Review: The Fifth Defiance

The Fifth Defiance by Walter
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Good superhero stories are hard to find. All too often, the protagonists hold the idiot ball, never really utilizing their powers in ways that would make sense in real life. It's often even worse for the antagonists. Yet occasionally a superhero story comes along that breaks these conventions: Walter's The Fifth Defiance is one of them.

This is a world where the strongest of the strong is a tyrant, bringing the entire world into ruin. Four times the world has risen up against her, and four times they have failed. This story recounts the fifth defiance, an attempt by our protagonists to take down the tyrant once and for all.

I really enjoyed this tale. The characters act rationally; the story beats are surprising and fruitful; the twists are fair and never really come out of nowhere, even if it may sometimes at first seem so. It was a genuinely fun (though harrowing) read.

With that said, there are some major issues that bring the text down. In the middle of the book, the author begins writing a questing prequel that is almost entirely unrelated to the main story of the fifth defiance. While it may be good on its own, not all readers who enjoy rational fiction superhero tales will also be interesting in the questing genre of allowing readers to directly influence the characters, plot, setting, and everything else the writer decides to put from pen to paper. Combining these two stories in the same text was a huge miss. So much so that I recommend skipping all "Regime Quest" chapters when reading the main story. If you are into the questing genre, you can then go back to read Regime Quest afterward.

The depictions of rape and unrestrained violence would ordinarily be a miss for me, but in this book they truly do make sense in the context of the story. This story is not just an excuse to write graphic scenes — it genuinely uses these scenes to propel the story at various points. With that said, some readers might want to skip The Fifth Defiance for this reason alone. The graphic scenes occur spread throughout and they are relevant to the story; it's not the kind of thing you can just skip over whenever they come up. With that said, they are written almost like the author has aphantasia: while graphic, there is no Melville-style depiction of every squicky thing that happens. I found these scenes to be quite bearable.

Which brings me to the part of the book that I disliked the most. Unfortunately, this is spoiler territory. If you want to go in completely blind, skip the rest of this review. I'll try to be as vague as possible, but what I'm about to say is still what I'd consider to be a medium-sized spoiler.

I disliked the ending. I won't say why, as that would be too spoilery, but fellow readers will know exactly what I am referring to. I went along the ride with this author from beginning to end, enjoying the ups and downs, getting excited as new revelations came up that changed the entire perception of what was going on in this world. And then: that ending. It is not that the ending is bad, per se. I understand why the author did it, and I can tell that the author planned this weird style of ending from the very beginning of the story. It makes sense to the story, and so I cannot call it bad writing. The concept itself is fascinating, but the execution left me in a state of denial. In the moment, I could not believe that that was the final chapter, and I did not like the author for having put me in that position. Now, hours after experiencing it, thinking about it as I write this review, I appreciate how unusual and surprising the ending was. It still sucked when I first read it, and that ultimately means I truly disliked it overall — but there is a sort of interestingness to reading an ending like this that maybe makes it worthwhile. This is not something that I can imagine a professional editor to ever allow in an ending, so seeing it here makes me somewhat appreciate the twist, even if I hated reading it in the moment.

Overall, I enjoyed The Fifth Defiance. Some parts were sloppy; there were times when I felt like the author didn't want to write a section and so they did a time skip so they wouldn't have to. But overall, I think the story worked. Walter could definitely use a good editor, but even without one, I'm glad that this story caught my attention.

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Review: mad investor chaos and the woman of asmodeus

mad investor chaos and the woman of asmodeus by Eliezer Yudkowsky
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Ambivalence gets a bum rap. Who would ever want to read a book that simultaneously delights and frustrates a reader to no end? When the text continually drops the ball on a simple matter and the mistake is repeated over and over again throughout the text, to the extent that this core mistake permeates the text in a way that can never be corrected by an editor, how could it ever be that the other content could delight enough to make up for this seemingly fatal deficiency?

I’m ambivalent about mad investor chaos and the woman of asmodeus. The characters all just care about sex too much. It's distracting. It's annoying. It makes it very difficult for me to place myself in the story seamlessly. But, unbelievably, the core conceit of a subpar dath ilani being isekaied into the Pathfinder universe where the citizenry literally are lawful evil supporters of hell itself and the dath ilani has yet to realize that evil is evil has got to be the most fascinating and exciting story hook I've come across since I was a teenager and wasn't already jaded to the classical canon.

