Yeah, I don’t think I can plausibly deny responsibility for this one.
Googling either (rationality + fanfiction) or even (rational + fanfiction) gets you there as the first hit, just so ya know...
Also, clicking on the Sitemeter counter and looking at “referrals” would probably have shown you a clickthrough from a profile called “LessWrong” on fanfiction.net.
Want to know the rest of the plot? Just guess what the last sentence of the current version is about before I post the next part on April 3rd. Feel free to post guesses here rather than on FF.net, since a flood of LW.com reviewers would probably sound rather strange to them.
Also, there is a sharply limited supply of people who speak Japanese, Hebrew, English, math, rationality, and fiction all at once. If it wasn’t you, it was someone making a concerted effort to impersonate you.
It gets a strong vote of approval from my girlfriend. She made it about halfway through Three Worlds Collide without finishing, for comparison. We’ll see if I can get my parents to read this one...
Edit: And I think this is great. Looking forward to when Harry crosses over to the universe of the Ultimate Meta Mega Crossover.
Let’s make that a Prediction. Harry becomes the ultimate Dark Lord by destroying the universe and escaping to the Metametaverse of the Ultimate Meta Mega Crossover.
This Harry and Ender are both terrified of becoming monsters. Both have a killer instinct. Both are much smarter than most of their peers. Ender’s two sides are reflected in the monstrous Peter and the loving Valentine. The two sides of Potter-Evans-Verres are reflected in Draco and Hermione. The environments are of course very similar: both are in very abnormal boarding schools teaching them things regular kids don’t learn.
Oh, and now the Defense Against the Dark Arts prof is going to start forming “armies” for practicing what is now called “Battle Magic” (like the Battle Room!).
And the last chapter’s disclaimer?
The enemy’s gate is Rowling.
If the parallels aren’t intentional I’m going insane.
This Harry and Ender are both terrified of becoming monsters. Both have a killer instinct. Both are much smarter than most of their peers. Ender’s two sides are reflected in the monstrous Peter and the loving Valentine. The two sides of Potter-Evans-Verres are reflected in Draco and Hermione. The environments are of course very similar: both are in very abnormal boarding schools teaching them things regular kids don’t learn.
Oh, and now the Defense Against the Dark Arts prof is going to start forming “armies” for practicing what is now called “Battle Magic” (like the Battle Room!).
And the last chapter’s disclaimer?
The enemy’s gate is Rowling.
If the parallels aren’t intentional I’m going insane.
There is a reason I didn’t look for it. It isn’t done. Having found it anyway via link above, of course I read it because I have almost no self-control, but I didn’t look for it!
Are you sure you wouldn’t rather have the mashed potatoes? There’s a sack of potatoes in the pantry. I could mash them. There’s also a cheesecake in the fridge… I was thinking of making soup… should I continue to list food? Is this getting anywhere?
This is a lot of fun so far, though I think McGonnagal was in some ways more in the right than Harry in chapter 6. Also, I kind of feel like Draco’s behavior here is a bit unfair to the wizarding world as portrayed in the canon—the wizarding world is clearly not at all medieval in many ways (especially in the treatment of women where the behavior we actually see is essentially modern), so I’m not sure why it should necessarily be so in that way. Regardless of my nitpicking it’s a brilliant fanfic and it’s nice to see muggle-world ideas enter the wizarding world (which always seemed like it should have happened already).
This story reminded me distinctly of Harry Potter and the Nightmares of Futures Past—you might enjoy that one. Harry works until he’s 30 to kill Voldemort, and by the time he succeeds, everyone he loves is dead. He comes up with a time travel spell that breaks if the thing being transported has any mass, so he kills himself, and lets his soul do the travelling. 30-year-old Harry’s soul merges with 11-year-old Harry, and a very brilliant, very prepared, very powerful, and deeply disturbed young wizard enters Hogwarts.
It’s very well written technically—better than Eliezer who overindulges in speechifying, hyperbole, and italics—but in general Harry doesn’t seem disturbed enough, heals too easily, and there are too few repercussions from his foreknowledge. (Snape leaving and usurping Kakaroff at Durmstang seems to be about it.)
That, and the author may never finish, which is so frustrating an eventuality that I’m not sure I could recommend it to anyone.
Similar in premise is “The Mirror of Maybe” (slash warning, never-updates warning) in which a fifth-year Harry is shown a hypothetical future and uses the extensive knowledge gained thereby to ditch school, disguise himself as an adult, and become the greatest Gary Stu of all time. Slightly AU magic system and, as I warned, it never freakin’ updates.
It’s almost done, actually. Here’s a sneak preview of the next chapter:
Dumbledore peered over his desk at young Harry, twinkling in a kindly sort of way. The boy had come to him with a terribly intense look on his childish face—Dumbledore hoped that whatever this matter was, it wasn’t too serious. Harry was far too young for his life trials to be starting already. “What was it you wished to speak to me about, Harry?”
Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres leaned forward in his chair, looking bleak. “Headmaster, I got a sharp pain in my scar during the Sorting Feast. Considering how and where I got this scar, it didn’t seem like the sort of thing I should just ignore. I thought at first it was because of Professor Snape, but I followed the Baconian experimental method which is to find the conditions for both the presence and the absence of the phenomenon, and I’ve determined that my scar hurts if and only if I’m facing the back of Professor Quirrell’s head, whatever’s under his turban. Now it could be that my scar is sensitive to something else, like Dark Arts in general, but I think we should provisionally assume the worst—You-Know-Who.”
“Great heavens, Harry!” gasped Dumbledore. He sat there with his head whirling. The boy was right that this was nothing to ignore. He dared not confront Professor Quirrell within the halls of Hogwarts, around the other students—he would have to figure out some way to lure Quirrell out of the castle -
But the grim young boy was still speaking. “Now, if the worst is true, then we know exactly where You-Know-Who is right now. And I don’t think that’s an opportunity we should pass up. Destroying his body didn’t work last time, so I asked Hermione if she’d ever heard of anything that would destroy a soul, and she mentioned a method of executing criminals called the Dementor’s Kiss...”
How proud of myself should I feel for figuring out how Comed-Tea works before Harry did? (Keeping in mind that it’s been years since I internalized the facts that in the Harry Potter universe, prophecies work and Time-Turners don’t create alternate time-lines, information not available to rational!Harry.)
How proud of myself should I feel for figuring out how Comed-Tea works before Harry did?
Not very. Tons of commentators glommed onto the non-time-warping explanation, and the fic all but tells us that this is a possibility, especially with the experiment vignette with Hermione on the train.
(Personally, I don’t like the idea that the Comed-Tea affects only Harry; that mechanism leaves Luna Lovegood as an ethically depraved libeller.)
I was looking over the old chapters and I found this:
One alert reviewer asked whether, if Luna is a seer, that means this is going to be an HPDM bottom!Draco mpreg fic. I regret that FFN does not allow me any larger font size in which to say NO. It honestly hadn’t occurred to me that Luna might be a real seer—I’ll have to decide whether to run with that or not—but I think we can all safely assume that if Luna is a seer, she said something about “light planting a seed in darkness”, and Xenophilius, as always, interpreted this in rather the wrong way.
This Harry is so much more potentially powerful than canon Harry, therefore having canon Voldemort be the final boss would be a let-down. Eliezer’s author description explicitly says that anything which strengthens the hero must be accompanied by a corresponding increase in the difficulties he will face, so I think we can be pretty confident that things are going to be much more awesome than just defeating Voldemort with the Potterverse equivalent of RPG rules exploitation.
Besides, even you had that happen in your story and had a dementor munching on the back of Quirrell’s head, wouldn’t the result be the equivalent of destroying only a single horcrux? (unless the bits of soul are linked in such a way that the dementor can suck them all up at a distance through the one...)
You can’t escape writing the rest of this that easily! ;)
Also, hrm… would your comment here then count as you doing a parody fanfic of your own fanfic?
It could be one chapter where they debate whether or not to sic the dementor on Quirell without even confronting him, then one chapter where they figure out how to magically triangulate and destroy all of the Horcruxes at once.
Shhhh… Stop trying to make it easy for him to end the story sooner than later. ;)
(Nevermind some of the grayer ethical aspects of, in a world with potentially eternal afterlife, Moldy Voldy’s crimes may not stack up to that. (That is, “destroying a soul” >>> “killing someone” in the potter verse. Probably even “killing many someones” (otoh, IIRC the Dementor’s were to a large extent his creatures, so we can probably safely assume that he was involved with or arranged for (or, more to the point, would in the future arrange for) plenty of soul consuming/destroying))
Well, by way of contrast, this point in the original book took us up to page 121 of 309. The story is currently 44,000 words which is approximately half the length of the average novel. However, we still haven’t seen any deviation from the original story which suggests that Harry’s opposition will be much harder, so I’m inclined to go with the first estimate, which gives us about 1⁄3 of total length so far. Not counting any sequels, of course.
Yeah, I don’t think I can plausibly deny responsibility for this one.
Even if you’d used a different pseudonym and such, I’m sure a lot of us would have figured it out just from your writing style, the rationality explanations, and … other things. Hell, the first chapter’s disclaimer alone was a giveaway. :)
Anyway, I’ve just finished reading all nine chapters, and this is a dream come true for me. I’ve had a few fantasies of my own about how I would have done things differently (and better / more rationally) if I’d been in Harry’s shoes, and they were a lot like this fanfic… except for the sheer, scintillating brilliance of your work, I mean.
