'If somehow you haven’t read His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman yet, I strongly recommend you get on that immediately. It is fantastic. And not just because of the initially alcoholic, armoured and in all other ways badarse polar bear. While such a character would probably be enough for me personally, wait, there’s more! In the first stage of this epic adventure, we’re introduced to Lyra. She is a sass-mouth scallywag who lives in Jordan College, Oxford, and kills time by causing trouble with her dæmon Pantalaimon. There is a metric fuckton of things to unpack in these novels—physics, philosophy and theology, mostly—but it’s Pan and his ilk I wanna discuss here.' (Publication abstract)