Fiction isn’t literal truth, but when done well it captures truths and intuitions that are difficult to explain directly. (It’s also damn fun to read.)

“Nonfiction conveys knowledge, fiction conveys experience.”—Eliezer Yudkowsky

Eliezer Yudkowsky helped kickstart the genre of rationalist fiction, which is about characters who solve the problems in their world by thinking, in a way where the reader could figure it out too. Not where the genius character explains it afterward like Sherlock Holmes or Artemis Fowl, but where the problem is fair and you could’ve figured it out first. Eliezer has written about this in his short online book The Abridged Guide to Intelligent Characters.

Other fiction on the site is in the spirit of hard science fiction, and often involves taking the laws of a universe or the rules of a system to their extreme conclusions, and munchkining your way to become god (or something similar). They also share much of the parts of sci-fi that engage with difficult moral quandaries.

Fiction on this site also tends to have puns. I’m so sorry.

Much more fiction can be found at r/​Rational, which is a subreddit devoted to rationalist fiction.

This is a tag for works of fiction, not for analysis or discussion of literature. For that see Fiction (topic).

Fiction Sequences

• HPMOR

• Three Worlds Collide

• The Bayesian Conspiracy

• Murphy’s Quest

• Luna Lovegood and the Chamber of Secrets

• Bayeswatch

• Short stories by lsusr

External links

• /​r/​rational/​ on Reddit

• RationalFic on TV Tropes

• Eliezer Yudkowsky’s guide to writing intelligent characters

• rationalreads.com