Golden Compass

A while ago, maybe 6th grade, I read the His Dark Materials trilogy by Phillip Pullman, the first book of which is the Golden Compass. I was struck by a vague notion that it was probably pretty controversial, but I was too young to understand its implications.This weekend I saw the movie, and this time the implications were pretty clear to me – the movie more or less portrays the church, although it’s never mentioned by name, as a huge, supremely powerful oligarchy that seeks to obliterate free will.

Yeah, it’s probably pissing a lot of people off.

But politics and offense aside, the whole alternate reality is really cool and obviously quite well-thought-out. For those who haven’t read it: the first one takes place in a not-quite-like-ours steampunk world where people’s souls/consciences take the form of animals that walk/run/fly beside them. The daemons reflect their owners’ personality traits, hidden thoughts, misgivings, etc; and conversations between the daemon and owner are representations of conversations people have inside their heads. It’s a brilliant literary device. Almost as if he had the movie in mind as soon as he started brainstorming…

In the second book of the trilogy, The Subtle Knife, you find out that the world of the first book is one of infinite parallel worlds in the universe, one of which is just like ours.

There’s also the alethiometer, (aka Golden Compass), a truth-o-meter.

Anyway, to get back to the point –

Tying all these brilliant little ideas together is Dust, an elementary particle/form of dark matter that is consciousness. The consciousness particle. It showed up a long time ago, the characters discover through finding traces of it on ancient skulls, and the date of its emergence corresponds with Creation. This is where the evil church comes in – they think Dust is original sin – it’s what created creativity and free will, pulling man up above all the other animals to change nature, question his place in the world, and disobey God.

They want to eradicate it, thus destroying everything that distinguishes man from beast and kicking the human race back into a state of peaceful ignorance.

No art, no invention, no discovery.

No extortion, no inequality, no oppression.

Whose side are you on?

December 19th @ 1:51 PM | 0 Comments | Trackback

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Twiddly Bit

the slash, a most useful character, is for:

• sticking together two slightly different words, making a new mega-word that contains their common meaning:
  • “it was silly/dumb”
  • “look at the elephant’s drinker/poker/manipulator/picker-upper thingy”
• denoting several different possible options:
  • “animals walk/run/fly to get around”
• representing levels in a heirarchy:
  • “go to edit/formatting/paragraph to change the spacing”
  • “the article is at website.com/writing/articles/article1.html”

Mmmm weblish…

December 16th @ 7:01 PM | 0 Comments | Trackback

Steam Punk

noun

Sci-fi set in the fairly recent past, when everything was powered by steam. There’s usually  sophisticated technology, but always mechanical, never electric.

ex: Golden Compass, Sky Captain and the World of Tommorow, Skybreaker, (Harry Potter?)

December 16th @ 6:17 PM | 0 Comments | Trackback

Plato’s Allegory of the Cave

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_cave

Imagine prisoners, who have been chained since their childhood deep inside a cave: not only are their limbs immobilized by the chains; their heads are chained in one direction as well so that their gaze is fixed on a wall.

Behind the prisoners is an enormous fire, and between the fire and the prisoners is a raised walkway, along which puppets of various animals, plants, and other things are moved along. The puppets cast shadows on the wall, and the prisoners watch these shadows. When one of the puppet-carriers speaks, an echo against the wall causes the prisoners to believe that the words come from the shadows.

The prisoners engage in what appears to us to be a game: naming the shapes as they come by. This, however, is the only reality that they know, even though they are seeing merely shadows of images. They are thus conditioned to judge the quality of one another by their skill in quickly naming the shapes and dislike those who play poorly.

Suppose a prisoner is released and compelled to stand up and turn around. At that moment his eyes will be blinded by the sunlight coming into the cave from its entrance, and the shapes passing by will appear less real than their shadows.

The last object he would be able to see is the sun, which, in time, he would learn to see as the object that provides the seasons and the courses of the year, presides over all things in the visible region, and is in some way the cause of all these things that he has seen.

(This part of the allegory, incidentally, closely relates to Plato’s metaphor of the sun which occurs near the end of The Republic, Book VI.)¹

Once enlightened, so to speak, the freed prisoner would not want to return to the cave to free “his fellow bondsmen,” but would be compelled to do so. Another problem lies in the other prisoners not wanting to be freed: descending back into the cave would require that the freed prisoner’s eyes adjust again, and for a time, he would be one of the ones identifying shapes on the wall. His eyes would be swamped by the darkness, and would take time to become acclimated. Therefore, he would not be able to identify the shapes on the wall as well as the other prisoners, making it seem as if his being taken to the surface completely ruined his eyesight.

Thank you, firestomp. (and wikipedia) I had heard this alluded to, but never knew what it was…

December 3rd @ 6:27 PM | 0 Comments | Trackback