Dark Matter Detectors and Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials (with a picture of a book horse) · 9:33pm Oct 17th, 2017
New Particle Gadgeteering post: Dark Matter Detectors and Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials.
Are there any His Dark Materials fans here? I’m curious to know. There was a time, about ten years ago, when it looked like this series was heading for the sort of mega success of Harry Potter. But then the planned film trilogy was cancelled after the disappointing reception of the first one, and there were no more substantial books (until now), and everyone stopped talking about it. Although predictably it has always been big in my city.
Which is a pity as it is one of those rare books which manage to manage to bridge the gap between children’s and adult fiction, combining a gripping adventure with a real depth, attracting acclaim from intellectuals and condemnation from religious conservatives. The books are a retelling of John Milton’s Paradise Lost, dealing with the theme of loss of innocence, and a lot more.
And one of the heroines is an Oxford dark matter physicist! I approve of that.
I liked the stories, once I managed to get past the religious presetilysing that makes Chronicles of Narnia look Maud faced atheistic. And Im as dumb as a sack of stuffed badgers.
One of my favorite series as a kid. It was probably responsible for my continuing love of parallel universes as a literary device and physical concept. Great to hear that Pullman's written something else in that continuity.
I actually really liked His Dark Materials, and I ought to re-read it. And I also liked some of the movie (armored polar bear, amirite?).
redpenofdoomdotcom.files.wordpress.com/2016/10/armored-squirrel-2.jpg
Like this, but bigger.
I didn't know that there was a new book out. Looks like that's something I'll have to get my grubby little paws on.
Also book horse is adorable.
Love HDM! Looking forward to reading the new book. I've also read the little short pieces set in that multiverse, and have a signed copy of Lyra's Oxford.
Sadly, the movie was doomed to please nobody. The producers "fixed" it to appease the people who were going to hate it anyway, and thereby angered the people who loved the books. I'm hoping that some smart person at Amazon or Netflix will realize what an awesome miniseries it would make.
I've got mixed feelings about the trilogy. The first book is extraordinary, the second book is "merely" good, and the third, IMO, gets stuck in too much preachiness.
But still, there are such wonderful ideas there: the daimons themselves, the Panzerbjörn, the intriguing multiverse...
I love His Dark Materials. When he decided that God would be a just an angel pulling a con with no evidence of gods or artificiality in the multiverse and preteens having sex helping set the multiverse back to its proper state, he knew that the theists would throw a fit, so he double-downed and threw in angels who are gay homosexuals just to troll them. Across the pond, we have a saying, “¡Go big or go home!”. Philip Pullman certainly went big.
On this website, is a story with a vibe like the Oxford-Part of Northern Lights. It is Time on their Hooves.
Out of curiosity, are there any HDM crossover fics here? A few perfunctory searches didn't seem to turn up anything relevant — and actually nothing at Derpibooru either, at least if the lack of tags is any indication.
If nothing else you'd think that the whole "Lyra" angle would suggest an obvious crossover.
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I'm not aware of any, but I seem to recall some talk of writing one, so I think at least a few fimfiction writers have toyed with the idea. Adding Equestria to the HDM multitude of worlds would be easy, and it would be interesting to develop a theory of how Dust influenced pony evolution and thus how cutie marks first appeared...
And strangely we don't seem to be inundated with "Twilight" crossovers either.
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Well, relatively speaking, we are inundated with Twilight crossovers. I mean, I can't find any fanfics with cursory searching, but at least derpibooru has a tag with 150+ pics. Compared to the literally nothing of HDM.
(Update: I stand corrected. A little more diligent tag filtering on db found an HDM series tag with two (2) pics. So at least there's this! Still, that's a factor of ~80 difference.)
I went to the bookstore and bought “The Book of Dust Volume One la Belle Sauvage”. I have 3 comments:
I would use the numeral “1” because usability-research shows that it is much easier to find numeric data in a paragraph of text if the numbers are in the form of numerals instead of spelt in letters. I often receive criticism from those who learned in grammar school from teachers trying to teach pupils how to spell numbers that I should use spelt numbers, but I know that my readers can more easily extract the numeric data.
I got the physical copy instead of the Audible-Version because of an idiotic policy Audible had:
Way back in the late 1990s, I decided to try the free audiobook from Audible to discover whether I like the service. I reached a point where Audible required a creditcardnumber. I see what Audible intends:
Audible wants to make certain that people do not get thousands of free books by setting thousands of phony accounts, but this implementation is garbage:
Basically, they indirectly use banks for vetting the accounts; if the creditcardnumber is legitimate, the bank believes that the person exists. The trouble is that only idiots give out creditcardnumbers willy-nilly for obvious reasons. This is what Audible could have done instead:
Audible could have required a PayPalAccount:
eBay wanted to receive commissions from people buying and selling on its auctionsite, but people feared giving their creditcardinformation to a strangers claiming to have a “My Pretty Pony” in the original packaging. eBay set up PayPal. The thing about PayPal is that one can only send money.; someone can request money, but cannot empty the PayPal account of another user without logininformation.
If Audible would have required a PayPalAccount, it would indirectly confirm that a bank believes that one is a real person without the securityconcerns.
I stopped at that point, but Audible already had my eMailAddress and spammed me for someteen years. The spam finally stopped a few years ago.
Suffice it to say, that I have never done business with Audible.
I did not get the ebook because often, the publishers block text-to-speech. This means that I cannot do anything while reading the book other than read the book and consume the battery on the phone like there is no tomorrow (when the screen is lit, it uses 75% of the power of the phone), and go blind staring at the small text. Plus, the ethics of blocking text-to-speech:
Blocking text-to-speech is a big “¡Fuck you!” to the visually impaired. Blocking text-to-speech should be against the law.