I’ve written a Fantasy Novel to Promote Effective Altruism
Back in February I got a grant through the extended set of ACX grants to write this. I now have a draft that is sufficiently polished that I’m comfortable showing to the community, though I suspect there will be a lot of things that I will want to change based on feedback here before I start publishing it in venues that aren’t part of the EA memespace.
I’m planning to post this one chapter at a time here for the next month or so, though depending on what sort of feedback I get, I might at some point stop or just make a post that has the rest of the book in one chapter. The whole thing is also available in a google doc which I strongly encourage anyone who wants to give me detailed feedback to go to and leave comments on.
I especially would like feedback on the philosophical arguments in the text, with an especial emphasis on criticisms of EA ideas that you think are important to be addressed, but that aren’t brought up by any of the characters in the text.
My plan is that after I’ve revised the book based on feedback received here, is that I will start publishing it serially on Royal Road and in the Spacebattles.com forums. After it is about half published on serial fiction websites, I plan to publish it on Amazon and make a website with the whole text posted. However this is a provisional plan — if anyone has good ideas on how I can help this novel find audiences that will like it and hopefully be influenced by it, I really want you to give me any advice or help that you can.
I did set up a discord to talk about the project, but I’m really not a discord person, and while I’ll participate in any conversations that happen there, I’m probably not going to start them. The best way to talk to me privately about the text is to send me an email at timunderwood9 at gmail. Or leave long comments on the google doc.
Anyways, everyone, tell me what you think, and I hope that this work is at least entertaining for some of you.
Prologue
“Even if we ignore the possibility of a glorious techno-utopian future, everybody alive today dying at the same time would be really, really bad for the people alive now as individuals.”
Isaac grinned at his new friend. “Sorry, but can we finish this argument later?” A quick pull of his phone from his pocket, and he checked the time. “I’m going to eat fish and chips while on this side of the pond. There’s this place that Tripadvisor recommended that I can grab before the next session starts, and —”
The other man grimaced. “High trip advisor ratings are if anything a signal of low quality, I wouldn’t —”
“Later!” Isaac grinned. “I know. But they have to mean something.”
He jogged down the street to the intersection light, his mind full of arguments, ideas, and questions raised by the conference he was attending. The light was red when Isaac reached the intersection, but he looked to the left, and didn’t see any traffic approaching.
Without further thought he stepped fully out into the street.
Squealing brakes. A loud honking horn. Sound of wheels.
Isaac had a fraction of a second to see the big yellow van with the words ‘We Deliver!’ and a phone number hurtling towards him from the right.
There was a fraction of an instant when his brain recalled that the British drove on the wrong side of the street, and he should have looked in the other direction before stepping out.
Pain, but only for an instant.
Blackness.
Nothingness. An infinite eternity that did not last a single instant.
And then he woke up.
Chapter One
So I’d made a bit of a mistake.
Eh, kids, your parents gave you good advice when they told you to always look both ways before crossing a road.
Otherwise you might end up dead, and then wake up in a fantasy world with cool magical powers, lots of new things to learn about, and a couple of unpleasant problems. If there is one lesson I want you all to take away from my story it is: Look both ways.
No, really.
But primarily in a metaphorical sense. You should always consider the possibility that you are wrong, and making a mistake. I’ve always tried to do as much as I could to help other people, and one important thing about doing as much as possible to help others, is that you, or at least we (the collective, not the royal we) should not simply start doing the first thing that sounds compelling and looks good. Sometimes the idea doesn’t even do anything good at all, and almost always there is something that is equally cool, but that does ten times as much good.
I consider missing opportunities like that to be sort of like getting hit by a three ton yellow delivery van.
Anyways I woke up again.
I sat upon a mountaintop high and craggedly peaked. Very high. Like, planes in the sky high.
And I was naked.
Now, at this point, to the extent I was thinking anything, ‘hospital fever dream’ was of course the number one guess. I was not cold, not shivering, not really feeling anything about the weather except an awareness that it was low thermometer type weather. Given that I was naked and sitting on the very top of a frozen, snow covered mountain top, with gusts of wind blowing around me at tens of miles an hour, and I wasn’t cold — uh… that’s not how getting cold is supposed to work.
I could see incredibly clearly, details of brown craggy rocks on other mountain peaks dozens of miles away, snow leopards wandering around, goats, all the birds circling in the sky for a hundred miles. I mean wow.
Once I’d read that Tiger Woods could see better than twenty-twenty after he got laser eye surgery. I suppose that is sort of like what this was like, except at least a thousand times more intense.
Also, really, really high up.
I mean we were really high up. From how far down below me the green valley beneath the mountain was, I felt pretty confident that I was far enough above sea level that I shouldn’t be able to even breathe without help.
Deep breath.
Something in my brain was aware that there was a low oxygen content to the air, and there was some other process, that by now had become as automatic as breathing, that I was using to… maybe multiply, or intensify, or something the sustaining substance in the air so that I was safe at this height.
And yeah, that is the awkward phrase that went through my mind, instead of ‘oxygen’. ‘The sustaining substance in the air’.
I think that was when I realized that something much weirder than a dream might be going on. I was pretty sure that I’d never invent a made up scientific phrase that was that awkward for ‘oxygen’, even in my dreams.
Anyway, around me, in a very magical mumbo jumbo array was a particularly complicated folded ninth shape runic spell circle.
And despite the fact that I had no idea consciously what the hell that description meant, or what I was looking at, I felt like I understood the weirdly entangled and braided giant circle drawn in what I also instinctively knew was my own blood around me on a flattened and cleared path of ground.
The drawing was sort of like a circle with a nonagram — nine sides — inscribed in it. The lines were made up of braided circles like Celtic necklaces, or the endless geometric forms of Islamic mosques. And then embedded in this were tiny letterings, symbols, pictograms, and endlessly intricate and fascinating structures that overlapped, and yet each was somehow perfect in its own way.
My own fucking blood?
Or anyways the blood of the dude who’d been running this body then — since I was starting to realize that I had memories from this person before I was the one in control.
The whole ‘painting the snow with my own blood for a powerful magical ritual’ weirdness made it hard for me to properly appreciate the intricate artistry.
I mean, objectively impressive. His memories were starting to nicely be available to me. The guy had spent two weeks preparing parts of it in his lab in his mage tower, because of course he had a tall mage tower, built out of a pale marble with pink veins. Then all of the intricate runes and spell work were magically folded into a tiny space, and then splotched out, and infused with his blood — that he could regenerate arbitrarily fast as a powerful cultivator, and then he made his own little mistake that had killed him.
Funny how we all seemed to be doing that sort of thing.
His error had been forced by a bad situation. It seemed like this island was going to be invaded by the ‘Celestial Emperor’, and he planned to kill the dragons that were the symbol of the island, and that everyone really loved. Also strip them of independence.
It was clear to the fellow that he thus had no choice but to do anything that might give him the power to face him, such as a dangerous ritual to open his fourth dantian, and gain the power of a celestial, even though he thought the ritual would kill him.
This reminded me about the idea that arms race dynamics could force us into technological disaster.
Sometimes research that is super dangerous, such as nuclear weapons research, or bioweapons research, or insufficiently careful AI research feels like it has to be done, because if you don’t do the research someone else will do it anyway and then they will win.
You don’t want them to win, even if you need to risk destroying everything to stop them.
According to legend, the builders of the first atomic bomb thought there was a bit of chance that the explosion would start a chain reaction in the atmosphere that ignite all of the oxygen, and kill everyone on earth.
They decided to do the test anyways, because after all, that was what they were being paid to do, and the Germans or Japanese might get an atomic bomb first, and they weren’t going to be stopped by any sissy concerns like possibly blowing up the world.
Strategic arms race dynamics are bad, but we don’t really know how to fix them, and back before I died, I hadn’t felt confident enough about any solution to try donating my money to pushing it.
This guy thought he’d had no choices, he’d guessed that there was at best a one in three chance that he would survive this attempt to open his fourth dantian, and to become a celestial like the emperor. But that was the only way to defeat this enemy.
Even if he’d succeeded, the odds would be against his success, since the emperor had vastly more experience and resources behind him.
So the man had come here, used materials that I’d guess were worth the equivalent of between a ten million and a hundred million dollars to power the vast ritual, used magic to paint with his own blood the ritual circles, and then blew his mind apart.
I had read enough of these stories to not be surprised by the consequence: A body with no soul attracted a soul with no body.
