Not a fan fiction, like HPMoR, but rather a lengthy novel about superheroes and supervillains that takes the subject seriously and with an incredible amount of inventiveness. It may sound lame, but just try it for a chapter or two.
Honestly Worm is probably one of the best superhero stories I've ever read. Wildbow made a really cool world with some crazy superpowers, and then managed to put an amazing story in it. Fair warning, it's ~1.75 million words. It took me a solid month to read.
Another good scifi web fic is Ra: http://qntm.org/ra. It's about a world in which 'magic' was discovered in 1972 by an Indian physicist. The story largely revolves around the search for what 'magic' really is.
Worm was so damn good, but I feel obligated to put a warning here. It's not just a lengthy novel, it's an extremely lengthy novel. Starting reading Worm can cause significantly decreased productivity for roughly the next month.
Wildbow's new series, which is a story about Occult, Diabolism,and explores a world where mathematical precision is applied against magic and deals with the devil, is also quite good :)
Worm is pretty good, but it runs into the issue that the continuing escalation of the narrative's scope, and a considerable time-skip partway through the story, can (depending on the reader) lose the aspects that drew a reader's interest in the first place.
Now that it's finished, it seems like it would work better if edited into a print or ebook format. The narrative could be split into two or three books with each designed to have self-contained storylines, making the differences in focus and scale less jarring.
It also has the same basic problem that most superhero fiction does, where a lot of the setting as presented is constructed to allow contrived superhero punch-ups and doesn't make that all that much sense in the context of how the characters and their powers would actually affect the world.
This problem is kind of a given if you want people running around in colorful costumes and capes, though, unless it's a setting where superhumans have only just appeared, like in the excellent novel Turbulence (http://www.amazon.com/Turbulence-Samit-Basu-ebook/dp/B00B0LP...).
I'm re-reading Worm currently, and keep thinking about what an awesome HBO/Netflix series it would make. I've been waiting patiently for the end of HPMoR. Have also read Ra, but Ra (and Fine Structure) both start going off the rails at some point, and I find it hard to follow.
All need a solid editor, but they're awesome and I can't believe the big publishing houses don't have people looking for stuff like this.
Seconding this one. I still haven't finished yet (on chapter 21/30 so far) but I've been quite impressed with it. I will say that it's important to get past the first couple sections, as the "high school" setting initially didn't grab me, but once it got into the world of capes it captured my attention. It's just nice to have characters that actually think things through and don't fall for the typical tropes of the genre.
I really like Worm (read through it once, then reread about 90% of it when preparing to write a review). My experience from recommending it a few times is that if people get a few chapters in, it's probably going to be a lot of very late nights of reading. The world building is some of the best I've ever seen, and Wildbow is really good at setting up cliffhangers that just make you read one more chapter. Probably a requirement for the web serial format.
I'm on my second read through of Worm, and it still sucks my time away almost as badly as the first! I had numerous nights where I'd read until 3 or 4 am when I had to drag myself into work the next day (and read it on the commute).
If you're looking to start reading Worm, and you want to do so in manageable chunks, you might try https://www.comic-rocket.com/explore/worm/ . That'll let you read it page-by-page (of its 306 pages) and note wherever you stop so you can return later.
What people complaining about "insufferable tone", "author inserts", etc. seem to miss is that HPMOR is not a completely stand-alone story. Eliezer is trying to get across some ideas about rationality, game theory and bayesian statistics he previously described at lenght in his non-fiction writings[0], and he often indirectly refers to them. Having read those posts before discovering HPMOR I very much enjoyed the first chapters and didn't find any "insufferable tone", but I can understand how some of the text can be confusing to people who haven't read Eliezer's blog posts before.
I didn't read the Sequences (mostly, it must be said, because they were boring), enjoyed the first few chapters, didn't mind the insufferable tone, and just ignore the unsubtle preaching. I'm more bothered by That Major Story Event in the 90s chapters than his authorial quality, really.
For those put off by the first few chapters, I highly recommend you try to stick with it, or skip the first 10 chapters. This story starts out with a rather insufferable tone, but after that, it becomes a lot of fun. It's what the author calls "rational fiction", meaning that there are mysteries in it that you can solve, given enough thought (unlike most of the mystery genre).
Personally, I was introduced to the story via a link to the chapter involving experiments with a time turner to factor products of large primes, or solve any other NP-style problem whose solution is easy to check but hard to find: http://hpmor.com/chapter/17
You can safely read up through the result of that experiment without any major spoilers for reading the story from the beginning. If that humor amuses you, you'll likely enjoy the rest of the story.
Also, if you find characters in the first chapters insufferable, it might be worth revisiting them after getting more used to the characters via the later chapters. The "insufferability" is actually addressed in-story and in-character, with some specific reasons given for why people might react that way.
Is it done yet? I refuse to read it again until it is. It has, so far, sucked in a week of my time twice, because I had to re-read all of it to remember how the new chapters came about.
It's really great writing (as sirsar says, after a while) - at least, I enjoyed it. But it does keep going well after you think it would.
Warning: the (real world) point of the fanfic is to recruit people into a cult whose goal is to prevent evil artificial intelligence from taking over the world.
> to prevent evil artificial intelligence from taking over the world
Many smart people find good reasons to care about that. But even if it's a personal goal for the author, it doesn't mean it's what he wants other people to do.
The "what if" concept is an interesting one, but you can really only keep that up for a few chapters, to show how all the obvious consequences will pan out.
After that, the author has to create additional divergences to justify an original story line, particularly with respect to Quirrell. There is a bit too much emphasis on deconstructing the very powerful, yet somehow mysteriously unimportant, plot devices from the source material, particularly the time turners.
Yes, a device that allows you to travel backwards in time that is somehow available to barely competent wizarding students probably would not have been used once as a plot device and discarded forevermore. But there is such a thing as the MST3K rule: it's just a book; I should really just relax. We purposefully ignore more details like the fact that spacecraft drive systems powerful enough to not be boring must necessarily be powerful enough to completely demolish whatever interesting plot we had in mind, simply because it gets in the way of the story. If you look at Star Wars, you know in your rational mind--from the first moment a hyperdrive engages--that Death Stars are not the best way to destroy planets, but you throw popcorn at that part of your brain and scream at it to shut up and watch the movie.
HPMoR doesn't throw that popcorn. It enthusiastically joins in, and spoils the suspension of disbelief for everyone.
But there is that one little bit of the very first original HP book that justifies the premise. It didn't even make it into the film version. Prof. Snape protects the MacGuffin with a logic puzzle, rather than magic, because the vast majority of wizards are completely unfamiliar with common sense.
But you can't have a hyperrational wizard among cloudcuckoolander wizards, in the same way that you can't have an interstellar hyperdrive that doesn't destroy planets. Because then you end up with an undestroyable horcrux and a first-year wizarding student who performs tasks nearly without assistance that a full caper crew of adults might find insurmountable. Your suspension of disbelief just has to attach to the chassis at a different point.
I had skipped the first few chapters (as had been suggested by others) and then started reading. I really liked the bits where Harry tried to figure out the nature of magic by using the scientific method (do wizards call upon magical power directly? or are their magic words and gestures simply controls for a sort of machine which unleashes the real power? Does magical ability follow Mendelian genetics? What kinds of materials can we make using magic?)
Later on, it got bogged down in an intra-school magic battle and Hermione and her crew attempting to be recognized as heroes, and that's where I stopped. It just seemed like the author gave up the whole "Methods of Rationality" thing and decided to write straight fanfic: stories and situations in which he'd like to see the characters. I gave up on it.
People seem to either love this book or vocally hate it with passion. There doesn't seem to be much middle ground, or at least those people never speak up.
MoR? Bleh. It's basically a half-inch away from a self-insert story, with every Doylist weakness in the narrative brutally exploited in a Watsonian manner and every other character made into a drooling moron so that Harry can be a genius by comparison.
I much prefer stories like Applied Cultural Anthropology, which takes the informed attributes of characters and runs with them to better flesh out the background and to give every character, including the villains, more Doylist competence.
I don't think that's a fair analysis of the characters as the story progresses (except maybe for Ron, but who likes Ron anyway?) How far into HPMOR did you get?
Another interesting take along these lines (although intended as just a story rather than as educational material) is "A Study In Magic" [1]. It's a Harry Potter/BBC's Sherlock crossover. The Dursley's were killed (in a Moriarty plot), and Holmes and Watson end up adopting Harry. He has learned a lot from Holmes and Watson, and brings this knowledge to Hogwarts. Holmes takes quite an interest in the criminal aspects of the wizarding world.
