This comment tends to discredit your first comment, since the typical reader of this thread probably takes it for granted that MoR is good and is wanting to know whether this story is good as MoR.
How well warranted is this assumption, i.e. that a typical reader takes the quality of MoR for granted? Readers of LW who don’t like MoR probably don’t comment on it.
How well warranted is this assumption, i.e. that a typical reader takes the quality of MoR for granted?
A typical reader of this post, mind you.
Readers of LW who don’t like MoR will probably have a strong tendency not to be interested in “rationalist fanfiction” in general. If someone reads LW and is also willing to entertain a rewriting of a famous fantasy story such that the characters are made to be LW-style “rationalists”, it seems highly unlikely that they’re going to be turned off specifically by the idiosyncratic details of MoR.
Given this, I think the assumption is very well warranted. Of course, it’s eminently falsifiable: if there are large numbers of people who love the idea of rationalist fanfiction but hate MoR specifically, let them speak up.
I think we’re making too much of the concept of “rationalist fanfiction” altogether. A typical fan of MoR would presumably be interested in fiction delivering rationality-related ideas or emotional states; that might constitute (or at least overlap with) a genre, but it certainly doesn’t imply derivative work. Neither is the bare fact of setting a work in another writer’s world necessarily a genre label; about all you can reliably conclude from that is that the author wants to comment on the original’s themes, or to explore implications the original author didn’t. Fantasy stories are notoriously ripe with questionable implications, so we could expect the fanfic approach to produce some interesting-to-LW fruit, but it hardly seems like it should be promoted to a defining characteristic.
So, what does unify the set of stories we’re talking about? Seems to me that it’s their themes: empiricism, respect for the scientific method (as opposed to the trappings of science, Michael Crichton-style), and a belief in focused introspection. The use of an existing setting serves to play up the contrast between those themes and the assumptions of conventional genre literature, but it’s not necessary, and the themes could work just as well without it.
Observation seems to bear this out; MoR shares a lot more, structurally and thematically, with The Cambrist and Lord Iron, or with Eliezer’s earlier Sword of Good (both original works), than it does with, say, Harry Potter and the Nightmares of Futures Past. If we’re actually looking at a nascent genre here, it’s a subset of revisionist fantasy (other exemplars: Gaiman’s Problem of Susan; Mieville’s Bas-Lag books), not of fanfiction-as-genre—although I’m pretty sure fanfic-as-genre is a lot smaller than it’s usually given credit for, anyway.
(Granted, there might be a minority of potential readers who look at MoR or Luminosity’s fanfiction.net address and immediately fixate on that as definitive, but that’s not a rational response and I really doubt it’s something we want to emphasize.)
So, what does unify the set of stories we’re talking about? Seems to me that it’s their themes: empiricism, respect for the scientific method (as opposed to the trappings of science, Michael Crichton-style), and a belief in focused introspection. The use of an existing setting serves to play up the contrast between those themes and the assumptions of conventional genre literature, but it’s not necessary, and the themes could work just as well without it.
But a thing I think unifies much of it (given that my four closest friends are both rationalists and deveoping authors) is what I like to call “Teapot Smashing”:
Teapot Smasing: Activity. Using what you know to get what you want, with expreme prejudice. Comes from the proverb “Any fictional system of physics can be broken like a teapot.”
In most of Rationalist fiction, the recurring Ultimate Motivations of the characters is almost exclusively Anti-Deathism and Fun For Everyone. Thus many of the themes involve gaming estabilshed setting rules to enter a feedback loop leading to godhood.
The reason why Fanfic is popular here is that it spares you inventing your own universe to game.
Actually, that might point to a feature that is almost unique to fanfic: protagonists can’t deploy the full range of strong munchkin tactics in an original universe without coming off like they’ve benefited from a deus ex machina, but they can do that in a preestablished universe. Some munchkinry is legal either way, but there are strict limits: you can almost always get away with social, economic, or introspective hacks, for example, because you didn’t invent the rules for those. But you can’t abuse laws of magic or xenobiology or exotic physics that you invented yourself without threatening suspension of disbelief.
I don’t think that works well as a defining feature of rational!fic, though. Almost everything that Bella does in Luminosity would work just as well in a universe where she was, say, a were-badger; the specifics of the setting’s inventions don’t matter too much.
