When Pullman began to write Lyra’s adventure in 1993, the world was a very different place. He looks back on the creation of his alternative Brytain

  • Read and listen to an exclusive extract from Serpentine below

It was 1993 when I thought of Lyra and began writing His Dark Materials. John Major was prime minister, the UK was still in the EU, there was no Facebook or Twitter or Google, and although I had a computer and could word-process on it, I didn’t have email. No one I knew had email, so I wouldn’t have been able to use it anyway. If I wanted to look something up I went to the library; if I wanted to buy a book I went to a bookshop. There were only four terrestrial TV channels, and if you forgot to record a programme you’d wanted to watch, tough luck. Smart phones and iPads and text messaging had never been heard of. The announcers on Radio 3 had not yet started trying to be our warm and chatty friends. The BBC and the National Health Service were as much part of our identity, of our idea of ourselves as a nation, as Stonehenge.

Twenty-seven years later I’m still writing about Lyra, and meanwhile the world has been utterly transformed.

Continue reading…

You May Also Like

The Gilded Age review – Julian Fellowes’ stinky rich New Yorkers are sheer agony

Forget Downton … here’s the new and definitely not improved Brownstone Abbey…

North of England leaders urge fair distribution of Afghan refugees

Poorest areas house high proportion of asylum seekers, analysis shows, but north…

EU unveils plan for ‘largest ever ban’ on dangerous chemicals

Up to 12,000 substances could fall within the scope of the new…

‘Alex Turner is the greatest of his generation’: Example’s honest playlist

The singer-rapper can do a mean Nate Dogg and would do Wu-Tang…