His Dark Materials

Noel Jenkins has consistently produced interesting resources for use with Google Earth, and he has now launched another excellent resource idea using text from Philip Pullman's award winning "Northern Lights". This is a book I read over 10 years ago and had a big impact ! The front cover of the edition I have shows the alethiometer: a very geographical looking device. In fact in the USA the book is published as 'The Golden Compass'. The needle seeks out 'truth' rather than true North...

The action in the first book ends with a whirl of events taking place in Svalbard, but not the Svalbard that we know - one that is subtly different i.e: it has armies of polar bears and witches in a parallel world, which has Norroway and Brytain.
Noel's idea is to use Google Earth to find the locations in the book.
This, as Noel says, is difficult on Svalbard except for the small areas where there are high definition images.
Check out NOEL's PAGE for more.

Why not buy Northern Lights from the GeographyPages bookshop. Click the image below to go there then follow the link and spend spend spend !

Noel uses the text to explore the landscape of Svalbard, which is shown in all its glory in the wonderful images of Laurel McFadden at her COLD PHOTO blog.

Also looking forward to the film, which is apparently due out in December 2007.