Infinite Earths, Infinite Stories: What Marvel & DC’s Multiverses Teach SF Novelists
https://boldly.blue/multiverse-speculative-fiction-marvel-dc-novelists/
Explore how Marvel and DC built their comic book multiverses, compare them with Moorcock, Zelazny, Pullman, and King, and learn craft lessons for building multiverse trilogies.
#multiverse #speculativefiction #Marvel #DCComics #MichaelMoorcock #RogerZelazny #PhilipPullman #StephenKing #worldbuilding #trilogycraft #CrisisonInfiniteEarths #DarkTower #HisDarkMaterials
Explore how Marvel and DC built their comic book multiverses, compare them with Moorcock, Zelazny, Pullman, and King, and learn craft lessons for building multiverse trilogies.
Das höre ich gerade ein zweites Mal um mich auf den letzten Band vorzubereiten.
Während andere Leser vergeblich auf „Winds of Winter“ und/oder „Door of Stone“ warten, bescherte uns Philip Pullmann vor kurzem den abschließenden Band seiner „Book of Dust“ Trilogie welche seine großartige „His Dark Materials“ Reihe fortsetzte.
Ab nächste Woche kann ich dann „Das Feld der Rosen“ zu betreten und darf ein letztes Mal Lyra und Pantalaimon folgen.
Es gib ja Leser*innen die warten immer noch hoffnungsvoll auf
• Winds of Winter
und/oder hoffen endlich die
• Door of Stone
öffnen zu können.
Ich gehöre nicht bzw. nicht mehr dazu.
Ich erwarte mit freudiger Spannung Ende März ein
• Das Feld der Rosen
zu betreten und in einem hoffentlich würdigen Abschluss noch ein letztes Mal unser Lyra zu begleiten.
[Bitte keine Spoiler oder Kritik zur bereits erschienenen englischen Ausgabe, ich will vorher nichts dazu wissen]
AO3 fandom metatags are back!
At long last, after a year’s worth of internal discussion and a few more months of preparing for the rollout, AMTs are back on the menu.
Two of my requests have already been approved! His Dark Materials & Related Fandoms and 魔法少女まどか☆マギカ | Puella Magi Madoka Magica & Related Fandoms are the metatags on a couple of shiny new tag trees!
Official AO3 announcement post is here. The number of “I’m so happy to see this, it’ll make my fandom browsing so much easier” comments are a joy to see. (The comments about “well, geez, took you long enough” are…valid, honestly.)
A lot of specific tag trees are still works-in-progress, especially if it’s a big complicated franchise. So don’t worry too much if a fandom you love doesn’t have one yet — the wranglers might still be working on it. Honestly, I’m still working on investigating all the Madoka Magica fandom syns, which is why most of the spinoffs still don’t have their own separate fandom tags. We’ll get there, I promise.
Fun little twist that’s only a problem for me: this means “more fandoms” listed on my wrangling page. The amount of work is objectively exactly the same! It’s the same amount of fic, just spread across slightly more fandom tags! But the recently-added limit is on the number of fandoms, not the amount of fanworks those fandoms get.
Current number of fandoms on my list: 1142.
Current number that have any tag-wrangling to do: 28. (Not the same 28 as the last time I posted. There’s some overlap — a fandom like Sailor Moon has new tags every week — but the others rotate, especially the “just got new tags from its first fic posted in 2 years” type of fandoms.)
All 10 references to Dust in the second Book of Dust volume
A thing I kept noticing in The Secret Commonwealth: any time someone brought up Dust, as in Rusakov particles, it went by fast. One character would mention it — another one might react — but then the conversation would move right along to something else.
The original HDM trilogy did a really solid job with this concept. Lyra first hears about it as one of many mysterious Scholar Things she spies on without understanding. When she gets a child-friendly explanation, it’s the Church-doctrine propaganda version. Readers follow along with her, and later with other POV characters, building out our knowledge as they hear more perspectives and see more experimental results.
There are good reasons Dust wouldn’t come up much in La Belle Sauvage. It’s a flashback, so even the experts are 10 years’ less knowledgeable, and young Malcolm (unlike Lyra) isn’t interacting with those experts much in the first place. If anything, the Rusakov physics in that book felt kinda shoehorned in. Bonneville is a Rusakov researcher, Malcolm finds his notes…then Mal keeps asking about it (even though it’s not relevant to surviving the flood, and he has no reason to expect it would be), and Bonneville keeps giving accurate answers (even though he has no motive to be honest, and every motive to make up something scary/demoralizing).