It’s also not strictly limited to fanfiction as such: genre conventions can generate a sort of implied metaphysics that you can then abuse. The Sword of Good works that way, and some of the Discworld books dabble in it too.
I’m not terribly clear about what the assumption is, exactly, and I’m not sure everyone in the conversation has the same referent for it, so rather than say “yes” or “no” to an ill-defined question, let me articulate some related thoughts.
I like the idea of fanfiction where characters who in canon think and behave in muddleheaded ways and ignore what seem like fundamentally interesting aspects of their world instead think and behave clearly and attend to the interesting things.
If done well, rationalist fanfiction can be a great example of that, as rationality is a very useful tool for focusing one’s attention on the things that matter. I like that sort of rationalist fanfiction quite a lot. (Which is not to say that I like anything that qualifies as rationalist fanfiction.)
MoR explores some marvelous ideas, it’s clever, it has moments of genuine humor and genuine human feeling. The early chapters, in particular, really spoke to me; the later chapters less so. As fanfiction goes, it’s probably in the top 10% of what I’ve read in my life, not that I’m a huge follower of the genre. But it has weaknesses that frequently bug me. As fiction goes, I would be fairly disappointed if I’d picked it up at a book store. I don’t care too much about Americanisms vs. Britishisms, though.
I’m vaguely intrigued by the LOR variation—it reminds me somewhat of the Sundering novels—and might read it some day when I have more time to spare.
Dunno if any of that is relevant to your discussion. If not, feel free to ignore.
The other plus point for MoR is that J.K. Rowling is not that great at shaping sentences unsupervised. I only continued past HP book four so I could find out how it ended—books 5-7 serve mostly as cautionary examples as to why immunity to editors is not such a great idea in some cases. Possibly I am oversensitive to appalling sentence construction, but then again if I’m reading something it’s my own responses I’m most interested in.
JRRT’s sentence shaping is way better than JKR’s and the English translation of this Russian fanfic is not too bad (allowing for grammatical hiccups) - different to JRRT, but not clearly better.
I am not interested in MoR not because of its idiosyncrasies, but because I have no interest in Harry Potter, have read none of it, and the characters are completely alien to me. I am neither a fan of Tolkien, but still find it more appealing, and at least I know one person who likes LotR and has poor opinion about HP. Also, sometimes I read posts whose topic isn’t particularly interesting, because sometimes inspiring ideas appear in the discussion.
Generalising from one example I had impression that readers of this post may not all like MoR.
How well warranted is this assumption, i.e. that a typical reader takes the quality of MoR for granted? Readers of LW who don’t like MoR probably don’t comment on it.
A typical reader of this post, mind you.
Readers of LW who don’t like MoR will probably have a strong tendency not to be interested in “rationalist fanfiction” in general. If someone reads LW and is also willing to entertain a rewriting of a famous fantasy story such that the characters are made to be LW-style “rationalists”, it seems highly unlikely that they’re going to be turned off specifically by the idiosyncratic details of MoR.
Given this, I think the assumption is very well warranted. Of course, it’s eminently falsifiable: if there are large numbers of people who love the idea of rationalist fanfiction but hate MoR specifically, let them speak up.
I think we’re making too much of the concept of “rationalist fanfiction” altogether. A typical fan of MoR would presumably be interested in fiction delivering rationality-related ideas or emotional states; that might constitute (or at least overlap with) a genre, but it certainly doesn’t imply derivative work. Neither is the bare fact of setting a work in another writer’s world necessarily a genre label; about all you can reliably conclude from that is that the author wants to comment on the original’s themes, or to explore implications the original author didn’t. Fantasy stories are notoriously ripe with questionable implications, so we could expect the fanfic approach to produce some interesting-to-LW fruit, but it hardly seems like it should be promoted to a defining characteristic.
So, what does unify the set of stories we’re talking about? Seems to me that it’s their themes: empiricism, respect for the scientific method (as opposed to the trappings of science, Michael Crichton-style), and a belief in focused introspection. The use of an existing setting serves to play up the contrast between those themes and the assumptions of conventional genre literature, but it’s not necessary, and the themes could work just as well without it.
Observation seems to bear this out; MoR shares a lot more, structurally and thematically, with The Cambrist and Lord Iron, or with Eliezer’s earlier Sword of Good (both original works), than it does with, say, Harry Potter and the Nightmares of Futures Past. If we’re actually looking at a nascent genre here, it’s a subset of revisionist fantasy (other exemplars: Gaiman’s Problem of Susan; Mieville’s Bas-Lag books), not of fanfiction-as-genre—although I’m pretty sure fanfic-as-genre is a lot smaller than it’s usually given credit for, anyway.
