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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   3718 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for May 24, 2024

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It is linked under library on lesswrong, so it is kind of the top of the canon as far as rationalist fiction goes. Other major works are:

  • Scott's Unsong (Original setting)
  • Alexander Wales' "Worth the Candle" (Original setting)
  • Alicorn's "Luminosity" (Twilight 'fan'-fiction, of all things)
  • Eliezer et al's planecrash (collaborative glowfic, Dath Ilianian isekaied to the world of the RPG Pathfinder)

All of these authors also have shorter fiction. If you are unsure, I would start with something shorter and see if you like the style. There are also audiobooks of HPMOR and Unsong.

Note that Alexander Wales also has an ongoing work, Thresholder (currently at 650,000 words, vs. 1.7 million for Worth the Candle).

1.7 million? That just seems ridiculous. Why does this work need to be three times as long as war and peace?

Why does this work need to be three times as long as war and peace?

Because it's being written for narrative addicts. People enjoy the altered flow-like state created by reading a long narrative for hours at a stretch, their own consciousness and volition being overridden by the flow of the story. For such people, the story concluding is a problem because it breaks the state, while additional length is pure benefit, because it allows for more contiguous false-memory and thus more verisimilitude to the experience.

People enjoy the altered flow-like state created by reading a long narrative for hours at a stretch, their own consciousness and volition being overridden by the flow of the story.

Narrative-gooning.

More or less. And to be clear, by "people" I'm referring to myself, and presuming that others read for roughly similar reasons.

I remember this post of yours where you floated psychoanalyzing the mindset of rational fiction after finishing Worth the Candle. I’d be interested in hearing what you had to say about the genre based on what you’re saying here.

It's never left my mind, and is both the reason I posted the OP and the reason I'd be interested in hearing what people liked about HPMOR.

This thread, via Orwell, is me poking at the same general idea. Sherlock Holmes is another example, as is Orson Scott Card from Ender's Game, and I think Tolkien's negative assessment of Frank Herbert's Dune. For examples of the opposite, one of my favorites is Hammer's Slammers, by David Drake, especially the first chapter of the first book.

Web serials are more like reading a series of novels.

I would guess most series clock in below this. Harry Potter for example is only about a million words.

Sure, but it's not competing with most series. Some people are looking for a more sprawling project. See comparisons here.

I don't know a lot of people who would buy an entire series of doorstopper fantasy novels and then read them back-to-back. It's a different story for buying the new Sanderson book when it comes out. Following a serial is even less of an imposition.

That's not to say it makes for good literature. If you're looking to uplift your human spirit or to gain cred with humanities majors, Tolstoy will be much more efficient.

I think most published series have a lot cut by editors to keep pacing tight. Serials obviously don't do that. Worth the Candle and Worm, another famously long web serial that iirc is also about 1.7 million, definitely suffer in my opinion from significant sections that probably could be largely cut and have any plot progress moved into brief sections within other arcs.

Are you not familiar with web serial novels? The Wandering Inn may well hit 17 million words sometime next year.

It's hard for me to fathom who has the mental bandwidth for this.

I read ratfics on lunch daily at work. Not much simpler than that. I read both HPMOR and Worm that way.

I was about to respond, "some people like to read a lot," and then I remembered I was on The Motte. Surely this isn't news to anyone here!

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