But TSC is a flash-forward. They have all the discoveries of HDM, plus another 10 years’ worth of research. A bunch of the main characters are professionally interested. This would be the point in the trilogy where you get to properly reintroduce Dust to the reader!
And instead…well, here are all the times it comes up:
—
(1) Chapter 5, page 76, a selection from Roderick Hassall’s journal as Lyra reads it:
Why is it necessary to investigate the roses? Because of what they show us about the nature of Dust. And if the Magisterium hears about what is here in Karamakan, they will stop at nothing to prevent that knowledge from spreading, and to do that they will come here and destroy the red building and everything in it; and they have armies and armaments in plenty to do that. The recent trouble in Khulanshan and Akdzhar is their work — no doubt about that. They are coming closer.
This seems like a perfect setup for Lyra to reflect on what she knows about Dust, and how long the Magisterium has been trying to suppress/distort knowledge about it.
And yet, nope. Doesn’t come up at all. She thinks she knows “something about that red building,” she reflects on her experience with daemon separation ordeals — and that’s it. If you didn’t remember HDM super clearly, you could come away from this thinking the red building was a callback to something on one of Lyra’s previous adventures, and this “Dust” idea was just being introduced for the first time.
(This also would’ve been a perfect setup for Lyra to refresh our memories about Mary’s suspiciously-similar work with lenses and plant oil…except that I don’t think Mary actually told her anything about the Amber Spyglass.)
—
(2) Chapter 8, page 146, Malcolm talking to Hannah about Hassall’s possessions, and rose-related violence:
‘There’s a scientific research station near there. Meteorology, mainly, but they cover a number of other disciplines as well. Anyway, they’ve lost a number of scientists, inexplicably. They just vanished. I did hear rumours about Dust,’ Malcolm said.
Malcolm is showing the journal to Hannah, so the idea is that it corroborates the rumors he’s already heard about Dust. But, again, we don’t hear anything about why it stands out to him as important.
Hannah even does a callback to Bonneville’s research! Which kid Mal didn’t understand when he got it, but Hannah did, and she’s been keeping up with the field over the 20 years since then. Shouldn’t she be able to give us some exposition about why it was relevant, which parts of it have been confirmed or denied by later research, what new discoveries have been made since…?
Yeah, no, she does none of that. She doesn’t even mention that Bonneville’s research was related to Dust.
—
(3) Chapter 10, pages 187-188, Malcolm at a debrief where Hassall’s botanist colleagues explain the effects of the rose oil (Dr. Stevenson is a particle physicist):
‘For those who haven’t come across it before, the Rusakov field and the particles associated with it are aspects of the phenomenon known as Dust. Which of course is not to be spoken about without the specific authority of the Magisterium. I’m assured by Lucy that you are all aware of the constraints this places on our activities. And our conversations.’
He looked directly at Malcolm as he said this.
Malcolm nodded blandly, and Napier went on: ‘Briefly, Margery Stevenson and I discovered that the oil on the lens made it possible to see various effects of the Rusakov field which had previously only been described theoretically. There have been rumours for a decade or so that something like it had been seen before, but any records had been systematically destroyed by — well, we know who.
The debrief gets crashed by Magisterium agents before anyone can elaborate.
If the writing overall was better, I would say this was a good set piece! We get teased with a few details (it’s the first mention of Rusakov!), then left in suspense, excited to discover more in the future. The interruption also makes you feel how tense and dangerous this is just to talk about, so it raises the stakes.
Trouble is, it doesn’t, you know…pay off. Still not even a hint about what this means to Malcolm in particular, either.
—
(4) Chapter 19, page 412, Pan confronting Gottfriend Brande:
‘I want to know about Dust,’ said Pan.
That startled Brande. He opened his mouth as if to speak, and then seemed to recollect that he was trying to ignore Pan, and looked away again.
‘Tell me what you know about it,’ said Pan. ‘I know you can hear me.’
‘There is no such thing,’ Brande muttered, looking at the floor.
‘No such thing as Dust?’
‘No — such — thing.’
(5) Same chapter, bringing it up again, on pages 413-414:
Pan said, “Tell me about Dust, now you can talk.’
‘This is dust,’ said Brande, sweeping his hand along a rafter and blowing on his fingers to disperse it. The grains whirled meaninglessly through the air and sifted down to the floor.
‘You know what I mean,’ said Pan. ‘You just refuse to believe in it.’
‘It does not exist. Belief and disbelief are both irrelevant.’
‘And the scientists who discovered it? Rusakov? And the Rusakov field, what about that?’
‘A fraud. Those who claim such things are either deluded or corrupt.’
I’m being a little generous to count these as two separate mentions. It’s the same conversation. My feelings about the whole thing all go together.
Gottfried here is a philosopher-turned-novelist. Why does Pan expect him to know anything about particle physics? Why, in particular, would he know about developments that are being actively repressed by the Magisterium? And why would Pan expect Gottfried’s knowledge to be useful or relevant to his quest in any way?
Some missed opportunities for setup:
And even if all the groundwork had been laid…if Pan had excellent and well-established reasons to confront this particular guy about Dust…how does Gottfried’s response follow from what we know about him?
He’s the “It was nothing more than what it was” guy. If he knows about Rusakov particles, his reaction should be “That’s just a meaningless phenomenon we happen to have scientific measurements of. It has nothing to do with silly, irrational notions like ‘creativity’ or ‘feeling’. It’s just lines on a screen, numbers on a dial, non-standard effects in a visual field. Projecting your own fanciful beliefs all over them won’t make them into anything more than what they are.”
—
(6) Chapter 20, page 446, for some reason Lyra brings it up with Magician Dad:
‘Tell me about Dust. You know what I mean by Dust?’
‘I have heard of Dust, of the Rusakov field, of course I have. You think I still live in the seventeenth century? I read all the scientific journals. Some of them are very funny. Let me tell you something else. You have an alethiometer, do you not?’
‘Yes.’
‘The alethiometer is not the only way to read Dust, not even the best way.’
‘What other ways are there?’
‘I will tell you one, that is all. A pack of cards.’
Lyra’s turn to interrogate some random guy, even though she has no established reason to expect him to be a physics expert.
Again, we can use details that haven’t been mentioned since HDM to backfill a theory Lyra could be working from, here. Asriel came very close to killing Lyra after he magically summoned A Child to murder, for experiments that had to do with Dust. Magician Dad here claims he just magically-summoned and then murdered his own kid for an experiment, so maybe his purposes are also Dust-related…?
But the current book doesn’t have Lyra make any of those connections. She’s briefly reminded of Asriel, then immediately moves on without any reflection on why. And it’s not like Asriel would’ve explained true/helpful facts about his Secret Church-Forbidden Science Knowledge to any random person who walked in, anyway. So why would Lyra expect that here?
On top of all that — Magician Dad clearly knows things without being told, and is a little smug about showing it off. Why didn’t Pullman just have him bring up Dust, without any prompting? Could’ve had the exact same lore dump, but with a realistic amount of wariness and opsec on Lyra’s part.
—
(7) Chapter 21, page 469, Olivier Bonneville when he’s captured by Magisterium agents, and is haughtily intimidating them into feeling bad about it:
To start with, the connection involves Dust. Got it? You understand that? You know what that means? My father was a scientist, as they call them now. An experimental theologian. He was investigating Dust, where it comes from, what it means, the threat it holds. He was killed and all his notes were stolen, and so was his alethiometer. The girl Belacqua knows something about it, and so does that Polstead man. That’s why I’m here. That’s what I’m doing.
Vague, unhelpful, tells us nothing new — but in this case it’s justified. Olivier is bluffing like hell, pretending he knows way more than he does, and going for shameless lies whenever that suits his purposes more than the truth.
It’s a good character moment. I’ll take it.
—
(8) Chapter 23, page 504, Lyra contemplating to herself while on the ferry:
And Dust? Where did that come in? Was it a metaphor? Was it part of the secret commonwealth? And the burning Dutchman! What would reason say about him? He couldn’t exist. He was a delusion. She had dreamed it all. It hadn’t happened—
About 2/3 of the way through the book, this highlights that we still have no idea what Lyra [thinks she] knows/remembers about Dust. It’s only come up in two other scenes she was in: a passage she read in a book (where she had no reaction to the word), and the time she asked Magician Dad about it (where it wasn’t clear why she asked, how much she already knew, or what she hoped/expected to find out).
“The burning Dutchman” is Magician Dad’s victim. This might be the only scene where Lyra goes into 100% denial of her own experiences — not just “I don’t have the right explanation for this thing I saw,” but “I didn’t even see this thing I saw.”
It doesn’t make a ton of sense here, and it makes even less if she’s trying to apply it to her experiences with Dust. So many other people have shared and corroborated those experiences. It’s an elementary particle that people in multiple worlds have measured with scientific instruments! Where’s the sense in writing that off as some kind of mass delusion? What would it be “a metaphor” for? This is like wondering if electrons are a metaphor.
—
(9) Chapter 24, page 536, Olivier responding to being interrogated by Malcolm:
‘The oil from that place has got various properties that [the Magisterium] haven’t got to the bottom of yet. They need a larger sample. I got hold of a tiny amount — I know a girl in the Geneva laboratory, and in exchange . . . Well, she gave me a piece of blotting paper with a few drops on it. I found out one thing straightaway. It protects against the nausea in the new method. With enough of it you could use the new method and never suffer the ill effects. But I only had that little bit.’
‘Go on. What else?’
‘You know what they mean by Dust?’
‘Of course.’
‘With the oil, they can see that. And lines of power. Or fields. Maybe fields. The girl in the lab said it was a field. And they could see not just chemicals and kinds of light but human interactions. If Professor Zitski had touched this specimen but not that one, he showed up somehow, because they could check it against the other things he’d touched. And Professor Zotski would have his mark on it too, if he had. If Zotski had been thinking about the thing, or he’d ordered how the experiment was to be set up, he’d show up in the field.’
…I want a workplace buddy comedy about Professor Zitski and Professor Zotski now.
This is Olivier talking again, so it works for his character that he’s only registered the details most relevant to his work/interests, He has no idea how the Rusakov field is related to free will, or daemon intercision, or angels, or any of the Magisterium’s past operations. (He…might not actually have noticed that the alethiometer works by reading Dust, come to think of it.)
That said, it’s a little exasperating that Malcolm doesn’t seem to get anything from those details. He doesn’t pick them up and fit them into his pre-existing knowledge. He doesn’t fill in any long-standing gaps, or come to any shocking new realizations, or update and refine his predictions about the Magisterium’s goals.
With other things Olivier brings up, Mal does that! With the Dust-related intel, it kinda doesn’t make a difference that it came up at all.
—
(10) Chapter 27, pages 575-576, Lyra contemplating again while people-watching from a hotel:
And she found herself thinking about roses and Dust. The street below her was saturated in Dust. Human lives were generating it, being sustained and enriched by it; it made everything glow as if it was touched with gold. She could almost see it. It brought with it a mood that she hadn’t felt for so long that it was unfamiliar, and welcomed it almost apprehensively: it was a quiet conviction, underlying every circumstance, that all was well and that the world was her true home, as if there were great secret powers that would see her safe.
Suddenly, out of nowhere, Lyra remembers relevant details about Dust that haven’t come up all book!
She doesn’t connect them to anything either. No reminiscing about how she learned any of this in the first place, or why that memory would make her feel so good. No speculation on which parts might have been discovered by the travelers in the mysterious red building. No reflection on why the Magisterium is so hell-bent on suppressing it. Nothing at all.
This whole thing isn’t my biggest complaint about the book. Not even close. But it sure is weird and frustrating, and I don’t care for it!
It almost feels like Pullman isn’t actually interested in Dust anymore — he’s all about roses now. (Parallel to how he’s bored with the alethiometer, and wants the characters to play with myrioramas instead?) He works in a handful of mentions of it, because he put it in the title of the trilogy, so he can’t just forget it exists…but they’re all so brief, in passing, and none of the characters are interested in dwelling on why it’s even worth bringing up.
Raurquiz
Boldly.Blue
Graulv [Ulf] : 🦥 & 🦤
Curt Johnson - Indie Genius
C.Suthorn 
Humanist+Humorist