A great post from YA author Scott Westerfeld

I recently started reading some books by author Scott Westerfeld, and I have to say — his books are really amazing. I started by accidentally picking up “Pretties,” a book in his “Uglies” series (with the fourth book, it’s no longer a trilogy, amusingly enough). Anyway, he has his own blog and has a lot of interesting information about other authors and such, and apparently there has been a lot of debate about The Golden Compass. Here’s what he has to say (click here to read the whole post; it’s full of information and very balanced).

However, I want to point out one thing that keeps going missing in the debate about Pullman: At no point in His Dark Materials do the characters kill god. This rumor isn’t a “controversial” aspect of the trilogy, it’s a lie about the trilogy. And like so many lies these days, this one is spread by people forwarding emails to each other. You probably have seen this sort of thing happen with rumors in school; after all, it’s more fun to spread a nasty rumor than it is figure out the truth behind it.

But how do I know this rumor isn’t true? Well, unlike rumors about what happened at someone’s party or who kissed whom, everything in His Dark Material is written down, and you can read it to find out exactly what happens. So if you go to page 188 of the US mass market paperback of Amber Spyglass, you’ll discover that Pullman’s Authority is not the creator. He’s not god. Ogunwe says so in the following words, “It shocked some of us, too, to learn that the Authority was not the creator.”

. . .

I’m not saying you all have to go read Pullman right now. Maybe you just don’t like armoured bears. But there’s one thing you really should remember: People who tell you juicy rumors, on the internet or in real life, usually aren’t trying to help you by giving you secret, important info. Very often, they’re trying to make themselves feel important, or hurt someone else, or control you in some way.

Don’t assume rumors are true, no matter how often you hear them.

I agree with Westerfeld here; the sad thing is that so much of this debate is based on his characters “killing” god — except that they don’t. There’s room for a lot of debate about Pullman’s books — they are quite deep for children’s books, after all — but this debate isn’t one of them.