The Republic of Heaven

This Idea has been nagging at me for the past month. I've finally gathered up the guts to post it.

Lyra's world is full of modernized things. Though it has almost no infrastructure to support them. Cars exist but they aren't mass produced. Lyra's world is also going through the same historical period as the 1400's. With the Mongols And the Oppressive Churches, and inquisitions. Its as if somehow technology from the 1950's somehow just slapped itself onto a 1300 century world that has daemons. what if the barriers between the world also cut through the space time continuum. What if someone brought all this super technology from another world.

what do you guy's think?

I think the presence of daemons is responsible for that, it'd change everything.

You shouldn't look at Lyra's world as our world, but merely from a different time period. Things happen at different times, because different things are influencong them, due to the different things before them.

abc wrote:You shouldn't look at Lyra's world as our world, but merely from a different time period. Things happen at different times, because different things are influencong them, due to the different things before them.

No, no no! Rosie's theory is incontrovertibly sound. Simplied massively, the religious conditions described in Lyra's Brytain are very similar to those in our Poland.

The technological and cultural states of our Poland are very similar to those described in Lyra's Brytain.

PP modelled the latter on the former because the extreme hegemony of the Vatican in Poland was what Pullman was projecting on to the entire world.

abc wrote:You shouldn't look at Lyra's world as our world, but merely from a different time period. Things happen at different times, because different things are influencong them, due to the different things before them.

Chaos Theory explains this tidbit rather well. Sensitive dependance on initial conditions. Charles Martel is routed at Tours, Islam flourishes in Europe, no Dark Ages, technology arrives 300 years earlier. Luther's rebellion against the church, except its for christianity. Anything can change the future. Well, almost.

modernmike0005 wrote:Its as if somehow technology from the 1950's somehow just slapped itself onto a 1300 century world that has dæmons.

i imagined the automobiles of lyra's world to be more like the automobiles of 1900s rather than those of the 1950s.

daemons would also affect the infrastructure a lot too.

but yea, what icytoast and max have said. 'lots of small chances coming together' that could have shut up the effects of the dark ages, etcetera would have allowed such developments to eventually occur earlier.

i think that you can't really judge lyra's world's timeframe based on our world. the worlds are really very similar, yes, but that doesn't change the fact that they are different worlds. *nods*

la bohemia wrote:i think that you can't really judge lyra's world's timeframe based on our world. the worlds are really very similar, yes, but that doesn't change the fact that they are different worlds. *nods*

Well... No they aren't. As they appear in the book they're both the products of Philip Pullman's mind, which exists exclusively in this world, and so will naturally have been inclined to base Lyra's world on elements of ours.

Max wrote:

la bohemia wrote:i think that you can't really judge lyra's world's timeframe based on our world. the worlds are really very similar, yes, but that doesn't change the fact that they are different worlds. *nods*

Well... No they aren't. As they appear in the book they're both the products of Philip Pullman's mind, which exists exclusively in this world, and so will naturally have been inclined to base Lyra's world on elements of ours.

Its based on our world, it has to be, since PP had no other world to base it on, but it is meant to be a different world.

The main problem with Lyra's world is that it is not sufficiently different from ours.

[quote="Jameson]Its based on our world, it has to be, since PP had no other world to base it on, but it is meant to be a different world.[/quote]

That's what I was thinking. It's funny I always assumed Will's world was our world - but I remember seeing a thread where this was disputed.

Ceres - why is this a problem?

Townie wrote:[quote="Jameson]Its based on our world, it has to be, since PP had no other world to base it on, but it is meant to be a different world.

That's what I was thinking. It's funny I always assumed Will's world was our world - but I remember seeing a thread where this was disputed.

Ceres - why is this a problem? [/quote]

Briefly, because I think that the existence of daemons would cause much greater differences than we see in HDM. There's certainly no reason why a world with daemons should necessarily have a dominant Church.

Will's world isn't our world - we don't call mobiles "cellphones" in Britain.

Ceres wrote:Will's world isn't our world - we don't call mobiles "cellphones" in Britain.

And the character Will Parry doesn't exist either.

I see your point, Tom, but taken to its logical conclusion this would mean Eastenders or Midsomer murders isn't in our world either - but they're meant to be aren't they?

...Quick where's that window that leads to the Vic? I'm parched

Max wrote:

PP modelled the latter on the former because the extreme hegemony of the Vatican in Poland was what Pullman was projecting on to the entire world.

<Slaps Max>

You were going so well until that bit. The appropriation of technology in "our" Poland was done by the Communist Party. Even before the Communist era, when did Rome ever have such control over Poland?

Furthermore, PP does not reserve his criticism for the excesses of the Roman Catholic hierachy. He is opposed to all forms of state endorsed religion, and the disaster it visits on true spirituality.

Townie wrote:

I see your point, Tom, but taken to its logical conclusion this would mean Eastenders or Midsomer murders isn't in our world either - but they're meant to be aren't they?

That's literary theory for you. All works of fiction exist in the world created by the author. Eastenders ain't in our world because there's no borough of Walford in London. Midsomer Murders ain't in our world because no part of rural Englandshire with such a high murder rate would have just one attendant DCI.

Melancholy Man wrote:Furthermore, PP does not reserve his criticism for the excesses of the Roman Catholic hierachy. He is opposed to all forms of state endorsed religion, and the disaster it visits on true spirituality.

He said that he was against any organisation/anything that tried to supress human thought, consciousness, expression etc. In a article for the Guardian he wrote (I think that's where it's from) he said that included both fascist sections of the church or athiest communist Russia.

Midsomer Murders ain't in our world because no part of rural Englandshire with such a high murder rate would have just one attendant DCI.

Surely there wouldn't even be a population to protect and serve with a murder rate that high?

Will's world isn't our world because it is (As far as we know) fictional. I think that was implied above.

Pullman would have to be documenting real events for it to be otherwise.

Lyra's world surely would have a different bible. Longer to say the names and species of the daemons that belonged to all those people who begat more people.

Is there a definitive history of Lyras world somewhere? It is impossible to state for the record without it, what cause the slowdown in the discovery of ambaric power (They are over a century behind technologically).

Especially odd of a country that prizes knowledge so highly.

Also can anybody explain the terminology of "Gyptian"?

Silent Knight wrote:

Lyra's world surely would have a different bible.

I don't have my copy of NL, but Lord Asriel did indeed quote Lyra a piece from their Genesis in which Adam & Eve's daemons feature. Pete (a.k.a. Ceres) has written an excellent piece about the crucifixion of Christ, and the nailing of His dove-daemon to some lolly-sticks.

Also can anybody explain the terminology of "Gyptian"?

The Gyptians seem to be a mish-mash of various traveller traditions in southern England. Etymologically, they're the gypsies (ethnic Romany) who were erroneously believed to have hailed from Egypt when they began to appear in Europe five/six hundred years ago.

Ceres wrote:

There's certainly no reason why a world with dæmons should necessarily have a dominant Church.

I've banged on before about the dominance of the Geneva-based Magesterium resulting from an undefined event during the Reformation which resulted in the snubbing out of the Rome-based Vatican, and victory of the John Calvin and the Elect. There's a nicely ironic touch in which priests with Iberian or Italic names are the servants, not masters of the Church. The Calvinist feel is hammered home with the manky-Scots gits in charge of the Magesterium.

Another effects would have been to strangle European expansion which was in a nascent form then, and save much of the rest of the world from our baneful influences. Other cultures and civilizations appear to exist on an equal footing in the L-Shaped Room. Consider King Ogunwe's West African kingdom. Six hundred years ago, the Yoruba or Benin or Asante peoples would have been just as advanced as North European societies of another six or so centuries before.

That said, there are also inconsistencies in this narative. How, for example, does Will meet a Magesterium Russian priest in TAS? The Eastern Church split from Rome centuries before Calvin.

How did the Scandinavians colonize North America? The settlements of Vinland and Erika stagnated long before the 16th century. Maybe the Tartars remained strong, and continued to harass those parts of Europe which encroached on Swedish and Norse influences at home.