OHC
deep green blue collar rainbow
- Location
- Little Beirut
- Pronouns
- they/she
I haven't been watching the show, but I have been rereading the books for the first time since I was a kid. They still hold up really well and will retake their position among my favorites - but naturally I've been paying more attention to the alternate history elements this time around.
Obviously the setting is soft AH with lots of supernatural elements, not quite like what we do here (although I do think it's useful for all AH writers as a great example of how to establish an alternate world without infodumping - you get a good sense of what a daemon is by the end of the first chapter, without any explanation required). I would like to bring up one of the less supernatural elements as a question here, though:
One main difference between Lyra's world and ours seems to be the role of Christianity. Instead of a schismatic Reformation, John Calvin took over the Catholic Church from the inside; by the present day, the Church, based in Geneva, is still a politically untouchable superpower and is so philosophically influential that physics is known as "experimental theology." I'm pretty ignorant of religious history, but is it plausible at all for the Reformation to be an internal process within Catholicism that changes the church's structure and doctrine but allows it to retain its preeminent position in European society?
Obviously the setting is soft AH with lots of supernatural elements, not quite like what we do here (although I do think it's useful for all AH writers as a great example of how to establish an alternate world without infodumping - you get a good sense of what a daemon is by the end of the first chapter, without any explanation required). I would like to bring up one of the less supernatural elements as a question here, though:
One main difference between Lyra's world and ours seems to be the role of Christianity. Instead of a schismatic Reformation, John Calvin took over the Catholic Church from the inside; by the present day, the Church, based in Geneva, is still a politically untouchable superpower and is so philosophically influential that physics is known as "experimental theology." I'm pretty ignorant of religious history, but is it plausible at all for the Reformation to be an internal process within Catholicism that changes the church's structure and doctrine but allows it to retain its preeminent position in European society?