Let me take a step back to explain, because if you're new to all of this, then the aim of this essay is to get you to read this story. Some very light spoilers follow, but honestly they are so light that I expect no one reading them to be bothered by them (the few who would be bothered by the most minimal of spoilers will stop reading here of their own accord).

First: Pathfinder is a role playing game universe with its own unique set of rules for magic, character alignment, governments, and gods. You usually see people playing an RPG in this setting; it's an alternative to the much better known Dungeons & Dragons universe. You don't need to be familiar with Pathfinder to get into this story, even though it's set in the Pathfinder universe. It's sufficient to be aware of general tropes regarding devils that contract for your soul and to realize that in Pathfinder, some governments are themselves lawful evil and enforce all their citizens to contract with devils for their souls. If you don't know Pathfinder, another basic fact you'll need is that demons are distinct from devils. Demons are chaotic evil fiends from the Abyss that exhibit raw fighting strength, while devils are non-chaotic evil contract-lovers who delight in taking unfair advantage of those who dare to sell their soul.

Second, dath ilan is an invention of Elizer Yudkowsky, one of the authors of mad investor chaos and the woman of asmodeus. Yudkowsky is significant in the rationality movement and has spent a lot of time writing tracts that help to make people think better about various things. dath ilan started out as an April Fools joke, when Yudkowsky started pretending that he was himself a citizen of dath ilan that was isekaied into our world and has been trying ever since to teach us Earthlings the ways of dath ilan. In dath ilan, the sanity waterline is much higher than on Earth. People cooperate there in ways that people here cannot, merely because everyone is much more rational along the dimensions that Yudkowsky cares about. It's a fascinating world, even if I don't personally agree that such a world would look the way that Yudkowsky portrays it. Their tech level is approximately a little beneath our own, mostly because the responsible adults of dath ilan deliberately slowed down (or stopped?) all technological progress along a dimension that will be obvious if you know any of Yudkowsky's other works, but which I won't name here as I expect it to be a further plot point in the text. If you know nothing of Yudkowsky and are going into this blind, the most important thing to know about dath ilan is that they're supposed to be the best that humans can be. Stuff just works there. Schools teach learning, businesses exist to better organize making goods available, politicians do the right thing, etc. It's not heaven — they're all still baseline humans — but they are much smarter than us and they work together to do society correctly.

Third, isekai is a genre where someone from world A suddenly finds themselves in world B. The genre started as a way to take someone from our world and put them in a fantasy world so that we can identify with the straight man and it is justified in-story why we stop to pay attention to details that people from world B wouldn't find interesting. But in mad investor chaos and the woman of asmodeus, this is turned on its head because we are unfamiliar with both world A and world B: Keltham (the dath ilani) is transported into the Pathfinder universe, where the lawful evil residents of Cheliax immediately start deceiving Keltham for reasons that I won't spoil here. Keltham is a teenager; he's smart, as all dath ilani are, but he's not the shining standard example you might expect from a place like dath ilan; Keltham is a bit weird by his culture's standards.

The resulting story is amazing. So many stories out there fail in my eyes because they insist on having characters hold the idiot ball, or because the characters make dumb decisions that the audience would never make. (It's the trope of a group in a scary mansion at night deciding to split up, but writ large: charatcers overlook obvious clues or make other choices that they definitely would not take if they were sufficiently rational.) mad investor chaos and the woman of asmodeus doesn't make this mistake. Keltham acts rationally. The adults of Cheliax act as they should, given their knowledge and desires. The story makes sense, and that's a rare treat among most stories told on Earth. mad investor chaos and the woman of asmodeus is a prime example of rational fiction, a genre that first started being considered a genre of its own in part due to Yudkowsky's Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, one of the best fanfictions ever written. If you end up liking mad investor chaos and the woman of asmodeus, you'll likely enjoy other rational fiction works; alternatively, if you find yourselves liking shorter ratfics, you'll also likely find this text worth the read.

