His Dark Materials - Settings

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The trilogy takes place across a multiverse, moving between many parallel worlds (See Worlds in His Dark Materials). In Northern Lights, the story takes place in a world with some similarities to our own; dress-style resembles that of the UK's Victorian era, and technology has not evolved to include automobiles or fixed-wing aircraft, while zeppelins feature as a notable mode of transport.

The dominant religion has parallels with Christianity, and is at certain points in the series (especially in the later books) explicitly named so, while Adam and Eve are referenced in the text (particularly in The Subtle Knife, in which Dust tells Mary Malone that Lyra Belacqua is a new Eve to whom she is to be the serpent), Jesus Christ is not. The Church (often referred to as the "Magisterium") exerts a strong control over society and has the appearance and organisation of the Catholic Church, but one in which the centre of power had moved from Rome to Geneva, the home city of both the real and the fictional "Pope" John Calvin.

In The Subtle Knife, the story moves between the world of the first novel, our own world, and another world, a city called Cittàgazze. In The Amber Spyglass it crosses through an array of diverse worlds.

At first glance, the universe of Northern Lights appears considerably behind that of our own world (it could be seen as resembling an industrial society between the late 19th century and the outbreak of the First World War), but in many fields it equals or surpasses ours. For instance, it emerges that Lyra's world has the same knowledge of particle physics, referred to as "experimental theology", that we do. In The Amber Spyglass, discussion takes place about an advanced inter-dimensional weapon which, when aimed using a sample of the target's DNA, can track the target to any universe and disrupt the very fabric of space-time to form a bottomless abyss into nothing, forcing the target to suffer a fate far worse than normal death. Other advanced devices include the Intention Craft, which carries (amongst other things) an extremely potent energy-weapon, though this craft, first seen and used outside Lyra's universe, may originate in the work of engineers from other universes.

References in Northern Lights indicate that the calendar of that universe is the same as our own, and that the date is around 1960: