, the continent of America is completely missing; the travellers encounter a Viking ship headed west and rescue it from falling over the rim of the world.
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