His Dark Materials

Philip Pullman rocking the Multiverse before rocking the Multiverse was cool.

Finally got the print upgrade from my cruddy Kindle single. About time.

What interesting about the story is there are no characters to root for. Horley is an ignorant and greedy aristocrat and Grinstead is an amoral sociopath. As a rule it's not exactly kosher to only make a horror story filled with nothing but detestable characters so the reader won't be upset when bad things go down. But it's a novella that enriches a far larger story. I'll allow it.

The notion that Grinstead doesn't take the monkey because he knows it will come to him eventually is both awesome and chilling.

The time travel aspects of the story are probably the most intriguing thing about it, mostly because Universe crossing in "His Dark Materials" never involved that. It's never explained how it works or WHY it happened to Grinstead (or even what Universe he's originally from) but that just makes it even MORE mysterious. The hows and whys don't seem to matter to this short story. It Simply Is A Thing That Is.

The illustrations really demonstrate what a different mix of genres the story is. It's a mystery, gothic horror, and science fiction. What's interesting about the conceit of the unsolved mystery is that even if the reader isn't allowed to know EVERYTHING, we still know more than the actual characters do. It's an irresistible conceit for the mystery to be people from our world have NO context for what the hell could possibly be going on with Lyra's world. I've given Pullman's short His "Dark Materials"-related fiction a second look and it's all surprisingly solid. 4 1/2 stars.

I'm a little disappointed. Not just for the flimsy page count (It's pretty ballsy print is only on one side of each page) but because about HALF of this is from the Lantern Slides portions of Lyra's Oxford. I LOVED the Lantern Slides (or as Pullman refers to it now, "Cloud Chambers"). It's not cool to ask readers to essentially double dip on half of a hardcover book, and one only printed on one side to boot. So it's basically only 20-25 pages of new material, some pages only a couple of sentences long.

That said, some of the "slides" / "clouds" are fascinating. Mostly the stuff with Will. Not only interesting and believable that he became a doctor, but the part when he realized the elderly people who treated his mother so terribly when he was six, who he wanted to kill were his father's parents was chilling. A lot of cool insights like that, but a LOT of it was already printed.

I like the idea that Will was a little TOO good at medicine and occasionally had to give an incorrect diagnosis so his talents wouldn't be considered supernatural. I also like learning that after Will and Mrs. Coulter's confrontation in the cave in "The Amber Spyglass" both felt they escaped with their lives.

Also cool is the idea that people don't always need to talk to each other. Their daemons can sometimes interact, and the person, without even knowing it, might have gained an enemy for life or fallen in love.

Some of the new material involves the "The Book Of Dust" characters. Still this very much felt like a bait-and-switch. Not cool. 2 1/2 stars.