Beyond the Oaken Door

Just caught up. An exellent tale, especially with Hypnos's measurements of the world (did he measure himself or find the measurements in dreams of others?)
 
Let's put it this way. The immortals don't have to travel in coach class. :p

When I post the story to my website, it will have a glossary and a section on the instruments used in measuring the size of a flat Earth. All the concepts such as the "sighting stick" and the "al kemal" will be briefly defined.

A flat world can be measured in ways a round world never could. For instance, it's dawn EVERYWHERE AT ONCE and therefore there are neither local times nor time zones. It also means a star angle shot made at dawn at one end of the earth can be directly compared to a star angle shot made at dawn at the other end. Why? Because the celestial sphere is tidally locked. The stars are always in the same places at the same time at sunrise...and for that matter at sunset.
 
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That's a really good question. I personally think he did remember, and that memory is tied to being right in the heart of the disruption in time. Also because Aslan wanted to reward him with the memory of his faithful service. That's why I imagine Jinks would have some memory of it and Boffer...whose immortal soul spent time in Aslan's Country...would have those recollections experienced out of the framework of the temporal universe.

Go back to your copy of "The Last Battle" and read about all the things in Heaven where nothing that is beautiful and useful is ever discarded. That would include the memory of great deeds.
 
Sir Joseph of Willoughby, from the story "Swept Away," asked me to give this story another bump. He enjoyed it as I did, and I share his opinion that it will gain more new readers.
 
In a Socratic discussion thread, we touched upon the fact that children CAN refuse to learn from, or to confide in, their parents. This caused me to think back upon John's "Oaken Door" novel, because that parent-child theme figures in it. Accordingly, I am bringing "Oaken Door" out of the archives again, hoping that it once again attracts new readers.

For those who aren't familiar with the Magister Badger's body of work, I explain that he has worked his mind farther _inside_ the imagined reality of Narnia than most fans have. Elsewhere on the forum, you may have seen a discussion of how Jadis first _began_ to have her "executioner's authority;" Evening Star has done plenty of thinking on that subject, and it is a subtext to his "Byron-on-Wells" stories. In _this_ novel, you will see that he ventures into another of the areas of uncertainty in the Narnian microcosmos: WHAT IS WEST OF TELMAR??? What he speculated, I borrowed a bit of in my story "Emmett and Queenie at Narnia's End."

Every new member who has a reasonable familiarity with the official Narnian stories is _insistently_ urged to read "BEYOND THE OAKEN DOOR."
 
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My my, I think I shall sit down and read it straightway! :D

Thanks much. I really put a lot of effort into that story and am fond of the results.
 
A lot of budding Lewis fans, who have only seen the movies, have been given by those movies the erroneous impression that EVERYPLACE existing in the Narnian space-time dimension plainly and simply IS Narnia. As if one said that all of the United States WAS New York City. (Well, of course many New Yorkers DO believe that.) But "Beyond the Oaken Door" should help to remedy this, making the reader understand that Narnia is just ONE PART of its world, even though the world containing Narnia is smaller than ours.
 
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