Fridge / Kraken

• Brilliance and Horror: the reason that fire ends everything is burning evolution means life never gets beyond pond scum.
  • Even worse than that, actually: magic in this Verse is susceptible to the semantics imposed upon it by the magic-user. Vardy was a die-hard creationist once, and was trying to supplant the existing laws of reality with that belief-system's paradigms. And creationists don't usually discriminate between "evolution" and other scientific origin-theories; they conflate natural selection with abiogenesis, planetary formation, and the Big Bang Theory. So Vardy wasn't just threatening to reduce life to primordial soup: his plan would have rewound the Big Bang back to a single timeless point. Hence, the sky, sea, planet and cosmos would've burned away, not just everything living.
  • Although it's questionable whether it would have worked, as Wallace would've still published the same theory if Darwin hadn't, and merely erasing a few specific specimens wouldn't necessarily have undone Darwin's work any more than erasing one specific Archeitheuthis specimen erased the whole species of giant squids from reality. Now, if the katachronophlogiston had accidentally spilled onto the basement floor while it was being applied, and burned up the whole planet...
• At first it seems odd that so much magic could be happening among the adherents of cults, while both the mainstream religions and the vast majority of scientists remain oblivious to its potential. But "knacking", in this Verse, is a semantic exercise: you subvert the predominant laws of reality by superimposing your own contrary conception of how things are and/or should be. Whichever exerted belief-force carries the most weight, spiritually and conceptually, will hold sway. Which implies that those "predominant laws" which apply in the absence of knacking, and which you'd find in any physics textbook, already are the conception of reality which mainstream religion and science have jointly imposed upon the universe. So you have to be a crackpot minority cult, not a dominant-faith believer or skeptic, to be eligible to mess with the prevailing rules that the majority are unconsciously maintaining by their beliefs. You can't "knack" to impose abnormal conditions over reality if your own beliefs about reality are what's making it "normal" in the first place!
• WPC Collingswood is a witch and a police officer. Her primary magical assistant Perky is a spirit in the shape of a pig. Why let the Atlantic Ocean get in the way of a good joke?
• When Dane explains the theology of the Church of God Kraken to Billy, he makes it very clear that Kraken is absolutely not the Pickled Cephalopod Jesus sort of deity and certainly never sent any of its children to die to save the world or humanity. Dane, his fellow church members, the Architeuthis specimen, and Billy all end up making Heroic Sacrifices to save the world.
• The reason why the mnemophylax chose Billy as its "saint" is because it believed his straight-faced lie about being the first test-tube baby, "born not of woman but of glass". By the novel's end, the Billy who confronts Vardy, and parts company with the Natural History angel, actually is "born not of woman", being a product of Destructive Teleportation. One who was "born" in the museum itself, and metaphorically "conceived" behind the glass of whatever television screen got Simon Shaw obsessed with old Star Trek episodes.