(Granted, there might be a minority of potential readers who look at MoR or Luminosity’s fanfiction.net address and immediately fixate on that as definitive, but that’s not a rational response and I really doubt it’s something we want to emphasize.)
I think you are right on with:
But a thing I think unifies much of it (given that my four closest friends are both rationalists and deveoping authors) is what I like to call “Teapot Smashing”:
Teapot Smasing: Activity. Using what you know to get what you want, with expreme prejudice. Comes from the proverb “Any fictional system of physics can be broken like a teapot.”
In most of Rationalist fiction, the recurring Ultimate Motivations of the characters is almost exclusively Anti-Deathism and Fun For Everyone. Thus many of the themes involve gaming estabilshed setting rules to enter a feedback loop leading to godhood.
The reason why Fanfic is popular here is that it spares you inventing your own universe to game.
Actually, that might point to a feature that is almost unique to fanfic: protagonists can’t deploy the full range of strong munchkin tactics in an original universe without coming off like they’ve benefited from a deus ex machina, but they can do that in a preestablished universe. Some munchkinry is legal either way, but there are strict limits: you can almost always get away with social, economic, or introspective hacks, for example, because you didn’t invent the rules for those. But you can’t abuse laws of magic or xenobiology or exotic physics that you invented yourself without threatening suspension of disbelief.
I don’t think that works well as a defining feature of rational!fic, though. Almost everything that Bella does in Luminosity would work just as well in a universe where she was, say, a were-badger; the specifics of the setting’s inventions don’t matter too much.
It’s also not strictly limited to fanfiction as such: genre conventions can generate a sort of implied metaphysics that you can then abuse. The Sword of Good works that way, and some of the Discworld books dabble in it too.
Spot on. Good observation.
I’m not terribly clear about what the assumption is, exactly, and I’m not sure everyone in the conversation has the same referent for it, so rather than say “yes” or “no” to an ill-defined question, let me articulate some related thoughts.
I like the idea of fanfiction where characters who in canon think and behave in muddleheaded ways and ignore what seem like fundamentally interesting aspects of their world instead think and behave clearly and attend to the interesting things.
If done well, rationalist fanfiction can be a great example of that, as rationality is a very useful tool for focusing one’s attention on the things that matter. I like that sort of rationalist fanfiction quite a lot. (Which is not to say that I like anything that qualifies as rationalist fanfiction.)
MoR explores some marvelous ideas, it’s clever, it has moments of genuine humor and genuine human feeling. The early chapters, in particular, really spoke to me; the later chapters less so. As fanfiction goes, it’s probably in the top 10% of what I’ve read in my life, not that I’m a huge follower of the genre. But it has weaknesses that frequently bug me. As fiction goes, I would be fairly disappointed if I’d picked it up at a book store. I don’t care too much about Americanisms vs. Britishisms, though.
I’m vaguely intrigued by the LOR variation—it reminds me somewhat of the Sundering novels—and might read it some day when I have more time to spare.
Dunno if any of that is relevant to your discussion. If not, feel free to ignore.
The other plus point for MoR is that J.K. Rowling is not that great at shaping sentences unsupervised. I only continued past HP book four so I could find out how it ended—books 5-7 serve mostly as cautionary examples as to why immunity to editors is not such a great idea in some cases. Possibly I am oversensitive to appalling sentence construction, but then again if I’m reading something it’s my own responses I’m most interested in.
JRRT’s sentence shaping is way better than JKR’s and the English translation of this Russian fanfic is not too bad (allowing for grammatical hiccups) - different to JRRT, but not clearly better.
I am not interested in MoR not because of its idiosyncrasies, but because I have no interest in Harry Potter, have read none of it, and the characters are completely alien to me. I am neither a fan of Tolkien, but still find it more appealing, and at least I know one person who likes LotR and has poor opinion about HP. Also, sometimes I read posts whose topic isn’t particularly interesting, because sometimes inspiring ideas appear in the discussion.
Generalising from one example I had impression that readers of this post may not all like MoR.
I like HP and have a poor opinion about LotR, if you’re interested in an opposite data point.