Dear Stroud: Superhero King,

I was re-reading Ptolemy's Gate today and thought about what Bartimaeus said about 'leaving most of his essence on the journey from --- to ---'. I'm wondering, since a djinn is made of essence, if he was to leave essence behind or have, say, an arm cut off and stored in a jar, would they blob of mass be sentient? Say I have a djinn named Boblicious. If you were to evenly divide the djinn into quarters, would he die, or would his consciousness be divided into four segments, or stored into one?

So if a djinn was to leave a trail of sloughed essence like the slime of a slug, would that essence retain parts of the djinn's thoughts? Would it become less and less coherent as it leaves more of itself behind?

I can understand if you don't have an answer to these questions, since the Other Place is chaotic. Would you say the Other Place itself is one consciousness, god-like, dividing its own intelligence and accumulated knowledge into pieces (aka summoned spirits), and then when the spirit returns to the Other Place the knowledge gained from its time on Earth adds to the general intelligence? But that would counter-act the whole chaos of the Other Place.

You should have me write an essay for jonathanstroud.com on the matter under the fictional name of some philosopher in the Bartimaeus universe, winkwink.

With :krim: intact,

Krim.

Hi Krim,

Blimey, that's a good question, and a tough 'un as well. I like the idea of the philosopher correspondent; very early on when I was just creating Nat's world I did a kind of almanac put together by some dusty old librarian (I forget his name) in which he discussed all the characters etc as if they were historical. Worked well for getting me into the world...

But you can see I'm just evading answering the question.

The first bit. While at the OP essence is intermingling and fluid, once a chunk has been summoned and acquired its 'personality', it thereafter needs to maintain that extent if it is to survive. There's a footnote in Amulet concerning a djinni who was destoyed when his essence was riven in two, and that's fundamentally the story. Bart and co, and indeed Boblicious, a well-known lesser djinni of somewhat dubious habits, can lose a bit of essence here and there and restore it later, when back at the OP. But if too much of it is lost, that's the end of them. I hope that hasn't happened to Boblicious. So, though in theory a trail of essence WOULD have traces of consciousness, it decays so rapidly that it can't function. A bit like people's heads when they fall into the guillotine basket.

As for the OP. It has a myriad consciousness, connected but infinitely divisible, so that it retains its essential chaotic nature regardless of which djinn are in it at any given time. Bart can't eavesdrop on Faquarl while they're both back in the OP for instance - they're separate, even though connected. Hmmm.... plenty of work for some erudite OP philosopher to do here, I think....

Bye for now,

Jonathan