Disagree with the “extremely emphatically” emphasis. Yes, it’s not as good, but it more satisfyingly scratched the “what happened in the end” itch, much more than the half-dozen other continuations I’ve read.
Originally written in response to a request for critique:
SD’s biggest problem as an HPMOR sequel (in my opinion) was that it simply wasn’t in the same genre. Like, it didn’t have complex tangles that the reader was meant to be able to unravel, or rigorously defined rules that the reader was meant to game, along with the characters. It didn’t “use” rationality such that the clearest thinkers would come out on top specifically because of their clear thinking, and it didn’t provide object lessons that were any more specific than “generally plan ahead, okay?”
Instead, it was just high fantasy with a modernist/transhumanist protagonist. Which is pretty neat, but not in “the spirit” of HPMOR. It wasn’t rational fic, in my estimation.
As for its qualities as a work of fiction generally—it did a lot of things right (very cool spells, neat dramatic history, decent intrigue, good skipping around in time). Where it missed, for me:
—Much of the plot felt random or just-because, as opposed to emerging from the “first principles” of the universe. There’s an OSC quote I really like that goes something like “fiction isn’t about what happened, once—it’s about what happens.” A lot of the events didn’t seem like they were in line with the flow of reality, like they were the sort of things I could nod along with and say “Yeah, it would happen like that!” For instance, the plot with Harry and Draco pretending to have a falling out and then just neatly tidying up the world into one largely unified package … that’s good enough for Brandon Sanderson fiction, but not for a story that purports to be realistic-fantasy.
—Chekov’s Gun misfires. The amount of words spilled on (e.g.) the spaceships and the pocket worlds and Neville/Fred/George and the whole American scene just … didn’t really seem to pay off? Like, the spaceships paid off because they allowed Luna (off-screen!) to take the Mirror into space, and the Neville/Fred/George bits paid off because they allowed Neville his (exquisite) badass moment, but both of those climaxes could’ve been purchased with fewer words, or alternately could have been better fleshed out and felt more important, to match how much time was spent on them earlier on. Similarly, Hig never really mattered except as a random background character … we could have replaced him with a different guy or a woman or a magical creature or a lump of furniture, and it wouldn’t have changed the plot (i.e. his specific personality and motivations didn’t really affect anything, and therefore I conclude we spent too much time “getting to know” him).
—The climax was incredibly, incredibly dumb. I’m sorry, I know that’s not constructive, but it was such a letdown, Harry’s tone was off, Merlin’s behavior matched that of an idiot who’d never thought things through when it should’ve matched that of a cautious immortal who’s spent literal centuries thinking about all of the consequences of all of his actions, it felt (to me) like the scene at the end of Avatar where all of the humans leave as if that’s a happy ending, as if they’re not just going to come back and nuke the place from orbit. It makes no sense for Merlin to both have failed to put two and two together for the past decade, and also to be the kind of rational quick-updater who will just nod and walk away. It’s not consistent, and if it was going to be consistent, the conversation should have been 3x longer and more nuanced, allowing Harry to actually, y’know, be persuasive instead of basically just pulling a Doctor-Who-on-Trenzalor and saying “I’m so awesome you don’t even KNOW how you’re going to lose, but it’s definitely a foregone conclusion, so don’t even bother to try.” An actual rational Merlin (and here I just mean a level-one rational character with consistent motivations, not even a particularly intelligent one) would either have not been there in the first place, or would’ve just killed Harry anyway, and if the point is to show that Harry leveled up Merlin’s awareness and perspective during the conversation, then that needs to be far better underlined and far better justified, given that he’s rationalsplaining to someone who’s survived for over a thousand years.
—Pacing, but it seems like you guys [beta readers] are already aware of/on top of that.
In general, I posit that the problem was poor back-chaining. Like, either he didn’t really know how the story was supposed to end, and kind of wrote himself into corners, or he knew how he wanted it to end all along, but didn’t do enough diligent work along the lines of “okay, these are my themes, this is the end state of the board, this is the message I want to get across/impact I want to have on the reader, now let’s work backwards and not do anything just because it seems cool.”
