I’m also somewhat confused by this. I love HPMoR and actively recommend it to friends, but to the extent Eliezer’s April Fools’ confession can be taken literally, characterizing it as “you-don’t-have-a-word genre” and coming from “an entirely different literary tradition” seems a stretch.
Some hypotheses:
Baseline expectations for Harry Potter fanfic are so low that when it turns out well, it seems much more stunning than it does relative to a broader reference class of fiction.
Didactic fiction is nothing new, but high quality didactic fiction is an incredibly impressive accomplishment.
The scientific content happens to align incredibly well with some readers’ interests, making it genre-breaking in the same way The Hunt for Red October was for technical details of submarines. If you are into that specific field, it feels world-shatteringly good. For puns about hydras and ordinals, HPMoR is the only game in town, but that’s ultimately a sparse audience.
There is a genuine gap in fiction that is both light-hearted and serious in places which Eliezer managed to fill. Pratchett is funny and can make great satirical points, but doesn’t have the same dramatic tension. Works that otherwise get the dramatic stakes right tend to steer clear of being light-hearted and inspirational. HPMoR is genre-breaking for roughly the same reasons Adventure Time gets the same accolades.
HPMoR is a new genre where every major character either has no character flaws or is capable of rapid growth. In other words, the diametric opposite of Hamlet, Anna Karenina, or The Corrections. Rather than “rationalist fiction”, a better term would be “paragon fiction”. Characters have rich and conflicting motives so life isn’t a walk in the park despite their strengths. Still everyone acts completely unrealistically relative to life-as-we-know-it by never doing something dumb or against their interests. Virtues aren’t merely labels and obstacles don’t automatically dissolve, so readers could learn to emulate these paragons through observation.
This actually does seem at odds with the western canon, and off-hand I can’t think of anything else that might be described in this way. Perhaps something like Hikaru No Go? Though I haven’t read them, maybe Walter Jon Williams’ Aristoi or Ian Banks’ Culture series?
The Culture books tend to star people on the margins of the eponymous Culture: disaffected citizens, spies, mercenaries, people from other involved (and usually more conservative) civilizations. They almost always have serious character flaws (a number of them are out-and-out assholes) and while character development does occur, generally toward Culture values, it’s not usually dramatic. On the other hand, the culture itself, and the AI entities that run it, are presented as having few to no flaws from the narrative’s perspective. While the characters are often critical of it, it’s fairly clear where the author’s sympathies lie.
They’re not rationalist fiction in the sense that Methods is, or even in the sense that Asimov’s Foundation books are. They do make for a decent stab at eutopia from a socially liberal soft-transhumanist perspective, though not an especially radical one.
Hmm… Atlas Shrugged does have (ostensible) paragons. Rand’s idea of Romanticism as portraying “the world as it should be” seems to match up: “What Romantic art offers is not moral rules, not an explicit didactic message, but the image of a moral person—i.e., the concretized abstraction of a moral ideal.” (source) Rand’s antagonists do tend to be all flaws and no virtues though.
Characters act against their own interests in HPMoR… and in Hikaru no Go, for that matter. Just, you get to see why they’re doing it so it seems more reasonable at the time. Which is of course how it seems to them. We’re just used to characters doing things that don’t seem like good ideas at the time in other works.
HPMoR is a new genre where every major character either has no character flaws or is capable of rapid growth.
I have not read HPMoR (or have a particularly strong desire to), but if this sentence is true, then HPMoR is shitty literature with a particular TVTropes name.
I’m also somewhat confused by this. I love HPMoR and actively recommend it to friends, but to the extent Eliezer’s April Fools’ confession can be taken literally, characterizing it as “you-don’t-have-a-word genre” and coming from “an entirely different literary tradition” seems a stretch.
Some hypotheses:
Baseline expectations for Harry Potter fanfic are so low that when it turns out well, it seems much more stunning than it does relative to a broader reference class of fiction.
Didactic fiction is nothing new, but high quality didactic fiction is an incredibly impressive accomplishment.
The scientific content happens to align incredibly well with some readers’ interests, making it genre-breaking in the same way The Hunt for Red October was for technical details of submarines. If you are into that specific field, it feels world-shatteringly good. For puns about hydras and ordinals, HPMoR is the only game in town, but that’s ultimately a sparse audience.
There is a genuine gap in fiction that is both light-hearted and serious in places which Eliezer managed to fill. Pratchett is funny and can make great satirical points, but doesn’t have the same dramatic tension. Works that otherwise get the dramatic stakes right tend to steer clear of being light-hearted and inspirational. HPMoR is genre-breaking for roughly the same reasons Adventure Time gets the same accolades.
One more hypothesis after reading other comments:
HPMoR is a new genre where every major character either has no character flaws or is capable of rapid growth. In other words, the diametric opposite of Hamlet, Anna Karenina, or The Corrections. Rather than “rationalist fiction”, a better term would be “paragon fiction”. Characters have rich and conflicting motives so life isn’t a walk in the park despite their strengths. Still everyone acts completely unrealistically relative to life-as-we-know-it by never doing something dumb or against their interests. Virtues aren’t merely labels and obstacles don’t automatically dissolve, so readers could learn to emulate these paragons through observation.
This actually does seem at odds with the western canon, and off-hand I can’t think of anything else that might be described in this way. Perhaps something like Hikaru No Go? Though I haven’t read them, maybe Walter Jon Williams’ Aristoi or Ian Banks’ Culture series?
The Culture books tend to star people on the margins of the eponymous Culture: disaffected citizens, spies, mercenaries, people from other involved (and usually more conservative) civilizations. They almost always have serious character flaws (a number of them are out-and-out assholes) and while character development does occur, generally toward Culture values, it’s not usually dramatic. On the other hand, the culture itself, and the AI entities that run it, are presented as having few to no flaws from the narrative’s perspective. While the characters are often critical of it, it’s fairly clear where the author’s sympathies lie.
They’re not rationalist fiction in the sense that Methods is, or even in the sense that Asimov’s Foundation books are. They do make for a decent stab at eutopia from a socially liberal soft-transhumanist perspective, though not an especially radical one.
Atlas Shrugged comes to mind.
Hmm… Atlas Shrugged does have (ostensible) paragons. Rand’s idea of Romanticism as portraying “the world as it should be” seems to match up: “What Romantic art offers is not moral rules, not an explicit didactic message, but the image of a moral person—i.e., the concretized abstraction of a moral ideal.” (source) Rand’s antagonists do tend to be all flaws and no virtues though.
Everyone in that book acts nearly completely diametrically opposed to their interests were they in the real world.
Characters act against their own interests in HPMoR… and in Hikaru no Go, for that matter. Just, you get to see why they’re doing it so it seems more reasonable at the time. Which is of course how it seems to them. We’re just used to characters doing things that don’t seem like good ideas at the time in other works.
I have not read HPMoR (or have a particularly strong desire to), but if this sentence is true, then HPMoR is shitty literature with a particular TVTropes name.
How many people over 35 enjoyed HPMoR?