I looked down at the hands. The hands were — to be honest — pretty similar to my own hands, except with a weave of extra scars and a faint glow from within a network of tattoos so thin that I would not have been able to see them with ordinary human eyes.
Poor guy.
Doubly sad because I didn’t have the slightest intention of trying to fight in his war.
Risky bets often fail.
The former owner of this body had made such a failing bet.
Even if this body had successfully ‘opened the fourth dantian’, I was pretty sure that a sorcerer who’d spent a thousand years warring and conquering would be better at it than me, and I didn’t have any particular reason to care about the fate of the island, or the survival of the dragons. They weren’t my personal project.
I mean I do care. I’m unhappy when I hear about anyone suffering, failing to achieve what they want to, and simply not flourishing. But I have no particular reason to care more about helping people in Kenya than people in Singapore — it just was that I could do more good with the limited amount of stuff I have for people in Kenya, and they also needed more help.
I figured it was sort of like that here.
It would be best if I didn’t die. Not dying again… in a part of my mind that was completely untouched by philosophical concerns, matters of optimizing the world, or even how I looked in front of others, I was desperate not to die again.
And, fortunately, it didn’t rationally seem like it would be a good idea to stick around here.
This island was going to lose its war — with or without me. But I could grab everything that he’d owned that was valuable and easily portable, and then scram, flee, make a cautious withdrawal — get the hell out of dodge.
It was not my war.
I mean I wasn’t a pacifist or anything, but it just wasn’t my war.
At this point I will freely confess that I had a sense with some part of my mind that I was supposed to despite all of those considerations care about this war and fight in it. But I wasn’t going to do that, unless someone gave me a clear explanation of why this was a necessary thing to do, from a point of view that considered the well being of everyone on this planet — possibly even everyone who ever might be born — equally.
Anyway, this guy had been ridiculously rich, and this body had a set of epic capabilities that were extremely valuable and with which I could make vast amounts of money — somewhere suitably far away.
Maybe dying and waking up here wasn’t the worst possible thing that could have happened to me: I’d spent the last years in the trying to earn as much money as I possibly could, and now I was going to do what I’d always planned to do if I ever got properly rich: Give it all away.
Without making the effort to recall the details from that fellow’s — Sesako had been his name — memories, I got a distinct sense that this world was at least as fucked up as earth was.
Maybe even a bit more.
There would be plenty of ways here to make the lives of impoverished, unhealthy, and underused human individuals better with the huge pile of gold coins and the giant store of expensive refined pills, power stones, finely enchanted artifacts, magically infused clothing, and just generally expensive stuff — much of which had no actual purpose at all except to show that the owner could possess ‘the best’.
Now my heart was beating.
This was more exciting to me than now having magical powers and being immune to the cold, and able to keep my place easily despite the winds that were gusting over the mountain top at probably a hundred miles an hour.
And what about those other, more uncertain issues — what were the things that might destroy this world entirely, and what were the ways that it could, slowly and over the very long term, be turned into a true utopia.
This was a chance to really, and personally make a vast difference for a vast number of other people.
That was better than the eyesight that let me see anything I focused on in detail, a small city far in the distance at the foot of the mountains, the orchards, the fields of wheat around the feet of the mountain, a snow leopard climbing on an icy ridge after the track of a mountain goat ten miles away, the very curvature of the earth underneath the vast oceans.
Oceans that were bringing a mighty invasion force — spotted, tracked, detailed by spies.
Eh, no time to waste, no rest for the wicked, idle hands are the devil’s playthings. Also haste makes waste.
My mind held a clear map of the whole island, and while I couldn’t see the capital city and my, or his… the tower, I knew exactly what direction to go. The capital city was almost five hundred miles away from here — which was the tallest mountain on the island, and also near the valley where the great dragons made their home.
It was an hour and a half trip for this guy when he flew and pushed himself, and about two and a half at what he thought was a comfortable pace.
I wasn’t sure how much of the valuable stuff I could actually carry from the storerooms, but I caught from his memories that there were extra dimensional storage systems where anything that wasn’t magically delicate could be stuffed in great quantities.
Of course the stuff that couldn’t be stuffed in such superdimensional pouches was the most valuable, I’d have to figure out some way to take all of it with me.
Maybe a big crate that I could hold up while I flew away.
This guy was big on magical flying, though I bet I pretty soon would be too. A large fraction of his memories focused on flight.
In the air, chasing down birds, outpacing hawks as they swooped down at hundreds of miles an hour to snatch their prey, hurtling through clouds, flying calmly along next to the flapping wings of a fucking gigantic dragon.
It turned out that leaping off a cliff wasn’t quite as easy as simply knowing that I could safely do it. When I tried to leap off the craggy side of the mountain into the air to fly away from the mountainside, my own instincts stopped me.
I was so high up.
I imagined the fall all the way down the ridges and cliffs to the valley far, far below — broken body tumbling.
Crack. Crack. Bounce. Crack. Ba-ba-bounce. Crack.
And then as though it reflected some sort of contempt for ordinary mortals, an instinct from Sesako overroad that anxiety, as though his mind was still there, and still active somewhere in my new brain — how the fuck did that even work? — and I leapt off the mountain side.
Wheeeeeeeee!
With a series of loud whoops I soared higher, and higher, hurtling upwards towards the sun.
The instincts honed by more than a century of life controlled the motion.
My stomach leapt. The mountain receded beneath me. Everything became smaller.. I could see further and further, the world curving out beneath me as the point of the horizon went further and further away. The whole path of water around the island, many cities.
The island itself was shaped rather like Britain, except that the side that reminded me of Scotland was nearly as wide around as the other. There were two giant circular clumps of mountains, and in between was a low fertile isthmus, that was big enough for large cities on either side, separated by incredibly thin roads and thick farmlands.
And then glancing down at the mountains behind me, I saw the dragon.
Sleeping, huge, the tail curled around the giant body, and the wings pulled in, but it looked to be at least a thousand feet in length.
That dragon figured prominently in Sesako’s memories, with a mix of fond affection, religious awe, and actual friendship.
The dragons were the symbol of his island, they were the gods they worshiped, and whose blessings they begged. They were fed off a fraction of the proceeds of a million farms and a thousand prosperous trading expeditions.
An odd sensation of guilt rose in me while looking at the dragon sleeping far below.
It had been the knowledge that the emperor meant to hunt and kill the dragon’s in the mountains of Yatamo after he had reconquered the island which drove Sesako’s reckless attempt to force open his fourth dantian.
This was his body. It was his wealth I intended to appropriate for my own purposes. His people, and all that he cared for was going to be abandoned by me, and left to be destroyed.
It did not feel like the right thing to do.
Selfish.
There was that difference from the memories in my body that said the fourth dantian was open.
I might be able to fight this invasion to a stop.
A proper storybook hero would stay and fight no matter what the odds were.
If I was in a novel or a web serial, I’d stay and fight.
I ought to fight, and…
And if I succeeded, I would kill a lot of people. Most likely I would kill a moderate number of people, and then just die because having the memories and instincts of Sesako was not in fact at all the same as me being a great battle cultivator with a hundred years of honed skill and tested brutality?
So yeah, I could try to kill a lot of people so that food that could feed tens of thousands of humans would continue to be fed to a group of ancient, overgrown lizards — even if they were sentient lizards that didn’t make it necessarily a good use of resources. It was like the way that billionaires on earth would vampirically suck up the labor of tens of thousands of people so they could compete to have the biggest yacht, the biggest mansion, and the biggest example of disgusting decadence.
Let me be clear: I personally think free markets are a useful tool, and that using government policy to eliminate billionaires, or even reducing their ability to spend their money the way they want to would probably cause worse problems than it would solve. But my objection was practical, not principled. If we could redistribute all giant piles of wealth without causing nasty side effects, I’d say we should do it in an instant without caring about questions of natural property rights.
There had always been a part of me that was simply disturbed by the existence of people who could spend so much money on themselves, while people were starving, dying of malaria, dying due to lack of antibiotics and doctors to prescribe them, and dying due to lack in general.
Of course relative to a very poor person in a third world country, having a hundred thousand dollars in savings was already a giant pile of money that ought to be redistributed by the same logic — so I didn’t expect this to ever become politically popular.
I kind of was disgusted in this way with Sesako — as one of the seven most powerful cultivators in this country, he was as wealthy as a billionaire on earth. He seemed to have no concern whatsoever for poor people in general, and especially poor people who weren’t Yatamo. But the important thing was not whether someone was a billionaire: Anyone with a job that didn’t actively suck in a rich country had enough money to do something for those who were way poorer than them.
It had always been my serious and considered belief that everyone should do something for the common good, for everyone alive. And Sesako was just focused on what was good for Yatamo, for his nation, and his friends, and those who he personally cared for.
Really though, I was just thinking this through again and again to try making excuses for myself and for my plan to abandon the place.
But whether I felt guilty or not, I was going to leave.
Author Note: Please tell me how I mangled the core ideas of EA, and said things that are potentially horribly offensive, etc :). Especially tell me anything that you think is accidentally offensive or crossing some line that some people have. In some cases the topic might be a hill I want to die on, but it probably can be removed or changed or moderated to be less offensive—and also importantly, if you think this project if worth encouraging people outside of the community to read, and have some idea about how to help me find those audiences, please tell me!
Also here’s the link for the google doc with the whole novel in it
And my email address is timunderwood9 at gmail
Only looked at the prologue and the beginning of the first chapter for a bit, but a few quick suggestions based on those:
I’d recommend cutting the prologue. You’ll ideally want to grab the reader’s attention from the very first sentence. That might be as much time as they’ll give your story before they decide it’s boring and close the browser tab. And while the beginning of the prologue isn’t very catchy, the first two sentences of the first chapter are. Better to start with that.
The next few paragraphs sounds a little “preachy” to my ear, and feel like they slow things down a bit; I’d cut them too and focus on ensuring that the narrative flows well. So something like:
Might say more if I have the chance to read more. :)
Yeah, you are right.
I added the prologue when an earlier version of the first chapter had a much weaker opening couple of opening sentences, but the first sentences here really don’t need that extra intro.
But tone down the preachiness seems to be the general advice. I think I went too far in trying to make sure that certain ideas were clearly covered.
So far, fun to read.
However if the aim of this novel is to convert people to EA the protagonist starts off too EA. Having the protagonist get all these magic powers and saying that what he was most excited about was being able to help more people isn’t something the reader is likely to connect to.
I’m not sure the best way to do this, but my impression reading this is “slightly preachy, and protagonist is way too sterile”.
I’m definitely not saying/ assuming that you are wrong on this point (most likely you are right for some readers, and wrong for some others), but part of my theory of how to write the character comes in part from Harry in MoR who definitely begins as being extremely who he is.
A priori I don’t see any reason to think that a textbooky novelization of a set of philosophical ideas will be worse if I have the MC start with that set of beliefs than if I have him develop them over time. I went through four different outline concepts while planning out this novel, and this resonated more strongly with me than the ones that were more focused on the MC being the one who gradually turns into an EA.
I guess the question should be to test how people respond to the charater and opening on average (but it probably shouldn’t be random people, but fantasy readers who are inclined to be interested in EA in the first place).
Perhaps I could run some sort of mechanical turk or similar survey of a hundred or so people and ask questions about whether they find this preachy/ etc.
Or does anyone know good reddit subthreads to post this to, to see if people who are not part of the community react negatively to this as overly preachy?
“Having the protagonist get all these magic powers and saying that what he was most excited about was being able to help more people isn’t something the reader is likely to connect to.”
Do you mean that you didn’t connect to this, or that you are guessing that EA naive or semi-naive readers won’t connect? -- in the latter case I think that falls very much under the heading of a theory that should be tested, and if this novel doesn’t work, the next author ought to try a different approach (and if this novel does work, the next novel ought to have a different approach anyways, because fiction is anti-inductive).
Regarding sterility perhaps that feeling points to something that can be improved in a straightforward way. Can you maybe try to draw out what you mean by it in more detail? That might spark some creative thought I can use.
An important part of HPMoR is that a substantial fraction of Harry’s earlier behavior is later revealed to be unhelpful and prideful and to have overall made the world substantially worse. I think a good chunk of Harry’s most arrogant/defiant behavior is at least partially intended as a warning, not as an example to follow.
