More Armored Bears!
by endless
Hiding in a cupboard in the Master's room at Oxford, Lyra Belacqua sees him try to poison her uncle, an important northern explorer and scientist. Lyra's daemon, Pan - an external animal manifestation of her soul creature, something between a patronus and animal familiar - urges her to leave quietly, but Lyra decides instead to warn her uncle. In doing so, she aligns herself with his quest to understand the northern lights and to build a bridge to another world. Pullman's trilogy takes place in a multiverse that spans something like WWI England, contemporary America, and a separate universe called Cittegaze, with its own rules of soul and substance. The "northern lights" trilogy, made of The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass, won several prestigious awards and was made into a series of films (see ). Pullman's trilogy has long been a favorite series to recommend to precocious young readers and teens looking to explore new literary worlds, much as Lyra bridges the universes of the books with her daemon in tow. For every young person today who has sorted themselves into Gryffindor, imagined a pet owl or rat, or wishes they could play quidditch, there's a slightly older person who has imagined themselves a daemon that changes animal forms depending on their true internal state, who has re-read Pullman's trilogy or read it aloud to their children and wondered about the fate of the armored polar bears.
We will soon get another installment of the bears, Lyra, and her northern journeys, because Philip Pullman recently announced a new trilogy to be released in fall 2017! "The Dust," the first new book takes place during the same historical timeline as the original trilogy. This is a great opportunity to go back to Pullman, who challenged young readers and older science fiction devotees to think about humanity's role in global destruction, who challenged the religious tenets of many YA series like the The Chronicles of Narnia, and who imagined a multiverse based on a particle physics decades before Steven Hawking. The series rewards re-readers and celebrates the power of children's curiosity.
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