Steve Paulson: Why did you come back to Lyra and the story of your earlier trilogy, 'His Dark Materials?' Did you feel like there was unfinished business in the story? This transcript has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.

In a rare interview, 'To the Best of Our Knowledge' executive producer Steve Paulson reached Pullman at his home just outside Oxford to talk about the ideas behind his novels. The biggest mystery in these books - an enigmatic substance called Dust - comes right out of current debates among scientists and philosophers about the origins of consciousness and the provocative theory of 'panpsychism.' Pullman loves to write about big ideas, and recent scientific discoveries about dark matter and the Higgs boson have inspired certain plot elements in his novels. In fact, screenwriter Jack Thorne finds 'quite a lot of similarities' to the young climate activist Greta Thunberg. And the fierce and unstoppable Lyra emerges as a hero for our time. Pullman’s fantasy world - filled with witches, talking bears and 'daemons' (people’s alter-egos that take animal form) - is rendered in glorious steampunk detail.

Pullman brings the story around to weighty questions about authoritarianism and original sin, which led some critics to call his series 'Harry Potter for grown-ups.'įor all his acclaim over the last three decades, this may be Pullman’s moment - thanks to the new blockbuster adaptation of 'His Dark Materials' by the BBC and HBO. She learns to master a mysterious truth-telling device known as 'the golden compass,' and falls in love with a boy from a parallel universe. In the original series, Lyra is a carefree 11-year old girl in Oxford, England, who’s suddenly pulled into a world of intrigue that pits her against the all-powerful Magisterium and sends her to the Arctic to rescue kidnapped children. The new book, 'The Secret Commonwealth,' picks up the story of Lyra Belacqua - now known as Lyra Silvertongue - from his earlier series 'His Dark Materials.' It’s the second book in Pullman’s new trilogy 'The Book of Dust.' The celebrated English author has just written a 630-page adventure story brimming with contentious ideas about religious tyranny, the loss of imagination and the nature of consciousness - all in a book that’s marketed to children.Īctually, Pullman doesn’t consider himself a children’s book author - 'this is a marketing question, not about the way the books are written,' he says - but he’s somehow managed to write a book that’s both a page-turner and a philosophical investigation into some of the deepest mysteries in science. Once again Philip Pullman has pulled off a remarkable high-wire act.

The dark materials books