But the path, which is Cinderella’s own story, goes from here to there, going through this part and that part. Always. And the business of the storyteller, or the novelist, it seems to me, is with the path and not the wood.
It doesn’t have to be Cinderella’s path, though. My book I Was a Rat! begins with an old couple called Bob and Joan. He’s a shoemaker and she’s a washerwoman, and they never had any children, though they would have liked to. One evening, as they’re sitting quietly in their kitchen, they hear a knock at the door. Standing there is a little boy in a ragged pageboy costume, all dirty and torn, and all he can say is, “I was a rat.” He doesn’t have a name, he can’t remember where he comes from, he says he’s three weeks old, though he looks about nine years.
Well, they take him in, and the story begins. The story of the boy who had been a rat is another path through Cinderella’s wood, and one that touches her life, Cinderella’s life, at two points, though it only touches her story once. It touches her story at the point where the fairy godmother turns the rats and the lizards and the pumpkin into a coach and horses and coachmen. There’s a young rat that Cinderella used to play with and give crumbs to, and the fairy godmother turns him into a pageboy to open the coach door and let down the steps and so on.
Well, they go to the ball, but he gets up to mischief in the palace, and he doesn’t make it back to the coach; so there he is, stuck as a boy for ever. And he has a great deal of trouble as a result.
Meanwhile, Cinderella’s story is going on elsewhere in the wood, and coming to a triumphant end with her marriage. That’s the end of her story—the Cinderella path—but it’s not the end of her life, which is just as well, because the poor little rat-boy ends up in desperate need of a dea ex machina in order to save him from the terrible fate towards which the path of his story seems to be taking him. And who better than a beautiful young princess to fill that role? Why, it’s almost lifelike.
That’s what I mean by the wood and the path, anyway. It’s the difference between the story-world and the story-line. And I want to stress again that the business of the storyteller is with the story-line, with the path. You can make your story-wood, your invented world, as rich and full as you like, but be very, very careful not to be tempted off the path. Another path in another wood: remember the wicked wolf tempting Little Red Riding Hood to stray off the path and pick the pretty flowers? Don’t do it! Don’t be weak! Don’t give in! Stick to the path. Admire them by all means, and slow down a little if you must, but don’t leave the path.
The reason for this is simple: if you leave the path, the readers put down the book. Suddenly they remember that phone call they had to make; they look in the paper to see what’s on TV; they think a cup of coffee would be nice, and when they’re in the kitchen they look out the window and see that hedge they meant to trim yesterday, or they switch on the radio to hear the football commentary, or when they get the milk out of the fridge they remember they had to get some cheese for supper, and there’s just time to go and get it…
And meanwhile the book is lying there forgotten. Because you left the path. Because you became more interested in the wood, in elaborating all the richness and invention of the world you’re making up. Never leave the path.
However, that’s when you’re telling the story. When you’re talking about telling the story, as I am now, you are allowed to leave the path and wander through the wood as much as you like. And I know that many science fiction fans, and fantasy fans, enjoy exploring the woods and the forests and the worlds that writers have dreamed up. I’ve been contacted by people in Canada and elsewhere who have been playing a game that they based on the world I made up for The Golden Compass. It looks like an odd kind of activity to me, but they seemed to be enjoying it. However, I’ve never been a games player of any kind—computer games and card games and chess and Monopoly have never had the slightest attraction for me—so maybe it’s the games-playing cast of mind that you need and I haven’t got. I’m quite willing to go into someone else’s fictional world and follow the path they lead me on, but I don’t want to leave their path and fool about among the trees; I’d rather make up my own wood and fool about in that. However, if I see something in their wood worth stealing, I’ll pick it up and take it away without hesitation. If they didn’t want me to steal from their story, they shouldn’t have invited me into it—that’s my view.
Anyway, I’m going to tell you something about the world I made up for the third book in the trilogy called His Dark Materials, which began with The Golden Compass and continued with The Subtle Knife, and which is completed with a book called The Amber Spyglass. When you begin by calling your first book The Something Something, and call the second The Something-else Something-else, you really have to give the third one a similar name. Eric Rohmann, the American illustrator who designed the covers, suggested The Sophisticated Monkey-Wrench, but I thought that wasn’t a good idea.
The whole trilogy is based on the notion of parallel worlds. We know that there must be other universes parallel to ours, because (as I understand it) an experiment which has been a cornerstone of twentieth-century physics leaves us with no alternative as an explanation. According to the physicist David Deutsch, the famous demonstration of the dual nature of light as both wave and particle—the double-slit experiment, where single photons are interfered with by something that we cannot observe, which makes them behave as if they are part of a wave—indicates clearly that the universe we see and touch must be surrounded by vast numbers of other universes.
That’s good enough for me. I don’t understand why, but I wouldn’t dream of arguing with him. The only problem is how to get from one universe to another.
