HisDarkMaterials.org

For the third year in a row, Mythopia is one of the most prominent literary conventions in the Israeli landscape. Starting off with academic lectures on the works of J. R. R. Tolkien and J. K. Rowling, it began to house other literary endeavours such as those of Philip Pullman's "His Dark Materials", G. R. R. Martin's "A Song of Ice and Fire" and C. S. Lewis's "Narnia".

The convention attracts a wide range of audiences, from early teens to mature adults, all interested in fannish delving or academic exploration, with no correlation to the age of the audience, who enjoys the stage of Israel's top academic lecturers concerning literary works in the fantastic genre, producing a fantastic convention.

This year we have a few interesting events concerning HDM:

His Bright Materials

Four months before the long awaited "official" version is released, the Israeli HDM Community is proud to present its alternative version to the trilogy by Philip Pullman. Suzie, a TV talk-show host and an aspiring journalist, is interviewing the cast of characters from His Dark Materials, trying to get a scoop about the plot's goings-on. Hence unfolds a crazy and funnilicous story, freely based on the trilogy by Pullman.

The movie is an original production of the Israeli HDM Community, the fruit of over a year of hard, but most enjoyable labor.

Dark Matter and His Dark Materials / Dafna Kirsh

What is Dark Matter in physics? How was it discovered? Is it possible to see it? Is there a connection between it and Pullman's trilogy? What does physics say about the possibility of the existence of parallel universes? And what interesting scientific ideas come into expression in the trilogy?

Pullman's Dogma: Is Pullman anti-religion or anti-religious observants?

This lecture attempts to question whether religious readers can read - and enjoy - His Dark Materials trilogy. We shall examine several differences between the Jewish and Christian philosophy using examples from the trilogy.

The Oxford Mail reports: A rallying call has gone out in a bid to save an Oxford canalside site from the latest threat from developers.  Last summer the Castle Mill boatyard site, in Jericho, was the scene of dramatic evictions as boaters protested against the closure of the yard.  But now the land has been sold to a developer by British Waterways and residents are concerned that blocks of flats proposed by the firm will overshadow St Barnabas Church.

Jenny Mann, secretary of Jericho Community Association, said most residents were opposed to the plans.  A public meeting is being held tomorrow night at 7.30pm in St Barnabas Church.  Ms Mann said: "This is currently a towpath walk of great character and historic interest and, of course, the canalside is the setting for Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy."

Rallying call over boatyard site plans

Protesters against a development behind St Barnabas Church, Jericho, Oxford

A rallying call has gone out in a bid to save an Oxford canalside site from the latest threat from developers.

Last summer the Castle Mill boatyard site, in Jericho, was the scene of dramatic evictions as boaters protested against the closure of the yard.

But now the land has been sold to a developer by British Waterways and residents are concerned that blocks of flats proposed by the firm will overshadow St Barnabas Church.

Previous plans by Bellway Homes to buy the site did not go ahead after the firm lost a planning appeal.

But now Spring Residential has bought the site and applied to the city council for permission to build 54 one and two-bedroom flats and a public piazza on the narrow strip of land next to St Barnabas church.

It also plans to build a new bridge over the Oxford canal for pedestrians and cyclists.

Jenny Mann, secretary of Jericho Community Association, said most residents were opposed to the plans.

A public meeting is being held tomorrow night at 7.30pm in St Barnabas Church.

Ms Mann said: "The three- and four-storey blocks will crowd in on both sides of the church, which is a listed building, and obliterate most views of it from the towpath, except from directly opposite.

"This is currently a towpath walk of great character and historic interest and, of course, the canalside is the setting for Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy."

Artist Valerie Petts, a Jericho resident, is preparing an artist's impression of what the new flats will look like next to existing homes.

Ms Mann added: "Spring Residential has set aside a strip of land for a new community centre, which is what the residents want, but there is no provision for a boatyard.

"The very heart and character of Jericho will be destroyed if these fortress-like blocks are allowed to loom over the traditional two-storey houses."

Spring Residential's plans will be on display in the church before the meeting from 7pm.

No-one from Spring was available for comment.

The Oxford Mail reports:  Residents in Jericho, Oxford, are meeting tonight to discuss new plans to build flats in the area. Spring Residential has applied to the city council for planning permission to build 54 flats on a narrow strip of land next to St Barnabas church.

Jenny Mann, secretary of the Jericho Community Association, said the "This is currently a towpath walk of great character and historic interest, enjoyed by local people and visitors to Oxford alike, and the canalside here is the setting for the famous "Gyptian" episodes in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy."

Meeting over controversial flats

Residents in Jericho, Oxford, are meeting tonight to discuss new plans to build flats in the area.

Spring Residential has applied to the city council for planning permission to build 54 flats on a narrow strip of land next to St Barnabas church.

Jenny Mann, secretary of the Jericho Community Association, said the three and four- storey blocks would "crowd in" on both sides of the church and obliterate most views of it from the towpath.

She added: "This is currently a towpath walk of great character and historic interest, enjoyed by local people and visitors to Oxford alike, and the canalside here is the setting for the famous "Gyptian" episodes in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy.

Artist Valerie Petts, a Jericho resident whose Oxford scenes are regularly seen in The Oxford Times' magazine Limited Edition, is preparing to draw before and after views of the area.

She added: "It's horrifying. We can not let this happen."

The meeting starts tonight at 7.30pm, at St Barnabas Church, and the plans will be on display in the church before the meeting from 7pm.

If you're still in for winning a copy of Claire Squires' Philip Pullman, Master Storyteller then hurry up! The deadline is the 31st of May, today but we'll only start reading the entries by tomorrow morning 7 AM GMT so if you send in before that time you'll still be accounted for!

All you have to do is prove your storytelling skills by writing a 500-1000 word His Dark Materials related story. It can be about any character, or any location, as long as it pertains to His Dark Materials.

You can send your entry to admin@hisdarkmaterials.org, one submission per member.

We'll announce winner shortly after we've taken some time to read all entries carefully!

Thanks to Claire Squires and the kind people at Continuum Books we are giving away a copy of Philip Pullman, Master Storyteller.

All you have to do is prove your storytelling skills by writing a 500-1000 word His Dark Materials related story. It can be about any character, or any location, as long as it pertains to His Dark Materials.

The deadline is May 31st, so you have ample time to come up with a worthy tale.

You can send your entry to admin@hisdarkmaterials.org, one submission per member.

Olamot 2007 is the annual SF&F convention jointly managed by the Israeli Tolkien society and the Israeli HDM community along with other big science-fiction and fantasy societies. The convention will take place from the 3rd to the 5th of April in Holon, Israel.

There are two His Dark Materials related events of interest.

"His Borrowed Materials" — Netanela Davidovich

How did Milton inspire Pullman? Why is Lewis turning in his grave, and how does 'Genesis' fit in? This lecture describes the inspirational sources of "His Dark Materials," the trilogy written by the British writer Philip Pullman. From Adam and Eve's myth as it appears in "Genesis," through Milton's "Paradise lost," and completing with Oxford writers from the last century.

"Tell me what your Daemon form is and I would tell you who you are" — Hagit Wienner

In almost every human culture there is a humanization of animals, in many fantasy books talking animals take part, and the idea of humans that become animals is known as well, but in "His Dark Materials" Philip Pullman has made the animal an inseparable part of humans. What are the human qualities we gave to different animal? Is there a real connection between the daemon's form and his human personality?

Convention website

It is my pleasure to announce that the rights to Philip Pullman's The Butterfly Tattoo have been optioned by my friend Rik Visser, and his company Dynamic Enterprises. The plan is to produce the movie with the help of the His Dark Materials community.

Read the announcement on Cittàgazze.

"The BigBadRead poll organised by publishers Bloomsbury which drew more than 16,000 votes from British schoolchildren" named Lord Voldemort the favorite villain, with Sauron in second, and our own Mrs. Coulter in third. Not coincidentally, the top three represent the three most popular fantasy series.

Harry Potter's arch enemy Lord Voldemort has been voted kids' favourite literary villain of all time.

The boy wizard's evil nemesis in the Hogwarts books by JK Rowling came top in the BigBadRead poll organised by publishers Bloomsbury which drew more than 16,000 votes from British schoolchildren.

And wizards and witches dominated the Top 10 with Lord Sauron - the evil sorcerer in The Lord of the Rings trilogy - in second place, and the White Witch from the Narnia stories in eighth.

Mrs Coulter, the baddie in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials sequence, was third followed by Superman's nemesis Lex Luthor and The Joker from the Batman comics.

Other well-known villains to make the Top 20 included Count Dracula at nine, Sherlock Holmes' adversary Professor Moriarty at 14, Captain Hook at 15 and Cruella de Vil at 17.

The Big Bad Wolf from the Little Red Riding Hood story was 26th most fearsome baddie, while Mr McGregor, who threatened to put Peter Rabbit in a pie, was 36th.

Harry Potter's creator JK Rowling said: "I am thrilled and honoured beyond words that Lord Voldemort has been voted best villain in the BigBadRead poll.

"I am not sure how he would react to knowing that he had won a Muggles

Svalbard, home of the Armored Bears in "His Dark Materials," will soon be home to a seed bank which will hold the seeds of up to 3 million different crops. Designed to preserve the world's agriculture in case of devastating worldwide natural disaster or nuclear war, the bank will be well guarded, buried hundreds of feet below the surface of the frozen island. No doubt the bears of Svalbard will help protect the bank from any intruders.