"'I don't see why it wouldn't be,' Harry said. 'A buckytube is just a graphite sheet wrapped into a circular tube, basically, and graphite is the same stuff used in pencils -'"
I love the story, and am currently waiting for the next installment.
One very tiny nitpick is about the title; the story is (at least currently) intended for web-based distribution, and in Chrome (Mac), Chrome (Windows), and Firefox (Mac), the title when rendered in the tab bar is truncated to "Harry Potter and the Meth", which frankly I'm embarrassed to have on my screen. A simple change such as using "&" instead of "and" would fix this.
I tried reading this, and I found that I wasn't a fan for two very specific reasons: First, Harry is imbued with a level of knowledge you'd be hard pressed to find at the world's top universities, and that always takes me out of a story. Its not his intelligence that bothers me, but the fact that he's a veritable walking scientific encyclopedia. Secondly, by adding rationality to Harry, the author also seems to have added a healthy dose of irrational fears. There's a moment that is the polar opposite of the original stories where harry decides that "voldemort" is a terrifying name and should be replaced with with "He-who-must-not-be-named". Which is silly and a clear misunderstanding of what drives harry potter and a clear misunderstanding of what "rationality" means.
[+] [-] anatoly|11 years ago|reply
Not a fan fiction, like HPMoR, but rather a lengthy novel about superheroes and supervillains that takes the subject seriously and with an incredible amount of inventiveness. It may sound lame, but just try it for a chapter or two.
[+] [-] ramidarigaz|11 years ago|reply
Another good scifi web fic is Ra: http://qntm.org/ra. It's about a world in which 'magic' was discovered in 1972 by an Indian physicist. The story largely revolves around the search for what 'magic' really is.
[+] [-] nbouscal|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Rantenki|11 years ago|reply
http://pactwebserial.wordpress.com/
[+] [-] zyxley|11 years ago|reply
Now that it's finished, it seems like it would work better if edited into a print or ebook format. The narrative could be split into two or three books with each designed to have self-contained storylines, making the differences in focus and scale less jarring.
It also has the same basic problem that most superhero fiction does, where a lot of the setting as presented is constructed to allow contrived superhero punch-ups and doesn't make that all that much sense in the context of how the characters and their powers would actually affect the world.
This problem is kind of a given if you want people running around in colorful costumes and capes, though, unless it's a setting where superhumans have only just appeared, like in the excellent novel Turbulence (http://www.amazon.com/Turbulence-Samit-Basu-ebook/dp/B00B0LP...).
[+] [-] basseq|11 years ago|reply
All need a solid editor, but they're awesome and I can't believe the big publishing houses don't have people looking for stuff like this.
[+] [-] DanAndersen|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jsnell|11 years ago|reply
I also find the business model to be very interesting as a sign of the times, some more thoughts on that in the aforementioned review: http://jsnell.iki.fi/blog/archive/2014-05-24-book-review-wor...
[+] [-] freshchilled|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JoshTriplett|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TeMPOraL|11 years ago|reply
[0] - http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Sequences
[+] [-] saraid216|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GFK_of_xmaspast|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sirsar|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JoshTriplett|11 years ago|reply
You can safely read up through the result of that experiment without any major spoilers for reading the story from the beginning. If that humor amuses you, you'll likely enjoy the rest of the story.
Also, if you find characters in the first chapters insufferable, it might be worth revisiting them after getting more used to the characters via the later chapters. The "insufferability" is actually addressed in-story and in-character, with some specific reasons given for why people might react that way.
[+] [-] not_a_test_user|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] irremediable|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zephjc|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chmullig|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] MPSimmons|11 years ago|reply
It's really great writing (as sirsar says, after a while) - at least, I enjoyed it. But it does keep going well after you think it would.
[+] [-] nbouscal|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JoshTriplett|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shinigami|11 years ago|reply
Seriously.
[+] [-] TeMPOraL|11 years ago|reply
Many smart people find good reasons to care about that. But even if it's a personal goal for the author, it doesn't mean it's what he wants other people to do.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/66/rationality_common_interest_of_ma...