But, as the opening of this review points out, I don't have nothing but praise for this book. Several parts make me feel strongly ambivalent.

mad investor chaos and the woman of asmodeus is a glowfic. It's written by two authors, each of whom writes dialogue and setting for the portion that they're responsible for. The text itself is a series of forum posts, where each post is written by one of the authors. It's not clear if they played it straight, but hypothetically, each other doesn't always know in advance what the other author is necessarily going for. In some glowfics, this means you get to see a succession of "yes and" situations, but in this specific glowfic style, you're more likely to see one author putting forth a general idea and the other one pushing back and finding edge cases that may trip them up. Does this make for good writing? Maybe, but not here. That's why I suspect that these two glowfic writers are more in concert than they may at first appear, since it's resulting in writing that more closely corresponds to what a single author may have written on their own. Parts of this feel stumbly where it needn't if this hadn't been a glowfic. I'm especially unhappy with the forum post format, which artificially creates issues not only with mathematical notation but also doesn't allow for graceful chapter headings or appropriate white space.

The strongest thing that puts me off the story, however, is the continued focus on sex. Yes, I get that Keltham is a teenager, and that a lawful evil society like Cheliax would use sex to nefarious ends. But the BDSM stuff is really pushed as a major part of the storyline in what feels like the cringiest thing I've ever started and then continued to read. The Erogamer, which is famously full of sex and yet nevertheless tells a deep story you won't expect (even having given this disclaimer, it will still be unexpected), does a legit better job of making the sex feel important-to-the-story than mad investor chaos and the woman of asmodeus does. Despite being asexual myself, I really enjoyed The Erogamer, and, in a similar way, I'm really enjoying mad investor chaos and the woman of asmodeus. But the former feels like the sex stuff is earned, while the latter feels like the authors just really wanted their rational story about math and rationality to also have a bunch of sex in it. I cannot tell you how much this turns me off. When I say I'm ambivalent about this, I don't mean that the sex part is bad but I recommend the story anyway because of its good qualities. No, what I mean is that the sex thing is so bad that I actively want to warn people away from reading this trash. Yet, at the same time, the rest of it is so good that I need others to experience this treasure. That's what I mean by my being ambivalent.

But, as I mentioned, I am asexual. Maybe other people just won't mind this level of BDSM in their stories. I tend to cringe when I see the two leads in a movie kiss (I keep hoping they're just friends!), and yet movie-makers keep using this trope over and over again, so maybe the rest of society just tolerates this kind of thing without cringing in the way I do. Maybe you'll enjoy it. But I remain ambivalent.

Sex isn't the only issue, however. The math is somewhat jumbled; the reader, if they are math literate, will be able to follow only with difficulty because dath ilan uses a different way of teaching and talking about math; the math illiterate will do no better than to skim over these parts. Worse, the format lends itself poorly to mathematical notation: at some points, the authors literally use a series of dashes to create a vinculum (dividing line in a fraction). The html doesn't wrap correctly in some browsers, so this makes the math appear amateurish. Given that I think at least one author really does intend for readers to learn this stuff, I'm guessing this doesn't have any aspect of authorial intent, and if the authors knew how to allow LaTeX to appear, they might use that instead. (I'm only partially sure because the authors insist upon making dath ilan math use different notation and go about describing mathematical relationships in an entirely different way.)

Worse, the author seems to want to teach the reader, even if the reader just wants to enjoy the story. This creates a tension where the author spends way more time on explaining a concept than any other author realistically would, and it may cause some readers to lose interest for a dozen forum posts at a time. I get that the point of the story is to semi-secretly increase the sanity waterline. But it feels like playing an edutainment game at times. Maybe if the teaching sections were shorter, or less dense, then you could stealthily teach while the reader is focused on enjoying the story. But, as written, it's like a story that occasionally takes breaks in order to go in depth and teach a lesson on rationality. Unfortunately, this isn't fixable by editing out the teaching parts, because the teaching parts are integral to the story itself. Fascinatingly, as you learn each lesson, you are supposed to be able to better understand what Keltham was doing in previous parts of the story. In a way, this is like an M. Night Shyamalan twist where when you see the twist at the end, you look back at the beginning and see it in a new light — except the twist is continuous: as you learn more ratonality, you're better able to appreciate how Keltham has been experiencing the situation the entire time, since he's looking at everything with a rational eye.

So even though the teaching parts feel stilted and break up the cadence of the story in unflattering ways, they're nevertheless part of what makes this text great. (Meanwhile, the sex stuff could be removed almost entirely and I suspect the story would be better for it.)

