It’s getting published all the time on fanfiction.net. You just can’t ask people money for copies.
It looks like a pretty weird situation for original fiction right now. Traditional publishing has massive inertia and cruft in a world where you can just put your manuscript online for everyone to read, particularly for someone who is more concerned about getting as many readers as possible than getting sales profits. On the other hand, everyone assumes, mostly correctly, that original fiction online is horrible crap and not worth even trying to read, so there’s no good method of discovering if some of it is actually good, and no incentive for actually good writers to get to the top of this discovery queue. It actually seems better for fanfiction, since there’s a centralized site for it with lots and lots of review aggregation.
Fanfiction is kinda shitty as fiction compared to good original fiction, but it actually does seem to make more sense than original fiction with the rationalist fiction thing, which basically wants to reach a maximum number of roughly age 12 to 30 readers and try to change their mind.
Even if physical publishing is not a concern here, fanfiction by itself carries a stigma, even among many of those same 12-30-year-olds that would be its target audience. And it can negatively reflect on the author and the community by association if said fanfiction is given excessive emphasis.
“Yudkowsky? Is that the one who’s writing an insanely long Harry Potter fanfic?”
“Well ummmm...”
it can negatively reflect on the author and the community by association
Oh ye of little faith. It’s a feature. Eliezer is trying to look chaotic and iconoclastic and contrarian. Possibly because trusting authority has historically been harmful and we need more dissent, possibly because he’s trying to annoy his parents.
It isn’t. Eliezer knows about the effects (p~1), approves of them (p=0.9), because they’re part of his “serious ain’t solemn” shtick (p=0.9), which he has carefully thought about and concluded is a good idea (p~1), and is in fact a good idea (p=0.6).
Well, where I come from, being uncompromisingly “iconoclastic and contrarian” doesn’t convince people, it makes them look at you like at a teenager with a grudge. Paying your words the same amount of attention this image implies.
And until LW authors learn the skills of persuasion, learn how to be the kind of person that people will occasionally listen to, LW is going to remain, at best, a fringe community.
What would your ideal public image of LW be, if you’re implying that “at best, a fringe community” is so much less preferable to it? Most of us who care about the issue probably think that LW must broaden its reach somewhat, yet not waste time and effort catering to—ahem—the less genetically fortunate, those who’d have trouble even considering the possibilities of radical change, and all the nice but unsalvageably deluded (yes, the T-word) people.
So do you fall somewhere between those, or in fact have a case for the latter? Not a loaded question; I’m purely curious.
Humble and correct denotation, consciously Hollywood-arrogant and lampshaded connotation, nothing wrong with that—or are you telling me we aren’t allowed to get some fun from that damn meta discourse? Anyway, do you have a stance?
Y’know… that’s a very weak guess supported by few observations, but the current, say, 12 year olds are growing up with fanfiction just as we grew up with SF and fantasy (another stigma-carrying dorky thing of old), and I just can’t see them having much prejudice against it.
This might mean that they’ll have lower standards, but it might also make them more open to looking for good ideas in unorthodox places.
It’s getting published all the time on fanfiction.net. You just can’t ask people money for copies.
It looks like a pretty weird situation for original fiction right now. Traditional publishing has massive inertia and cruft in a world where you can just put your manuscript online for everyone to read, particularly for someone who is more concerned about getting as many readers as possible than getting sales profits. On the other hand, everyone assumes, mostly correctly, that original fiction online is horrible crap and not worth even trying to read, so there’s no good method of discovering if some of it is actually good, and no incentive for actually good writers to get to the top of this discovery queue. It actually seems better for fanfiction, since there’s a centralized site for it with lots and lots of review aggregation.
Fanfiction is kinda shitty as fiction compared to good original fiction, but it actually does seem to make more sense than original fiction with the rationalist fiction thing, which basically wants to reach a maximum number of roughly age 12 to 30 readers and try to change their mind.
Even if physical publishing is not a concern here, fanfiction by itself carries a stigma, even among many of those same 12-30-year-olds that would be its target audience. And it can negatively reflect on the author and the community by association if said fanfiction is given excessive emphasis.
“Yudkowsky? Is that the one who’s writing an insanely long Harry Potter fanfic?” “Well ummmm...”
Oh ye of little faith. It’s a feature. Eliezer is trying to look chaotic and iconoclastic and contrarian. Possibly because trusting authority has historically been harmful and we need more dissent, possibly because he’s trying to annoy his parents.
I’m not sure if this is supposed to be sarcasm. At least, I hope it is.
It isn’t. Eliezer knows about the effects (p~1), approves of them (p=0.9), because they’re part of his “serious ain’t solemn” shtick (p=0.9), which he has carefully thought about and concluded is a good idea (p~1), and is in fact a good idea (p=0.6).
Well, where I come from, being uncompromisingly “iconoclastic and contrarian” doesn’t convince people, it makes them look at you like at a teenager with a grudge. Paying your words the same amount of attention this image implies.
And until LW authors learn the skills of persuasion, learn how to be the kind of person that people will occasionally listen to, LW is going to remain, at best, a fringe community.
What would your ideal public image of LW be, if you’re implying that “at best, a fringe community” is so much less preferable to it? Most of us who care about the issue probably think that LW must broaden its reach somewhat, yet not waste time and effort catering to—ahem—the less genetically fortunate, those who’d have trouble even considering the possibilities of radical change, and all the nice but unsalvageably deluded (yes, the T-word) people.
So do you fall somewhere between those, or in fact have a case for the latter? Not a loaded question; I’m purely curious.
“Less generically fortunate”?
That’s, like, not arrogant at all.
Humble and correct denotation, consciously Hollywood-arrogant and lampshaded connotation, nothing wrong with that—or are you telling me we aren’t allowed to get some fun from that damn meta discourse? Anyway, do you have a stance?
Y’know… that’s a very weak guess supported by few observations, but the current, say, 12 year olds are growing up with fanfiction just as we grew up with SF and fantasy (another stigma-carrying dorky thing of old), and I just can’t see them having much prejudice against it.
This might mean that they’ll have lower standards, but it might also make them more open to looking for good ideas in unorthodox places.