Seeds of hope

An international seed bank is being set up in the Arctic

IF CATASTROPHE were to befall humanity

According to a research by Alvai Winkler His Dark Materials comes 83% close to the perfect title, based on grammer patterns and the structure of the title. It's the most appealing title, along with Agatha Christies' Sleeping Murder.

A formula painstakingly developed by a group of statisticians to determine the secret of producing best selling novels has baffled its own creators. If it were to be applied universally, then this year's bestselling novel, The Da Vinci Code, would have been a flop with a 36 per cent chance of reaching the charts.

The formula worked out by Alvai Winkler, a former academic at Middlesex University, and his team for the U.K. wing of the self-publishing website Lulu.com to help its customers to better target their books to the market tastes, can be applied to works by some top selling authors but surprisingly gives only moderate marks to the Harry Potter titles and rules out almost everything by Charles Dickens except his little known The Battle of Life.

However, Winkler, quoted by the Guardian newspaper, says he does not think the method is a failure. The team had three statisticians and several programmers, who studied 54 years of fiction No 1s in the New York Times and 100 favourite novels in the BBC's Big Read poll. Its first assumption is that title holds much of the key to the success.

When they compared the recommended titles with a control group of less successful novels by the same authors, they found that the winning books had three common features -- they had metaphorical, or figurative titles instead of literal ones; the first word was a pronoun, a verb, an adjective or a greeting; and their grammar patterns took the form either of a possessive case with a noun, or of an adjective and noun or of the words The ... of ...

Applying this criterion, the most successful titles would be Agatha Christies' Sleeping Murder and Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, with 83 per cent scores. The poorest will be Patricia Cornwell's Cause of Death, with 9 per cent.

Winkler maintained that when the team tested the formula on 700 titles published over 50 years, it correctly predicted whether a book was a bestseller or not in nearly 70 per cent of the cases. "This is 40 per cent better than random guesswork. It is far from perfect but given the nature of the data and the way tastes change 70% accuracy is surprisingly good."

Surprisingly, applying the formula, the Harry Potter books get a score only 51 per cent because their titles are literal, but with correct grammar patterns. The Da Vinci Code is considered as literal, so are Catch-22 and Dickens' Bleak House.

One intriguing aspect of the formula comes out when it considers the title, The Solomon Key, for Dan Brown's forthcoming book as indicative of a best seller. The words are considered as figurative, though strictly speaking, it is not much different from the Da Vinci Code. It is figurative, says the group, because of its "reference to the Greater and Lesser Keys of Solomon, medieval books about black magic".

Lulu.com's chief executive officer Bob Young says the formula cannot be used as a rule by authors. If a book is written well and there is a bad title, it will still sell more copies than a badly written book with a good title.

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You can win the exclusive tenth year anniversary editions of the His Dark Materials trilogy from the Times by answering three questions:

1. In Northern Lights, the Gyptians speak a mixture of two languages: English and which other?

2. In The Subtle Knife, Lee Scoresby tracks down a shaman called Stanislaus Grumman

n0signal reported on our forums that a new edition of John Milton's Paradise Lost has been released. The new edition is introduced and signed by Philip Pullman, probably one of the most famous Paradise Lost admirers and author of the His Dark Materials trilogy.

You can get the new edition for just over US$18 or just under

We would like to inform you that a new adaptation of Philip Pullman's earlier work 'I Was A Rat!' will be performed at the world famous Edinburgh Fringe Festival next month.

'I Was A Rat!' foreshadows many of the storytelling elements that made the 'His Dark Materials' trilogy so enormously compelling, including a focus on young protagonists, talking animals, royalty and intrigue at the highest levels of society.

Philip Pullman attended the opening night of production's Oxford run at the Old Fire Station Theatre and commented: "I'm delighted to see I WAS A RAT! on the stage, and this talented company is telling the story with verve and swiftness and clarity, and with the right sort of fairytale freshness. It's a real pleasure to see a cast and director trusting the story so fully and letting the events make their own impact. I hope the audience enjoys it as much as I do."

This high praise was matched by reviews in the local and student press. "Dazzling and thought provoking in equal measure" - Cherwell

"I Was a Rat transports the audience, depicting a world of personalities and action wildly extravagant and yet oddly recognizable, as though conceived with the fresh eyes of a child." - The Oxford Student

'I Was a Rat' will be showing at 11:00 am, C Chambers Street, (Venue 34) from Sunday 14 August to Monday 29 August. Prices will be

A Sun journalist was shot at last week. He

But adults have always intruded into the domain of children

The His Dark Materials Stageplay is mentioned in this article from the Financial Times about the productions staged by the National Theatre. Overall, it's an article that might be of interest to you.

When audiences went to see Tennessee Williams

Used to compliments from within his profession, Oram is one of a breed that is rarely acknowledged outside theatre circles. For every hundred punters who can talk excitedly about the merits of actor Simon Russell Beale, or recount in loving detail Richard Eyre