The story itself is ongoing, but I'm a writing a review now anyway because I'm already certain of the five star rating I'm going to give it. You may wonder why a book I'm ambivalent about is getting a perfect rating, but, at the meta level, I think that this is entirely appropriate. I genuinely cringe at sex stuff in this book even when I didn't cringe at more extreme sex stuff in The Erogamer. I actively dislike the sex parts so much that I want to warn people away from reading. I also actively like the other parts so much that I need others to read this. On the meta level I want others to experience this fascinating dissonance, which, when combined with the good object level parts, results in my five star rating.

You can read mad investor chaos and the woman of asmodeus on glowfic.com. You can learn more about dath ilan on LessWrong, including links to previous stories about dath ilan people isekaied into various locales. If you decide to read this despite never having heard of Yudkowsky or rational fiction before, and you like it, be sure to look up other rational fiction works. Oh, and Eliezer, if you're reading this: good god, man, please stop weaving this much unnecessary sex into your plotlines. It's one thing to write sex into a story about being corrupted by the internet. But when you take what may be the best plot hook of all time (dath ilani isekaied to nation of lawful evil people intent on corrupting them) and then stuff your sex fantasies in there, it ruins what could have been so much better. I'll take it anyway, because it's damn good, and maybe there's no incentive to do otherwise since most of your intended readers won't be asexual like me, but good god that's a lot of sex and masochism for a story supposedly about rationality. Granted, the lawful evil stuff justifies the inclusion of masochism, but not the sex in the first place, no matter how horny a teenage dath ilani might be.

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Review: Vampire Flower Language

Vampire Flower Language by Angela Castir
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The problem with most romance stories is that the plot tends to revolve around a conflict that the characters see as big, but that the reader sees as small. This is because romance authors want there to be tension with the characters not being able to get together, but for the reader to desire them to be together anyway. The easiest way to achieve this is to set up a comedy of errors: a misunderstanding that would have been resolved had they been truthful, or, if the story is from before the 1990s, a misunderstanding that would have been resolved had they just had access to a mobile phone. Occasionally, the problem is a love triangle, so the conflict is because the characters aren't polyamorous; or the problem is that they live in different worlds. These stories are slightly better because they don't rely on the characters holding the idiot ball, but they never seem to reach the level of rational fiction, where the characters are thinking properly, and the conflict stems not from their errors in thought, but in differences in value.

Angela Castir (or, rather, the two-person-author team that calls itself Angela Castir) expertly navigates this hole by creating a rational romance story where the plot doesn't revolve around silly misunderstandings. (Don't get me wrong: misunderstandings do occur, but they are appropriate to the characters.) Instead, the tension of the romance story comes from the disconnect between the worldview of a baseline human during world war 2 and a very, very old vampire. Their story is realistic and sweet; heartwarming and heartwrenching. I expect fans of general vampire romance to be blown away by the sheer competence of the surrounding story and events; I expect fans of rational fiction to be blown away by the fact that the author was able to create a romance story in the ratfic genre. Regardless of where you come from, I expect you'll enjoy this story.

The remainder of this review has spoilers; please stop reading here and start reading the story itself if you haven't already. It's worth it! [Seriously, spoilers are ahead. Do not read further before reading the story itself.]

I love the themes present in this book. A gay romance in this time period would historically be seen (by humans) as entirely inappropriate in society, but the focus starts on vampire society instead, where the tension is a romance between a vampire and a human being considered inappropriate. The reader starts out thinking that this is the allegory: the inappropriateness from vampire culture's point of view mimics the inappropriateness from human culture's point of view. But by the end this reader expectation gets upended: the more important allegory here is of understanding. Can a relationship where people love each other persist when their values don't match? To what extent must those values change in order for the people to have a meaningful relationship?

The protagonist's sister is not okay with homosexuality, to the extent that she eventually refuses to be close to her brother, even while loving him; this matches the protagonist's refusal to be close to his partner, even while loving him. Seeing this parallel is what causes the character to update toward being more comfortable in his relationship, so that he does not make the same error that his sister does. More importantly, at the reader level, we now see that the value mismatch which we thought was a huge divide for the majority of the book should instead be considered a minor hurdle. It's not just the characters who update on this revelation: the readers are intended to update as well.

The Julius storyline introduces a truly alien alien: a character whose value function seems to be set in the way an AI might. As the reader is given access to Julius' internal thoughts, this seems like the scariest part of the story. A slightly misaligned AI, valuing its expectation of one's happiness rather than a person's stated goals, can easily go wrong. You see this manipulation occur freely and easily with Red (a mere human), and it is only because William (the vampire) is more competent that things do not immediately fall apart. Even so, William's competence is not sufficient to be immune to Julius' machinations; I expect that Julius was given away by their previous owner on purpose for this reason. When the story jumps ahead in the epilogue, we see that Julius has been somewhat reigned in, not by William's competence, but by Red's morals being forced onto Julius. We readers don't see Julius' internal state in the epilogue, so it is left ambiguous whether the situation is actually better or worse here, but its appropriate for the story to end here anyway, as the story we've been following is not Julius' story, but William and Red's story.

I was enthralled by the worldbuilding, but my favorite part of the book was how characters would ask questions that I, too, would ask if I were in that situation. This allowed me to partially self-insert myself into the story, a feat that is exceedingly rare in romance novels, given that I am poly and asexual. I really appreciated the way that characters sought out information. What I didn't like was that so much of that information remained hidden, even to the end! I recognize that further stories in this world are going to be told, and so it is appropriate to leave dangling threads. But it was unsatisfying all the same. I am left wanting more!

One note I would give to the authors for future stories: please consider restricting the reader's point of view to a single character. Although it would have made for a different book, had the entire novel been written from Red's point of view, then that could have included a mystery element for the readers: is William sincere? Should we also want Red to run away? But by letting us see into William's mind, this possibility is lost completely. I recognize that's not what you were going for, so it's unfair to complain about this. But this could have been done at least with Julius and it would not have changed the story too much. By letting us see into Julius' mind, we get access to knowledge that cuts the tension too much. I honestly believe it would have been better to never allow us access to Julius' thoughts, so that readers could be honestly divided on whether Red's or William's point of view were best. This would have added to the tension of the split that occurred. I hope in your next book you take care to only allow the reader access to more limited points of view to allow for more mystery in your story beats.

Even if this weren't an exceedingly well written book, I would still recommend it for the novelty of being in the rational romance genre. However, this book is genuinely well written, with rational characters and tension that realistically flows from the worldbuilding set up by the authors. I enthusiastically recommend this to anyone interested in either rational fiction or vampire romance.

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Review: Octo

OCTO by Z. Albert Bell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

While definitely not perfect, let me go ahead and recommend that you not google this story and just start reading blindly. Much of the value in this rationalist sci-fi horror story comes from not knowing what will happen next, so if you consider a 4 star review from me sufficient to entice you to read a rationalist sci-fi horror story, then do so now. Spoilers are ahead.

With that said, Zeno Albert Bell is in desperate need of a professional editor. It seems that every idea they’ve come up with has made it into the text, and I don’t just mean this in terms of word choice. Still, the ideas themselves are great, reminiscent at first of Hal Clement-style Needle aliens, but done in a rational hard-sci-fi way. The end result is (and the spoilers start to get heavy here, so stop reading this and go read the book if you’re going to at all) lovecraftiam kaiju hard sci-fi, and that is legitimately hard to do.

Perhaps the most significant aspect of the story is the inclusion of css+javascript to spruce up the text. Creatures who only understand some spoken words have other words of dialogue obscured in the text, although we as readers can still hover over the text or otherwise copy it in order to know, narrator style, what is said behind these obscured words. Later, anti-memetics come into play, causing the relevant text to change before your very eyes, as you read along. While some other authors use this as a way to permanently change text, messing with what was previously written as a kind of mind fuck, Bell is kind enough to not use cookies, and they allow readers easy access to replay potentially missed material just by refreshing and starting from the top of the page again. While these effects aren’t what I’d call accessible, I nevertheless appreciate them for those of us capable of seeing it; they're cute effects that are done quite well. It’s also foreshadowed appropriately without spoiling; early chapters include vibrating text for explosions or flashing text for warning readouts. This prepares the reader for more advanced text-based shenanigans later without spoiling just how significant those textual changes will end up becoming. Hopefully the text modifications that occur throughout the story are sufficient to train the reader to be able to handle the final chapter, which perhaps requires a bit more patience than some readers may give it.