This could be a good introduction/portal to rationality for a lot of people. I’ll do what (little) I can to promote it and get you more readers, and I suggest other LWers do the same.
Yeah, I don’t think I can plausibly deny responsibility for this one.
Googling either (rationality + fanfiction) or even (rational + fanfiction) gets you there as the first hit, just so ya know...
Also, clicking on the Sitemeter counter and looking at “referrals” would probably have shown you a clickthrough from a profile called “LessWrong” on fanfiction.net.
Want to know the rest of the plot? Just guess what the last sentence of the current version is about before I post the next part on April 3rd. Feel free to post guesses here rather than on FF.net, since a flood of LW.com reviewers would probably sound rather strange to them.
Voldemort’s Killing Curse had an epiphenomenal effect: Harry is a p-zombie. ;)
I don’t like where this is headed—Harry isn’t provably friendly and they’re setting him loose in the wizarding world!
Also, there is a sharply limited supply of people who speak Japanese, Hebrew, English, math, rationality, and fiction all at once. If it wasn’t you, it was someone making a concerted effort to impersonate you.
Do I have to guess right? ;)
It gets a strong vote of approval from my girlfriend. She made it about halfway through Three Worlds Collide without finishing, for comparison. We’ll see if I can get my parents to read this one...
Edit: And I think this is great. Looking forward to when Harry crosses over to the universe of the Ultimate Meta Mega Crossover.
Let’s make that a Prediction. Harry becomes the ultimate Dark Lord by destroying the universe and escaping to the Metametaverse of the Ultimate Meta Mega Crossover.
DO NOT want.
This Harry is so much like Ender Wiggin.
Really? I picture him looking like a younger version of this.
This Harry and Ender are both terrified of becoming monsters. Both have a killer instinct. Both are much smarter than most of their peers. Ender’s two sides are reflected in the monstrous Peter and the loving Valentine. The two sides of Potter-Evans-Verres are reflected in Draco and Hermione. The environments are of course very similar: both are in very abnormal boarding schools teaching them things regular kids don’t learn.
Oh, and now the Defense Against the Dark Arts prof is going to start forming “armies” for practicing what is now called “Battle Magic” (like the Battle Room!).
And the last chapter’s disclaimer?
If the parallels aren’t intentional I’m going insane.
And going back a few chapters, I’m betting that what Harry saw as wrong with himself is hair-trigger rage.
Ooo, I missed that. Yeah, OK.
This Harry and Ender are both terrified of becoming monsters. Both have a killer instinct. Both are much smarter than most of their peers. Ender’s two sides are reflected in the monstrous Peter and the loving Valentine. The two sides of Potter-Evans-Verres are reflected in Draco and Hermione. The environments are of course very similar: both are in very abnormal boarding schools teaching them things regular kids don’t learn.
Oh, and now the Defense Against the Dark Arts prof is going to start forming “armies” for practicing what is now called “Battle Magic” (like the Battle Room!).
And the last chapter’s disclaimer?
If the parallels aren’t intentional I’m going insane.
There is a reason I didn’t look for it. It isn’t done. Having found it anyway via link above, of course I read it because I have almost no self-control, but I didn’t look for it!
Are you sure you wouldn’t rather have the mashed potatoes? There’s a sack of potatoes in the pantry. I could mash them. There’s also a cheesecake in the fridge… I was thinking of making soup… should I continue to list food? Is this getting anywhere?
Holy fucking shit that was awesome.
This is a lot of fun so far, though I think McGonnagal was in some ways more in the right than Harry in chapter 6. Also, I kind of feel like Draco’s behavior here is a bit unfair to the wizarding world as portrayed in the canon—the wizarding world is clearly not at all medieval in many ways (especially in the treatment of women where the behavior we actually see is essentially modern), so I’m not sure why it should necessarily be so in that way. Regardless of my nitpicking it’s a brilliant fanfic and it’s nice to see muggle-world ideas enter the wizarding world (which always seemed like it should have happened already).
You also have the approval of several Tropers, only one of which is me.
I normally read within {nonfiction} U {authors’ other works} but I had such a blast with Methods of Rationality that I might try some more fiction.
This story reminded me distinctly of Harry Potter and the Nightmares of Futures Past—you might enjoy that one. Harry works until he’s 30 to kill Voldemort, and by the time he succeeds, everyone he loves is dead. He comes up with a time travel spell that breaks if the thing being transported has any mass, so he kills himself, and lets his soul do the travelling. 30-year-old Harry’s soul merges with 11-year-old Harry, and a very brilliant, very prepared, very powerful, and deeply disturbed young wizard enters Hogwarts.
I’ve finished reading that.
It’s very well written technically—better than Eliezer who overindulges in speechifying, hyperbole, and italics—but in general Harry doesn’t seem disturbed enough, heals too easily, and there are too few repercussions from his foreknowledge. (Snape leaving and usurping Kakaroff at Durmstang seems to be about it.)