Had he done so, the climax would’ve been larger and fuller, extraneous storylines would’ve been tightened and streamlined to make room for the stuff that really matters to rise above (thereby focusing the readers), and we would’ve known which aspects of characterization to pay attention to and which events had real consequence and should be concerning. Another OSC example … he talks about how you shouldn’t start a story as a mystery, and then end with the widow falling in love and getting happily remarried without ever solving whodunit. There’s a kind of promise you make, to your reader, that the initial questions you pose will be the ones you answer in the climax—that once you’ve told your readers what your story is about, they’ll know when it’s over, because they’ll feel closure and resolution.
What was SD “about”? It’s hard to tell. Was it about convincing Merlin that magic should be allowed to continue, and isn’t an existential threat? Was it about overwhelming Merlin through the use of rationality, even though he couldn’t be convinced? Was it about the friendships of Harry, Draco, and Hermione, and how those friendships deepened and changed? Was it a Shadow Puppets-esque, Tom Clancyish story of politics and intrigue, telling the tale of the unification of the magical world? Was it about the merger of magical power with scientific principle, and the first steps into a brave new frontier?
I think it tried to be all of those things, and ended up being none of them, where if it had tried to be one or two first and foremost, and let the others play backup harmony, it would’ve been far, far stronger, as a story. I would’ve liked to read any of the stories listed in the previous paragraph, pure and unalloyed and done with the skill this author has at his disposal (because he does generally know how to write, even though he’s not an expert yet; the Egeustimentis chapter in Harry’s head is the scariest thing I’ve ever read). If it’s a character story, it’s a character story; if it’s political drama, it’s political drama; if it’s high fantasy, let it be high fantasy. And most particularly, if it’s intended to be a showcase of rationality, it can’t make the mistakes SD made (the number of enthusiastic fans on reddit notwithstanding).
Originally written in response to a counterpoint on the above critique:
In general, I think we disagree on the percentage level—for instance, you point to the arrival of a hundred phoenixes and don’t think of that as cheating for a cool moment, whereas I think it is cheating for a cool moment. There’s nothing about that moment in the battle, or even that battle in general, to imply that it’s more phoenix-worthy than any other moments throughout history (or even in the story itself) to have a suspension-of-disbelief-breaking HUNDRED phoenixes show up. So I imagine it’s just an issue of where each of us draws the line.
Same thing for idiot ball. Merlin firmly held it throughout the entire story, in my opinion. Same thing for explicit rationality, of which I think Harry and Hermione did basically zero, except “generally plan ahead.” Same thing for the repeated “oh, the problem will be solved by an ancient magical artifact” sort-of deus-exes.
Re: worldbuilding, there’s good and bad side stuff. Speaking as someone who loves the Wheel of Time and has read every book in it at least four times, I love me some ancillary action. But ancillary action has to pay off in itself, if it’s just there to enrich the world, or otherwise it’s wasted time. Again, I think it’s just that we have different tolerance levels? I notice that you more-or-less agreed to the majority of my points, and basically just felt that each was either enjoyable anyway, or less egregious than I was making it out to be.
Probably the only point I have an … antagonistic? As opposed to friendly debate-y? … reaction to is your last one, about the strengths and weaknesses of publish-as-you-go. I think you make a fair appraisal of the situation, but I personally don’t think that explanation suffices for an excuse. I recently got into a long back-and-forth about how terrible the book Elantris is, and someone was like, hey, give the guy a break, it was his first novel. To which my response was, no one made him publish before he learned how to write passably well.
I think there’s a similar deal with serial fiction. I’m writing serial fiction myself—I’ll be up until two or three in the morning tonight, working on r!Animorphs. But if one of my chapters sucks because it’s branching, verbose, or haphazard, I think I should still be criticized for that. Saying “but but but it’s because I’m publishing as I go!” seems, to me, like saying “but but but this is only my tenth painting ever!” Sure, and it deserves credit for trying, and maybe the hundredth one will be better. But that doesn’t make it good, and if it’s bad, valid criticisms should be “allowed” to be spoken. The immaturity of a given artist or a given draft is no defense—if a creator doesn’t want to be criticized for those flaws, they can always just … wait until their work doesn’t have those flaws.
Originally written in response to authorial+fan gushing enthusiasm after Eliezer made a comment about SigDig:
“A worthy successor on grounds of worldbuilding and humanism” isn’t quite the same as “a worthy successor, no qualifications needed.” I’ve enjoyed following Significant Digits a lot, and I’m looking forward to the finale, but I also think that the overflowing praise and admiration in this thread isn’t fully grounded, and is counter to the author’s own (repeatedly) stated desire to improve. I think there’s a bit of a halo effect thing going on, where the good qualities of the writing and the general Hufflepuff impressiveness of having spilled this many words are causing people to gloss over real flaws.
Or maybe it’s just that the people who identify those traits as flaws aren’t speaking up? There could be a self-selection effect along the lines of not-wanting-to-ruin-people’s-party or being afraid that offering critique will cause others to get upset, or something. But I’m feeling willing to risk the ire of die-hard fans if it means bringing the conversation back to a place where it’s not all about gush. Based on mrphaethon’s response to my last criticism, I predict he’d prefer that, too.
Speaking as someone who’s read HPMOR about eight times all the way through and rates it at about a B+, I think Significant Digits comes in somewhere between C and C+ [I later revised this down to a C- after the conclusion]. I don’t think it would obviously clinch EY’s declaration were there five works of similar length, and I doubt mrphaethon wants his trophy to be based on “nobody else put as much time into it.”
There are things SD does exceptionally well. The early parts of the Lethe touch arc, for example, were both well-imagined and incredibly chilling—the chapter internal to Harry’s consciousness was some of the finest writing I’ve seen, and it’s far from the only bit that’s really, really good.
But there are many more things that come to mind as uncanny-valley versions of HPMOR, rather than actually feeling true to the spirit. Harry and Hermione simply don’t feel like HPMOR!Harry and HPMOR!Hermione + some years, in the same way that many of the scenes in Ender in Exile felt false-note untrue to canon Ender Wiggin (Draco does seem spot-on, FWIW, but I don’t buy his role within the larger context of the world ). The inclusion of a wider/wilder magical feel, more in line with standard high fantasy, doesn’t click—I like the magic on its own, but I can’t reconcile this universe with the HPMOR universe, because HPMOR rules with this history = world already destroyed a dozen times over. Half of the broadening of the world re: politics, other races, flashbacks/historical examples works, and half of it bores or feels overwrought or irrelevant.
Et cetera, et cetera—I would enumerate more of the things that are good about SD’s writing, except that the whole point of this post is to provide a reasonable counterpoint. And there are a couple of elements that I think are outright bad, though I’m going to refrain from posting those here as well because I’m not trying to flame or troll. Again, I’ve enjoyed this ride, and I’m looking forward to the ending.
But as a sequel, this falls in the reference class of [Matrix Reloaded, Dune Messiah, and Ender’s Shadow], rather than [Empire Strikes Back, Dark Knight, or even Speaker for the Dead]. In fact, Ender’s Shadow may be the perfect analogue—some amazing parts, a significant number of mediocre parts, a couple of terrible elements, weird pacing, doesn’t-quite-feel-like-exactly-the-same-universe, and steals some of its power in a zero-sum way from the original.
I think that, if SD ultimately ends up being considered the “true” or “official” continuation of HPMOR, the overall result will be a lowering of the average quality-per-word of the combined work by a meaningful amount, and the final impression will be one of a “meh” conclusion that [prediction based on reference class forecasting and outside view synthesis of previous chapters] didn’t quite stick the landing.
In a certain sense, that feels like the saddest possibility of them all, because if SD were terrible, no one would think to give it the successor endorsement in the first place. But now, because it’s good enough, it feels like it’s being handed the seal of approval in a sort of “Well, sure, I guess” spirit, and the result will be nobody bothering to spend time writing something better.
Disagree with the “extremely emphatically” emphasis. Yes, it’s not as good, but it more satisfyingly scratched the “what happened in the end” itch, much more than the half-dozen other continuations I’ve read.
Dragging up some old commentary.
Originally written in response to a request for critique:
Originally written in response to a counterpoint on the above critique:
Originally written in response to authorial+fan gushing enthusiasm after Eliezer made a comment about SigDig: