Why this project? Well, I’ve been lurking on Less Wrong (and before that, Overcoming Bias) for years, and yet I recently realized that I’ve not been very rational in actual practice. So I decided to write a novel about rationality and moral philosophy, just to make sure that I managed to actually understand the topics well enough to put them in my own words. Hopefully the attempt to explain them to a lay audience will help my own understanding.
I’d like to get some help from others in the LW community, since I suspect the novel is not very well-written, and I need some ideas on how to improve it. Why should anyone help me? Well: two of the best recent rationalist fiction that I know of are Alicorn’s Luminosity and EY’s HPMoR. I am nowhere near those levels (for one, their characters are not flat). The only advantage I have is that my novel has (in current law, anyway) a slightly higher chance of being published, unless J.K.Rowling suddenly has an aneurysm and gives the copyright to the public domain, or if suddenly everyone listens to rms and start repealing copyright laws internationally: the novel is original and won’t get sued into oblivion if published.
My goals are… a bit iffy. I imagine publishing this in actual real-world physical book form, because those things are easier to give as gifts and might help raise the sanity waterline (badly needed in my family, and least they read books). But with the current level of quality I suspect I have about a snowball’s chance of passing unscathed through the sun.
Alternatively: how about an open-source novel? I could put it up into a CC-BY-SA and try to actively recruit people to help improve it, try to leverage the community, but that probably will make it difficult to publish physically, as legally speaking (IANAL) that would require contacting all the copyright owners. Maybe a fiduciary agreement a la FSF-Europe, but I know of no big, trustable entity that would act as a fiduciary for fiction.
I just finished my NaNoWriMo novel, Judge on a Boat (latest revision kept here), last month in November, and this month I’m going through the process of fixing it up and improving it. I described it on LessWrong yesterday.
Why this project? Well, I’ve been lurking on Less Wrong (and before that, Overcoming Bias) for years, and yet I recently realized that I’ve not been very rational in actual practice. So I decided to write a novel about rationality and moral philosophy, just to make sure that I managed to actually understand the topics well enough to put them in my own words. Hopefully the attempt to explain them to a lay audience will help my own understanding.
I’d like to get some help from others in the LW community, since I suspect the novel is not very well-written, and I need some ideas on how to improve it. Why should anyone help me? Well: two of the best recent rationalist fiction that I know of are Alicorn’s Luminosity and EY’s HPMoR. I am nowhere near those levels (for one, their characters are not flat). The only advantage I have is that my novel has (in current law, anyway) a slightly higher chance of being published, unless J.K.Rowling suddenly has an aneurysm and gives the copyright to the public domain, or if suddenly everyone listens to rms and start repealing copyright laws internationally: the novel is original and won’t get sued into oblivion if published.
My goals are… a bit iffy. I imagine publishing this in actual real-world physical book form, because those things are easier to give as gifts and might help raise the sanity waterline (badly needed in my family, and least they read books). But with the current level of quality I suspect I have about a snowball’s chance of passing unscathed through the sun.
Alternatively: how about an open-source novel? I could put it up into a CC-BY-SA and try to actively recruit people to help improve it, try to leverage the community, but that probably will make it difficult to publish physically, as legally speaking (IANAL) that would require contacting all the copyright owners. Maybe a fiduciary agreement a la FSF-Europe, but I know of no big, trustable entity that would act as a fiduciary for fiction.