That, and the author may never finish, which is so frustrating an eventuality that I’m not sure I could recommend it to anyone.
AH… spoiler!
Snape leaving is hardly a spoiler, since so far it hasn’t affected anything...
Similar in premise is “The Mirror of Maybe” (slash warning, never-updates warning) in which a fifth-year Harry is shown a hypothetical future and uses the extensive knowledge gained thereby to ditch school, disguise himself as an adult, and become the greatest Gary Stu of all time. Slightly AU magic system and, as I warned, it never freakin’ updates.
lol
I like all of Eliezer’s fiction… if you want more like this, see the pseudo-sequel, http://lesswrong.com/lw/18g/the_finale_of_the_ultimate_meta_mega_crossover/ It is too insane of a story to recommend to most people, but assuming you’ve read Eliezer’s non-fiction, you can jump right in.
Otherwise, just about all of Eliezer’s fiction is worth reading, Three World’s Collide is his best work of fiction.
It’s now the second hit on Google for (rationality + fiction)!
What proportion of the whole story are the current ten (nine) chapters likely to be?
(There is going to be more, right? Right?!)
It’s almost done, actually. Here’s a sneak preview of the next chapter:
just kidding
that that is an excerpt or that you are almost done?
How proud of myself should I feel for figuring out how Comed-Tea works before Harry did? (Keeping in mind that it’s been years since I internalized the facts that in the Harry Potter universe, prophecies work and Time-Turners don’t create alternate time-lines, information not available to rational!Harry.)
Not very. Tons of commentators glommed onto the non-time-warping explanation, and the fic all but tells us that this is a possibility, especially with the experiment vignette with Hermione on the train.
(Personally, I don’t like the idea that the Comed-Tea affects only Harry; that mechanism leaves Luna Lovegood as an ethically depraved libeller.)
Or her father, at least. (I think there was an author’s note about this—she says vague things and he turns them into ridiculous headlines.)
Well, that’s just great—how am I supposed to know that now with Eliezer’s little erasure system?
I suppose better Xenophilius being a depraved libeller than Luna… although as an adult it’s even more inexcusable.
I was looking over the old chapters and I found this:
Or just charmingly nutty.
Good to know.
And what does Voldemort have to do with anything?
He’s not Harry’s target, he’s just a stumbling block in the middle. You’re not fooling me that easily. :P
This Harry is so much more potentially powerful than canon Harry, therefore having canon Voldemort be the final boss would be a let-down. Eliezer’s author description explicitly says that anything which strengthens the hero must be accompanied by a corresponding increase in the difficulties he will face, so I think we can be pretty confident that things are going to be much more awesome than just defeating Voldemort with the Potterverse equivalent of RPG rules exploitation.
Besides, even you had that happen in your story and had a dementor munching on the back of Quirrell’s head, wouldn’t the result be the equivalent of destroying only a single horcrux? (unless the bits of soul are linked in such a way that the dementor can suck them all up at a distance through the one...)
You can’t escape writing the rest of this that easily! ;)
Also, hrm… would your comment here then count as you doing a parody fanfic of your own fanfic?
It could be one chapter where they debate whether or not to sic the dementor on Quirell without even confronting him, then one chapter where they figure out how to magically triangulate and destroy all of the Horcruxes at once.
Shhhh… Stop trying to make it easy for him to end the story sooner than later. ;)
(Nevermind some of the grayer ethical aspects of, in a world with potentially eternal afterlife, Moldy Voldy’s crimes may not stack up to that. (That is, “destroying a soul” >>> “killing someone” in the potter verse. Probably even “killing many someones” (otoh, IIRC the Dementor’s were to a large extent his creatures, so we can probably safely assume that he was involved with or arranged for (or, more to the point, would in the future arrange for) plenty of soul consuming/destroying))
Well, by way of contrast, this point in the original book took us up to page 121 of 309. The story is currently 44,000 words which is approximately half the length of the average novel. However, we still haven’t seen any deviation from the original story which suggests that Harry’s opposition will be much harder, so I’m inclined to go with the first estimate, which gives us about 1⁄3 of total length so far. Not counting any sequels, of course.
Even if you’d used a different pseudonym and such, I’m sure a lot of us would have figured it out just from your writing style, the rationality explanations, and … other things. Hell, the first chapter’s disclaimer alone was a giveaway. :)
Anyway, I’ve just finished reading all nine chapters, and this is a dream come true for me. I’ve had a few fantasies of my own about how I would have done things differently (and better / more rationally) if I’d been in Harry’s shoes, and they were a lot like this fanfic… except for the sheer, scintillating brilliance of your work, I mean.
This could be a good introduction/portal to rationality for a lot of people. I’ll do what (little) I can to promote it and get you more readers, and I suggest other LWers do the same.