> into a cult
Oh well, you realize you're writing this on another cult's news page? ;).
http://lesswrong.com/lw/4d/youre_calling_who_a_cult_leader/
[+] [-] loup-vaillant|11 years ago|reply
I'm not going to justify myself (okay, a little bit[1]), but I must say I'm at a point where such assumptions make me raise an eyebrow.
[1] http://intelligenceexplosion.com/
[+] [-] nemo|11 years ago|reply
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basilisk
No rational person could describe that groupthink madness as a cult. :)
[+] [-] lurkinggrue|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kbenson|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] logfromblammo|11 years ago|reply
After that, the author has to create additional divergences to justify an original story line, particularly with respect to Quirrell. There is a bit too much emphasis on deconstructing the very powerful, yet somehow mysteriously unimportant, plot devices from the source material, particularly the time turners.
Yes, a device that allows you to travel backwards in time that is somehow available to barely competent wizarding students probably would not have been used once as a plot device and discarded forevermore. But there is such a thing as the MST3K rule: it's just a book; I should really just relax. We purposefully ignore more details like the fact that spacecraft drive systems powerful enough to not be boring must necessarily be powerful enough to completely demolish whatever interesting plot we had in mind, simply because it gets in the way of the story. If you look at Star Wars, you know in your rational mind--from the first moment a hyperdrive engages--that Death Stars are not the best way to destroy planets, but you throw popcorn at that part of your brain and scream at it to shut up and watch the movie.
HPMoR doesn't throw that popcorn. It enthusiastically joins in, and spoils the suspension of disbelief for everyone.
But there is that one little bit of the very first original HP book that justifies the premise. It didn't even make it into the film version. Prof. Snape protects the MacGuffin with a logic puzzle, rather than magic, because the vast majority of wizards are completely unfamiliar with common sense.
But you can't have a hyperrational wizard among cloudcuckoolander wizards, in the same way that you can't have an interstellar hyperdrive that doesn't destroy planets. Because then you end up with an undestroyable horcrux and a first-year wizarding student who performs tasks nearly without assistance that a full caper crew of adults might find insurmountable. Your suspension of disbelief just has to attach to the chassis at a different point.
[+] [-] Indyan|11 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1898783
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2429034
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1385932
[+] [-] StavrosK|11 years ago|reply
Here's an ebook version I made:
https://leanpub.com/hpmor
It should be mostly-current (I'll update it again now).
[+] [-] aaronem|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davidtanner|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chromaton|11 years ago|reply
Later on, it got bogged down in an intra-school magic battle and Hermione and her crew attempting to be recognized as heroes, and that's where I stopped. It just seemed like the author gave up the whole "Methods of Rationality" thing and decided to write straight fanfic: stories and situations in which he'd like to see the characters. I gave up on it.
[+] [-] Houshalter|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zyxley|11 years ago|reply
I much prefer stories like Applied Cultural Anthropology, which takes the informed attributes of characters and runs with them to better flesh out the background and to give every character, including the villains, more Doylist competence.
Edit: link is https://www.fanfiction.net/s/9238861/1/Applied-Cultural-Anth... (thanks, Groxx)
[+] [-] zephjc|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gcv|11 years ago|reply
Professor Quirrel?
[+] [-] Groxx|11 years ago|reply
Link for others (and for verification, but I think it's right): https://www.fanfiction.net/s/9238861/1/Applied-Cultural-Anth...
[+] [-] Albuca|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tzs|11 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.fanfiction.net/s/7578572/1/A-Study-in-Magic
[+] [-] mrfusion|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mcguire|11 years ago|reply
Well, technically....
[+] [-] imranq|11 years ago|reply
I imagine if all my technical books were written like that, I'd quickly have to check in to a mental institution.
[+] [-] jonmrodriguez|11 years ago|reply
One very tiny nitpick is about the title; the story is (at least currently) intended for web-based distribution, and in Chrome (Mac), Chrome (Windows), and Firefox (Mac), the title when rendered in the tab bar is truncated to "Harry Potter and the Meth", which frankly I'm embarrassed to have on my screen. A simple change such as using "&" instead of "and" would fix this.
[+] [-] ajaimk|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ender89|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] swombat|11 years ago|reply
I beg you, please continue writing this awesome stuff.
Thanks,
Almost Everyone Who's Read This