Hi!
Before I say anything I guess I'm going to introduce myself as my good manners require. My name is Klaus and I picked up TN-1 on holiday summer '01 by chance, because I needed something to read and it was the book that looked most different to the rest (And the dodo on the cover is just cute). I am hooked ever since.

Well now, there is something that bothers me a bit - you may call this a plothole - and that's the existence or nonexistence of planes in the Nextian world. It was explicitely said that there have never been any airplanes until 1985 in the end of TN-2 when Thursday's father wants to sideshift her to 'our universe'. But if there are no planes in real life, no author could have written about them, and there are definitely planes in TWOLP. Thursday even said she hadn't flown one for some time (I don't remember exactly what she said, but it was when Mary told her to run the engine from time to time).

Can anyone give an explanation for this leap?

Klaus

First off - Welcome Klaus!

The plane that Thursday hadn't flown in for a while is a flying boat, rather than a full plane - that might make a difference (not being too technologically minded, me...)
Plus I believe it is only jet planes that don't exist (Hades gets away in a bi-plane in TEA), and they use airships for mass air transport. Smaller planes do exist - one of the girls in Sense and Sensibility flies away in one at the end of one of the chapters in LIAGB.
Don't know if that's cleared anything up - I'm typing as I think here, and am slightly drugged up with cold medication...



I drink to drown my sorrows. Unfortunately they've learnt how to swim.

Welcome to the fforum. There ARE planes in the Nextian world, but only propellor-driven ones rather than jets. Acheron Hades used one for the ransom collection, remember?

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"This was willed where what is willed... can get rather silly."

AS well sa there being no jet engines, there was never a Hindenburg disaster - IIRC - which means nobody developed a fear of airships, and consequently there was less demand for another form of air travel to be developed...



PSD

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This is the work of an Italian narco-anarchic collective. Don't bother insulting them, they can't read English anyway.

I see. Well, I'm re-reading TEA right now (It's been too long since I lastr read it). And English isn't my native language after all, although I believe my English isn't too bad.

You all do have a point there, but still a lot of books will have to be different in the Nextian world without Jetplanes.

It also begs the question when exactly the Nextian world split from our world (it must have been midway through the 19th century I guess), but this topic must have been discussed here already...

Klaus

Hi Klaus - my but we're getting truly international on the Fforum. Just goes to show that good stories can be understood in any culture.

I don't think that the Nextian world every split from our world - it runs along side it. There are overlaps (Shakespeare, Trafalgar, dodo extinction spring to mind) but I think it's like the Pullman Trilogy - different worlds running alongside which can be accessed if you know how.

There's a lod of hints that the Nextian world is only one of many parallel universes: in TEA Thursday is given a Beatles LP by her father:

"I thought they split in 1970?"
"Not always"



PSD

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This is the work of an Italian narco-anarchic collective. Don't bother insulting them, they can't read English anyway.

That could have been due to somebody changing history, with the Beatles not splitting up in 1970 as one of the consequences, and somebody else subsequently changing it back again.
John Brunner wrote a novel ("The Wrong End of Time"?) in which there was only one Reality as a time but explorers (from a version of Reality in which controllable time-travel had been discovered) deliberately made major changes (which they reversed again) just to see what was possible...

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"I a ie ee a i ie... a e ae iy."

My favourite novel that plays with time as a concept is the brilliantly funny allegorical work 'The Third Policeman' by Flann O'Brien. I can actually see a very thin line running directly from that to 'Lost in a Good Book' - but I suspect I'm not the only one who can see that so I won't precis the backstory here...

One of the other people at the Brighton signing, a Dubliner, asked Jasper whether Flann O'Brien's works had been amongst his inspirations: Jasper said that he'd never heard of him before...

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"This vas villed vhere vhat is villed... can get rather silly."

I like Brian O'Nolan/Flann O'Brien's effusions as Myles na gCopaleen, but I coouldn't get my head round 'At Swim-Two-Birds' at all. It seemed as if he was trying to be a funny Joyce, and it just didn't work for me.



- - -
I am very interested in the Universe. I am specialising in the Universe and everything surrounding it. - E. L. Wisty

No, you're right Jon - ASTB doesn't do it for me either. I suspect most people on this list would dig 'The Third Policeman' though - especially the way the main character dives into an underworld beneath a parallel universe (sound familiar?) in search of the "omnium" from which all matter is made (kinda like the Text Sea, except this is extracted by pressing light in a mangle) - oh yeah and the myriad footnotes O'Brien specialises in, a lot of them written in the third person about a character named De Selby who invents things - and gets investigated because he was diverting 200,000 gallons of water a day into his house and yet not a drop came out again (turns out he was forcing tiny jets of steam towards the sky in an attempt to wash the blackness out of it at night or something). Oh yeah and the brief unrequited yet somehow erotic love story between the policeman and his bycycle, that's sheer allegorical comic genius too. It's years since I read it (the book dates from 1967 and it was probably only 5 years afterwards when I first stumbled across it) but I'm definitely going to hunt down a copy and read it again.

H'mm, that looks intriguing, I may have to add this author to my list of ones for whose works I'm looking.

The Dubliner who mentioned O'Brien in Brighton said that some of his works were (supposedly) a deliberate attempt at parodying Joyce.

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"Thiis waas wiilleed wheeree whaat iis wiilleed... caan geet ratheer siillyy."