English author Philip Pullman is known for being outspoken. His bestselling fantasy series His Dark Materials provoked the ire of religious groups for its depiction of a sinister church called The Magisterium. Pullman went on to write the provocatively titled The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, a retelling of the gospel story in which Jesus has an evil twin, and has also spoken in the press on issues ranging from human rights to library funding to the teaching of phonics.

“I have the right of every citizen to open my mouth on public affairs,” says Pullman in this week’s episode of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast.

Now, though, Pullman is withdrawing from public life in order to focus on the long-promised sequel to His Dark Materials, a novel called The Book of Dust.

“I’m going to clear the whole of next year,” says Pullman, “and most of the year after, and I’m not going to accept any invitations to make speeches, go anywhere. From now on silence will descend, and I will be in my room with my pen and my paper, writing The Book of Dust.”

So don’t count on seeing the author out and about anytime soon. But hopefully our new interview will help tide you over. In Episode 76 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above), Pullman offers a candid perspective on Jesus, explains why he won’t be in the audience for Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit, and argues that students shouldn’t be hooked on phonics. Then stick around after the interview as Corey Olsen, host of the popular podcast The Tolkien Professor, joins hosts John Joseph Adams and David Barr Kirtley to discuss the new Hobbit movie.

Philip Pullman on Jesus:

“Jesus was one of those prophets who believe that the world is going to end very soon, in their lifetime. And like the various prophets we’ve seen in recent years, they tell all their followers to go up onto the mountaintop because the flying saucers are going to come on Tuesday, and they’re going to take them up to the planet Venus and they’re all going to go to Heaven, and they go up onto the mountain and Tuesday comes and there are no flying saucers, and they come down looking rather disconsolate on Wednesday and say, ‘Well, we got the date wrong. It’s next October.’ That’s the usual way it happens … But the other complicating factor in the story of Jesus is that — unlike these other people who say ‘Come up to the mountaintop, the flying saucers are going to come on Tuesday’ — unlike the rest of those people, he happened to be a storyteller of genius.”

Philip Pullman on writing imaginary beings:

“If you use the square root of minus one, which doesn’t really exist — I mean, you can’t see the square root of minus one. But you can use it in a lot of different contexts to give meaning and expression to all sorts of ideas that do have very rich consequences, such as chaos theory, for example. So the comparison I was making was between the square root of minus one and angels and demons that don’t exist, because if you use those in a story, again, you can do certain things with those that you couldn’t do without them. John Milton, when he wrote Paradise Lost, could not have done it without the use of angels and devils…. So if some censor were to come to him and say, ‘You can’t use these beings in a story, they don’t really exist, you must only write stories about human beings that do exist,’ well, we’d be without a great work of literature.”

Corey Olsen on adapting The Hobbit:

“Some people are sort of feeling like Jackson is trying to force the Hobbit story into the mold of Lord of the Rings, trying to force a connection between that story and Lord of the Rings. Well, he is doing those things, but in doing those things he’s following in Tolkien’s footsteps, that’s what Tolkien did. I think it’s inevitable. For them to try to do like the equivalent of the Rankin/Bass animated film, which really is just a film about the book, with very little — not no reference to The Lord of the Rings, but very little reference to The Lord of the Rings — I think that would be a disaster. And it would be just deeply confusing…. That’s a lot to ask of people to say, ‘Hey, we’re putting out this other movie. It’s just like our other movies, except you’re supposed to pretend our other movies didn’t exist.'”

Corey Olsen on dwarven incompetence:

“The dwarves have apparently set off on this quest completely unarmed … That’s how bad their planning is. When they say they want a burglar, what’s their plan? What are they going to do with a burglar? What’s the burglar supposed to do when they get there? Break in and steal the treasure? It would seem so, that’s what burglars do … Seriously, that was their plan? They’re going to hire one hobbit to come and make off with the entire dragon hoard on his back? … They’re utterly clueless, completely clueless. And again, I wouldn’t exactly call that a plot weakness. If it were in The Lord of the Rings it would be a plot weakness, but not in a fairy tale story…. But yes, when you are taking it out of that more comical, more fairy tale context, then you need more of a plan.”