(Conversely, many fictions are instantiated somewhere, in some infinitesimal measure. However, I deliberately included logical impossibilities into HPMOR, such as tiling a corridor in pentagrams and having the objects in Dumbledore’s room change number without any being added or subtracted, to avoid the story being real anywhere.)
In the library of books of every possible string, close to “Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality” and “Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationalitz” is “Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality: Logically Consistent Edition.” Why is the reality of that books’ contents affected by your reticence to manifest that book in our universe?
Absolutely; I hope he doesn’t think that writing a story about X increases the measure of X. But then why else would he introduce these “impossibilities”?
It is a different story then, so the original HpMor would still not be nonfiction in another universe. For all we know, the existance of a corridor tiled with pentagons is in fact an important plot point and removing it would utterly destroy the structure of upcoming chapters.
Nnnot really. The Time-Turner, certainly, but that doesn’t make the story uninstantiable. Making a logical impossibility a basic plot premise… sounds like quite an interesting challenge, but that would be a different story.
A spell that lets you get a number of objects that is an integer such that it’s larger than some other integer but smaller than it’s successor, used to hide something.
And SCP-033. And related concepts in Dark Integers by Greg Egan. And probably a bunch of other places. I’m surprised I couldn’t find a TVtropes page on it.
In the library of books of every possible string, close to “Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality” and “Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationalitz” is “Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality: Logically Consistent Edition.” Why is the reality of that books’ contents affected by your reticence to manifest that book in our universe?
Absolutely; I hope he doesn’t think that writing a story about X increases the measure of X. But then why else would he introduce these “impossibilities”?
Because it’s funny?
It is a different story then, so the original HpMor would still not be nonfiction in another universe. For all we know, the existance of a corridor tiled with pentagons is in fact an important plot point and removing it would utterly destroy the structure of upcoming chapters.
Nnnot really. The Time-Turner, certainly, but that doesn’t make the story uninstantiable. Making a logical impossibility a basic plot premise… sounds like quite an interesting challenge, but that would be a different story.
A spell that lets you get a number of objects that is an integer such that it’s larger than some other integer but smaller than it’s successor, used to hide something.
This idea (the integer, not the spell) is the premise of the short story The Secret Number by Igor Teper.
And SCP-033. And related concepts in Dark Integers by Greg Egan. And probably a bunch of other places. I’m surprised I couldn’t find a TVtropes page on it.