Urth Net
Daemonising Pullman
↰ answers Dan'l Danehy-Oakes
· by quotation
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Dan'l Danehy-Oakes wrote:
1. This is a brilliant novel.
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...But there's no reason for calling them daemons; it's just an in-yer-face choice to irritate easily-irritated Christians.
I'm glad you're enjoying the book I know as Northern Lights, Dan'l, but I can't agree with you that this is the only reason Pullman chose the word "daemon". The Marriage of Heaven and Hell probably irritated a few easily-irritated Christians in its time too, but what it was supposed to do was make people think.
I would hope that a child reading Pullman's book might be very interested to learn that a word used by Christianity to mean an incarnation of evil originally meant something as harmless as "spirit", and might wonder what other little misappropriations and mistakes may have taken place over the years.
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On a larger scale: does anyone, can anyone, believe that in a world this different -- where every human has an externalized animus/anima, where bears are sentient, etc. -- the history of the world would be similar enough that someone called John Calvin would become something called Pope of something called the Catholic Church?
The Crushed Butterfly theory of time has been tediously fashionable in SF writing for a long time now, but it -is- just a theory. Another one is that the stream of history would simply flow around any change, and carry on much as before. If that theory leads to more books like Pullman's, or Wolfe's There Are Doors, where the changes are small and thought-provoking rather than huge and predictable, then I for one am happy to give "logic" a miss for a while. :-)