The lesser mabinogion

Title: His Dark Materials
Author: Philip Pullman

His Dark Materials is a trilogy consisting of three novels titled “Northern Lights”, “The Subtle Knife” and “The Amber Spyglass”. My copy has all three books together in a great big impressive hardcover of more than 1000 pages. It’ll look good on the shelf, but it was really hard to read in bed, and there’s no way I’d have been able to fit in in my bag if I was flying anywhere and wanted to read it on the plane, so purchasing the individual volumes might be more practical.

Now on to the story itself.
I don’t know how to describe it, so I’m just going to list some of the stuff you’ll find in this amazing story.

• Magic artifacts with amazing and terrible powers
• dark matter and quantum entanglement
• witches on broomsticks
• zeppelins, hydrogen balloons, helicopters and bizarre craft controlled by telepathy
• armoured talking polar bears
• The quite faded elegance of Oxford
• A massive fortress
• The freezing artic wasteland
• a world where the only vertebrates are the occasional snake and the dominant species appears to be some sort of wheeled antelope / elephant cross (yes wheeled, it’s brilliant the way that works)
• A powerful and domineering church
• A world where adults run in fear, and children roam in gangs looting and fighting
• A trip through death itself and out again
• An exploration of the nature of human consciousness, our souls, and the power of love.
• Exploration of multiple world theories, alternate histories, and completely alien societies

And battles! many battles!

• Street urchins ganging up to fling mud at each other on a summer’s day
• Zeppelins chasing down a balloon and napalming a forest
• A lone gunman making a last stand behind a rock in a canyon outnumbered 20 to 1
• A 12 year old boy armed only with a small knife facing off against 2,000kg of angry armoured bear with 6 inch claws that can cut through steel like butter
• A battle of wits with a king
• A final battle so huge as to make Pelenor Fields and Helm’s Deep look like the aforementioned mud fights
• And a battle of the heart against the conscience

And an wonderfully engaging story that winds you though all of that and more…with the most heartbreakingly bittersweet ending.

For some bizarre reason you’ll probably find this series in the children’s or Young Adult section. I can’t understand that logic at all, perhaps it’s the fact that the two protagonists are 12 year old children, but if that’s the reason then it’s a pretty weak one. There is nothing childish about this series, it covers issues emotional, intellectual and spirtual that most adults will probably never understand completely, and has a far more complex and subtle plot than a lot of stories that are considered adult.
Compare for instance, the Belgariad, it’s one big adventure story where you know who’s good and you know who’s bad, and even the geography knows it – good is west, bad is east. The heroes cant die, there’s no real question posed for the reader, the whole thing is just a happy journey to the end. There’s nothing wrong with that – it’s still fun, but it seems to me that it would be far more appropriate to classify stories like The Belgariad, the Wheel of Time, and Terry Brooks’ works as children’s stories, than something of the scale of His Dark Materials. Hell, even the later Harry Potter books are probably more adult than them. (end rant)

You must read this series if you love good fantasy that pushes the boundaries and doesn’t rely on cliches and archetypes to get by. There might even be enough mention of advanced physics theories and non magical alien worlds to satisfy Sci-Fi readers too, but who knows how Sci-Fi readers think anyway?

In my continuing quest to find some way of introducing Caitlin to programming, I’ve tried a few different things…Logo and Python to name a couple..
I actually had the most success with Python- I got her to print out her name a few times and some other simple stuff like that…with Logo she was far more interested in telling me what she wanted to see happen, and having me do it, than trying anything herself.
But now hopefully I’ve found something that might be a little more appropriate.
It’s Squeak, which is a Smalltalk implementation that comes with something called eToys. eToys is basically an extra layer on top of the Squeak environment that allows visual manipulation of properties, and creation of “scripts” (which are basically just methods, or smalltalk messages).
The general idea with eToys is that you start with a “Sketch”, which you create using a painting tool, and then from there you can start creating scripts for it and manipulating it’s properties.
I created myself a rather badly drawn cat and mouse, and had them run around the screen, turning if they hit the edge. I also added a button to make the cat turn towards the mouse. It was rather addictive, I kept thinking of other things to try to make them do….
I’m definitely going to have to play with it a bit more and then try Caitlin with it, and see what she thinks.
Oh, and here’s a screenshot of my work in action…heh
Another great thing about it, is that there’s a small browser plugin you can download that lets you run Squeak projects straight from the web – either in the browser window, or fullscreen. I definitely recommend installing it and having a look at the tutorials and having a play…’cause it’s fun!