I also think Harry currently reads quite different from your protagonist. I don’t expect to see sentences like “Harry strongly believed in X”. Instead I expect to just see what consideration Harry’s beliefs generate, and then separately Harry often talks to other characters in the world about his beliefs, but in those contexts he has natural in-story reasons to explain the relevant concepts (like, he truly has things to gain by and it makes sense that he would explain the scientific method to Malfoy, and it makes sense that he explains various biases to Hermione while they are trying to research how magic works). I think a key thing that bothers me about the current version is that it feels like the sentences that explain the concepts are not naturally thoughts that the character would think at that time. It feels similar to one of those standard bad fantasy-novel opening scene where one character for some reason explains how the whole world works to another character that presumably knows all this (“Oh hello Bartholomew, my brother and third cousin who I met while we were galloping across the fields of Galeia during the first annual summer festival that we celebrate every year to appease the big sun gods. It is good to see you this morning”).
This was not my impression. I recall rationality mistakes he makes, and somewhere near the end, an overall takeaway that’s somewhat like “you generally won’t apply rationality properly unless you’ve also gotten practical experience”. But all of those indicate that his rationality wasn’t enough. I don’t recall any revelation indicating that he was going into the wrong direction, was too arrogant, or anything of the sort.
Maybe the one exception is that he was too rude to Dumbledore specifically, but this seems too narrow to warrant that overall description.
Could be wrong, of course. Do you have examples?
Yeah, here are some examples in spoiler blocks:
The whole initial scene with Neville where he protects him from the bullies and uses the pies and the time turner is pretty quickly revealed to be a pretty rash and irrational things to do that hurt Neville more than it helped him
The whole initial confrontation with Snape is something Harry later reflects on as super reckless and rash that gave up both a lot of his strategic advantage in the form of the time turner, and very needlessly escalated a conflict for the sake of his own pride
A lot of Harry’s harshest and most arrogant tendencies are revealed to be the result of Tom Riddle’s mind being imprinted on him. That’s why he is so paranoid about losing people, and find it’s hard to trust people, and lies to people a good amount.
The whole thing where he lied to Malfoy about how he related to Hermione blows up in his face
In the last chapter he realizes that he likely would have destroyed the whole universe by doing something dumb like reverting vow of secrecy for magic, opening up the world to crazy things like people transfiguring a single up-quark. At least Harry’s take at the end of the book is that if Quirrel hadn’t forced him to take a vow not to risk destroying the world, he would have likely almost immediately done so.
The whole ark with Hermione is primarily about Harry learning how to healthily relate to other people in a non-controlling way. The last chapter makes this pretty clear.
That chapter where Dumbledore tries to get Harry to understand the need to be strategic and that losing Hermione isn’t worth losing the whole war over, and Harry responds with a bunch of dumb stuff about “replacement cost” and tells Dumbledore how he is an idiot I think is pretty clearly trying to show a bunch of facets of irrationality and arrogance in Harry.
More broadly, I think Dumbledore as a character is first portrayed as kind of an antithesis to Harry with little merit, but is later revealed to have been the primary positive force in the whole story, I think in parts to show the need for the kinds of virtues that Dumbledore has, in contrast and addition to the virtues that Harry has.
To be clear, overall the book is not like “all of these cognitive patterns have no merits”. I think the book tries to say that Harry has a lot of important components that are necessary to actually do important things, but that he is frequently reckless and clueless about how to apply them, and frequently bumps into both other people and the world in ways that is quite dangerous and reckless.
Thanks for taking the effort to write this up. I was definitely wrong.
This seems to be a consistent (and not really surprising) point of criticism. I’ll soon try rewriting the first chapter somewhat to see if I can make a version which works better. Though I suspect that the book is inevitably going to have somewhat of a preachy feeling, in part simply because I’m not as good of a writer as EY.
I meant that I personally didn’t connect with it, and I’m already pretty sold on much (but not all) of EA.
It sort of feels like the author is a perfect EA machine who exists only to maximize total utility. I’m not getting much in the way of feelings or emotions from him.
Also BTW is there a reason the text switches from 3rd person to 1st person after the prologue?
“It sort of feels like the author is a perfect EA machine who exists only to maximize total utility. I’m not getting much in the way of feelings or emotions from him.”
Do you think you’d find him more relatable and emotional if I strongly emphasized how he is afraid of dying again?
Though maybe trying to bring out points of joy might work better, but that could also make him seem more like what you are talking about.
I’m not really sure, sorry. It’s much easier for me to notice how the story is making me feel than actually working out why, or how to change it… I guess that’s why writing books is harder than reading them 😂
Anyway not meaning to criticize here—you’ve done a fair better job than I could have. Just trying to help here a bit.