In a sense, this is a basic problem of science fiction: how to get from here, where we live, to there, where the strange things happen. And there are as many ways of solving it as there are novelists. One of my favourite ways occurs in that great, mysterious, powerful, odd and inimitable novel, David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus, which was published in 1920. Here is the hero, Maskull, examining some small torpedo-shaped bottles containing a colourless liquid, and possessing queer-looking nozzle-like stoppers. I quote:
He now made out on the larger bottle the words “Solar Back-Rays”; and on the other one, after some doubt, he thought that he could distinguish something like “Arcturian Back-rays.”
He looked up, to stare curiously at his friend. “What are back-rays?”
“Light which goes back to its source,” muttered Nightspore.
“And what kind of light may that be?”
Nightspore seemed unwilling to answer, but finding Maskull’s eyes still fixed on him he brought out—“Unless light pulled, as well as pushed, how would flowers contrive to twist their heads round after the sun?”
How indeed. To fly to Arcturus, all they have to do is get into a space-ship fuelled by Arcturian Back-rays, which will suck them up to the star in nineteen hours—light goes even faster backwards than forwards, apparently.
Absolute nonsense, of course, and it doesn’t matter a bit. The real point is not how they get there, but what they do when they arrive: not the wood, but the path. So when I needed a way of getting from one universe to another, I didn’t waste time inventing anything fancy: I just cut a hole. In the second book in my trilogy, the young boy Will has acquired a knife, known as the subtle knife, which is sharp enough to cut even between the molecules of the air, and he’s now learning how to use it. I quote:
The second time it was easier. Having felt it once, he knew what to search for again, and he felt the curious little snag after less than a minute. It was like delicately searching out the gap between one stitch and the next with the point of a scalpel. He touched, withdrew, touched again to make sure, and then did as the old man said, and cut sideways with the silver edge.
It was a good thing that Giacomo Paradisi had reminded him not to be
surprised. He kept careful hold of the knife and put it down on the table before giving in to his astonishment. Lyra was on her feet already, speechless, because there in the middle of the dusty little room was a gap in mid-air through which they could see another world.
(TSK, 193)
And so on. Once you have the subtle knife, you can open the way to any other world, and the problem of travel is dealt with at once.
In the third and final book, The Amber Spyglass, I needed a new world altogether to which Lyra and Will must travel. If anyone here has read The Subtle Knife, they might remember the scientist Dr. Mary Malone, who leaves her world—ours—because she’s told she has an important task to fulfil somewhere else. Part of The Amber Spyglass deals with her journey there, and with the making of the instrument named in the title. She goes there to prepare the way for Will and Lyra, though she doesn’t know why.
This world itself is peopled by creatures with wheels, and I want to say a little about how I developed them. (And here my ignorance of science fiction comes into play: it may well be that every science fiction novel which I have not read has dealt with this question, and done it far more neatly and cleverly than I have. However, you have to put up with the fact that I can only tell you what I know, so here goes.)
At first I didn’t know why these creatures had wheels: it was just a puzzle and I was interested in solving it. How could a living creature have wheels? The wheel is almost the prototypical human invention: the first big technological idea. The main problem, of course, is that to revolve at all, a wheel has to be detachable: it has to have no communication with the axle apart from the bearing on which it revolves. It can’t be part of it.
Around this time my son Tom and I spent a morning walking around Lake Bled, in Slovenia, talking about the problem. He was fifteen then. I don’t usually talk about my books till they’re finished, but this wasn’t the path, it was the wood. That’s all right; I can talk about that.
We decided that either there had to be a connection or there had to be no connection: either they could take the wheels off, or they were part of them and they had to leave them on. If they were connected, if the wheels themselves were living tissue, they would need oxygen and nutrition and so forth; so how would that be supplied?
There could have been some sort of infinitely extensible and flexible material to make the blood vessels from, which could wind round and round the axle as the wheel revolved but didn’t take up any room—but that was such a clumsy idea that we didn’t like it at all. We could have gone for a different idea, where the blood or the equivalent material passed directly into an open chamber in the hub of the wheel through an open chamber on the axle, the edges being sealed in the same way as a tubeless tyre is sealed on to a car wheel: pressure, basically.
But I felt another idea coming, and I wanted to go for detachable wheels. Were they made, or were they natural? There were a lot of trees around us as we walked along the lake side, and the idea of seed-pods almost fell on my head: very large ones—flat and perfectly circular—very hard—with a soft place in the centre through which a claw could be inserted for an axle. I liked the idea of symbiosis: the creatures depending on the trees that produced the seed-pods, the trees depending on the creatures to spread their seeds for them. Eventually, after much hard riding, the pods would break open, and more trees would grow. And there was that other idea hovering somewhere just out of reach…
What shape should the creatures be? Like us, vertebrate with a central spine and four limbs, a wheel at each corner like a car? I didn’t like that. I saw them as moving swiftly and with great freedom, and if each limb had a wheel on it, how could they propel themselves? There was no reason to limit them to four limbs, of course; they could have as many as I liked. But four is neat.