I was just checking if you might have introspective knowledge about how you’d respond to that :P, also I think I may have been trying to demonstrate that I am in fact paying attention to and thinking about the criticisms—the important thing is in fact that X didn’t work for you (and didn’t work for several other people in the same way). Isn’t there some saying about product development that when the customer tells you that it isn’t working, they are right. When they tell you how to fix it, they have no idea what they usually don’t know what they are talking about?
The too preachy feeling definitely is something to soften out and try fiddling with.
For what it’s worth, I disagree with Yair’s assessment (in the sense that I felt differently to Yair, not that I’m doubting their feelings on the matter) - there are plenty of much shallower xianxia characters out there. I agree with other people that Isaac adjusts to his circumstances pretty quickly, but I can let that go for the sake of the story, because the character freaking out about the obvious impossibility of all of this doesn’t really add much, especially because your intended audience seems to be somewhat familiar with cultivation novels and isekai already.
With the standard warning that this is just my impression and is in no way guaranteed to be actually good advice:
My largest complaint is that the word to content ratio is too high. As an example:
Could drop one half and be almost as informative. Just:
This guy could’ve made the trip within a few hours at a comfortable pace.
Would’ve been fine. It can be inferred that he can go faster if that’s a comfortable pace, and even the flying can be inferred from surrounding statements.
There’s also no need to be super specific about these things if it’s not going to be plot relevant. Even if the exact number is plot relevant, I doubt many people are going to remember such details after reading a few more chapters. Focus on what’s important. Particularly, focus on what’s important to the character. Is his flight time really what matters most to him right now? A lot of characterization can flow from what a character does and doesn’t pay attention to. Dumping the entire sensorium on the reader, while technically accurate, leaves a shallow impression of the character.
I would argue that good writing tends to condense data as far as it will go, so long as the jargon count is kept at a subdued level.
While I think there are cases where condensing world details is better writing, I think in general that is more of a style preference than actual good or bad. Some people like jargon heavy fantasy/ sci-fi, and I’m one of them.
But the second point that I should pay more attention to how what the character notices says about him is completely right, and probably by shifting that around more is a strong way to improve the viewpoint.
I don’t think Amazon allows you to do this, legally. My sister self-publishes through Amazon and used to offer everything but the last chapter of her first book for free on her website — she had a note at the end that she’d send the final chapter via email to anyone who asked, but Amazon didn’t want her to have the entire thing posted for free anywhere while it was also being offered through print-on-demand. I don’t know details about the contract and this was a few years ago, but you might want to look into that.
(Sorry for not reading / commenting on the actual content of your story 😅)
That sounds very weird to me and surprising. I have been actively self publishing for seven years, and I’ve never heard anything about that. It might be some weird specific contract with Amazon.
The general problem that does come up is there are benefits to having an exclusive contract with Amazon, where only a ten percent sample can be posted elsewhere, but I’m not planning to go that route as it would probably limit the audience more than it would expand it.
According to my sense of how these stories go, Isaac is probably about to stay and help the dragons.
I’m not sure if that’s deliberate on your part, and I’m not sure if it’s an accurate prediction on the part of that-part-of-me. But it was mildly surprising, and felt worth mentioning.
Beware fictional evidence.
I’m not even joking here. The essay about “beware fictional evidence” is there for a reason. The kinds of things that a rational person should be able to get from an EA-based story that drive him towards EA should be very limited, because as an author you control all sorts of things about the world of the story that you don’t control in the real world.
I don’t think that is relevant to this project.
I’m not trying to have a fictional world provide evidence that EA is true. I’m trying to write a basic intro to EA essay that people who wouldn’t read an ‘EA 101 post’ will read because it is embedded in the text of a novel that they are reading because I got them to care about what happens to the characters and how the story problems get resolved.
Also, I do think works of fiction can definitely be places to create extended thought experiments that are philosophically useful. I mean something like Those Who Walk Away from Omelas is a perfectly good expression and explanation of a view about the problems with utilitarianism. I don’t like it because I bite the bullet involved and because I think vaguely pointing in a direction and saying ‘there has to be a better solution’ isn’t actually pointing at a solution. But the problem with it as a piece of philosophical evidence is not that it is fiction, any more than the problem with every single trolley problem ever is that it is a work of fiction.