However, they didn’t have to be disposed like ours. If they were like motorcycles, with one wheel in front of the other, they could move quickly and balance easily and be in every way more mobile; and if there were two lateral limbs, then they could scoot along by using them to push with. But how could that arrangement work with a skeleton based on a central spine? It couldn’t. I needed a different structure altogether: a diamond-shaped skeletal frame, with a limb at each corner. Almost there. (And that other idea was pressing at me more and more.)
But before we went any further, Tom reminded me of something very important. Wheels are so successful in our world because we’ve made plenty of smooth surfaces for them to run on; it would be no good having creatures with wheels in a world full of rocks and bogs and quicksands and covered in thick undergrowth. Where could they use their wheels? We stopped to think about that. Should they have artificial roads, or should they be something that developed naturally?
Well, the creatures might adapt and improve them later, but to start with, they had to be natural: they had to be there to allow evolution time enough to bring the creatures and the seed-pods together. Suppose there had been many volcanoes in that world, and suppose that the lava they produced contained the right combination of minerals to flow across the landscape like rivers, and suppose that the ambient temperature was such as to let them cool at just the right rate to solidify as flat surfaces and not break up into crystalline columns, as the basalt pillars of the Giant’s Causeway in Ireland did.
We decided we could suppose that, so we did. That was the roads taken care of. I could have consulted geologists, no doubt (one advantage of living where I do, in the city of Oxford, is that there are experts on everything under the sun just a phone call and a bicycle ride away)—and I could have persuaded someone to come up with the exact combination of minerals and temperature that would give a result like that…But I haven’t yet. Maybe I will, and maybe I won’t. Is it the path, or is it the wood? If it’s the path, I will, and if it’s the wood, I won’t.
Similarly, I could have gone into the evolution of the diamond-frame skeleton. It wouldn’t have been too hard: a moment of luck at the time of the Burgess Shale, for example, and our own earth might never have given rise to vertebrates at all. We and our ancestors and our present-day cousins might all have walked about on seven pairs of legs and lived inside a shell made of intricate plates of silica.
So it would have been quite easy, had I wanted to, to invent a series of chances and contingencies that would have favoured the development of a skeleton based on a frame rather than a flexible spine. Actually, the diamond-frame is a pretty versatile thing as the basis of an animal structure: there’s a large seagoing bird in that world which has two lateral legs for swimming with and two long wings, fore and aft, which it extends upwards and uses as sails. It can skim before the wind, or tack against it, and the legs give it great manoeuvrability and speed. And there could be all sorts of other variations on the diamond-frame skeleton, if anyone wanted to make them up. They’re all there in the phase space, somewhere off in the wood.
Mind you, not all creatures in that world have diamond-frame skeletons, any more than all the creatures in our world are vertebrates. It’s just that the diamond-frame is successful, and predominates. There are vertebrates there too: they have snakes, for example, of which more later.
But just to finish describing the main creatures, the ones with the wheels. In order to reach the level of sophistication and technology I wanted them to get to, they had to have something to make and hold tools with: the equivalent of the opposable thumb. But if all four limbs are busy with transportation, what could that be? Well, there’s a ready-made structure in the animal kingdom of our own world that would do: the tip of an elephant’s trunk is packed with muscles and nerves and very strong and almost infinitely flexible and sensitive. Very well: give them trunks.
And at this point that other idea that I’ve been mentioning all the way through kept on coming closer and closer until I was able to look at it directly. In fact, I couldn’t ignore it any longer.
It had to do with the matter I’ve been talking abo
ut all through: the path and the wood. Making up creatures like this was good fun as I walked around a lake in Slovenia with my son, but what did it have to do with the story I was writing? What was the point? Did the wheels add to the story or only decorate it? Were they part of the wood, or could they be part of the path?
Well, of course, they had to be part of the path, or I wouldn’t have wanted to waste my time with them. In other words, the wheels had to advance the story. The story had to concern the wheels. If they’re just picturesque, if they’re just part of the wood, the book gets put down.
Mulefa visualization by Eric Dubois
Well now: one of the themes of the story from the very beginning was this substance which I called Dust, with a capital D. To Dr. Mary Malone, the scientist, it seems to be what we in this universe call dark matter, the subject of her research. But in Lyra’s universe, Dust is a source of great anxiety to the authorities, and since her world is more or less a theocracy, the authority is the church. Dust, they think, is the physical evidence of original sin; Dust comes to us when we grow up and become corrupted by the wickedness of the world, of knowledge. In their version of the book of Genesis, the serpent is responsible for bringing Dust into the world by tempting Eve to taste the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil. Dust is something to be hated and feared.
However, Lyra comes to a different point of view, which by a strange coincidence is also mine: that Dust is a positive good. This does not mean embracing evil instead of good: it means understanding that since the loss of innocence is inevitable, we should welcome it and embrace the next stage of our development instead of hiding our eyes from it. Knowing about good and evil is not the same as embracing evil, though it might look like that to a church that likes to think it has all the answers.
Daemon Voices Page 10