Octo is not my favorite story, but its level of uniqueness and excellent presentation make up for the authors seeming unwillingness to edit the story into something half as long with a much tighter narrative arc, with the end result being a hearty recommendation from me. But I may be being too hasty: it's not entirely clear to me, but there is the distinct possibility that the author Bell is trying to make a meta narrative here: the protagonist’s view on patience may be a commentary on the readers' views on patience. Without getting too spoilery, the protagonist is willing to wait, but the text itself does not: as you read at the top of your screen, you start to notice text moving lower down, where you haven't gotten to yet. Later in the book, you start to notice that text is disappearing, or moving away from you, or changing before your very eyes. There starts to be a race between your ability to read and the text's ability to change. Bell is careful to allow you to reset if you refresh the page, so you never really miss out on anything, but there's clearly something going on with rewarding impatient readers more and more — until the final couple of chapters, when everything flips, and suddenly you start to miss out on text if you go too fast. The final chapter really underlines this: after reading, you have to wait several moments if you want to see the last parts of the book.

I'm fascinated by the idea that the connections between what the text itself rewards readers for doing has such consonance with what the protagonist clearly prefers. The points of views of humans are so fast in comparison, and when you get the point of view of a feline, you can just feel the irritation of wanting to go even faster. These points of view at the character level match that of the trained reader, and this makes the alienness of the protagonist even more stark.

And this is why I'm not quite sure of what I said earlier about the author needing a professional editor. This theme of patience — of rushing and not rushing and being rewarded at different times for different things while the characters themselves see reality at different rates — this is echoed and subverted continuously at the literary level by the author including unkilled darlings that the reader dare not fast forward through. I'm not going to claim that this is necessarily intentional; as Plato pointed out in The Republic, many poets will write poetry that has qualities the authors themselves do not always see. But regardless of its intentionality, there is a direct parallel between the unlocking of the library and the written inclusion of scenes that can’t be skipped. The animal scenes are great — be sure to hover over every “meow” — but their inclusion doesn’t have a payoff in future chapters. In any other book, this content would be cut. As great as these ideas are, any author would cut them and put them into a different short story, rather than keep them in Octo. The fact that this author does not cut them is what gives me pause. Is this intentional? Are we including fun and well written chapters that really should be cut on purpose? Is this a commentary on patience, making the reader deliberately have to wait?

I don't know. Maybe the author is just a beginning author and doesn't realize that you can cut great ideas like this and incorporate them into their own short stories, separate from this book. Maybe they have yet to realize that great writing requires major amounts of cutting. But maybe the author is playing a level above me, and these chapters are here on purpose to show you what it means for the protagonist to be okay with waiting. This story has a lot to do with alien thinking, and this might be yet another way to make the reader feel like they are reading about an alien. Seeing events from the points of view of a canine or feline feels alien. That the cat wants to rush through the situation, wants you to skip text and dialogue that you can, if you slow down, also read, has a distinctly alien feel. And that the entire sequence is just dressing, a side story, not relevant to the ongoing plot, feels even more alien still. Maybe I shouldn't give the author credit for this, but including sub-par editorial parts felt almost right to me. It was irritating, but they were well written and entertaining. It felt like reading small short stories occasionally right in the middle of the book. It felt appropriately alien.

With that said, the pacing and narrative structure was terrible due their inclusion. The writing goes through successive sections that are fast and slow, with no regard to what the narrative arc demands. If a movie were made this way, people would walk out. As it is, I imagine most readers may opt out. But if you struggle through — if you are okay with seeing an action scene pause mid-scene while you watch a short entertaining commercial before the action resumes — then you will enjoy Octo. It genuinely puts you into a place where you can start to appreciate something so incomprehensibly alien.

I also want to give a shout-out to that great ending. The IRL aliens take pity and expend resources on letting the instanced beings play out their story, but it’s not at all clear whether the simulation will do anything to help them solve their library problems. I personally read it as a tragedy: this simulation won’t have the humans attack the library, and so can’t possibly show how the humans in the real world destroyed it — but I can also see how someone else might think that the lateral thinking nature of how upraised humans think might be sufficient to help solve the problem of fixing the library without the simulation ever giving rise to the specific acts that humans used the first time around. Either way, the ending is great, because we don’t care: the story follows the protagonists of the simulation, reminding us of who we the readers should truly be concerned with.

I eagerly look forward to Z Albert Bell's next project. Just, please, Bell, if you're reading this: do consider using an editor to help you parse your overly creative brain’s ideas down to what is needed for the story’s own purposes. You can always use the cut ideas in even more stories, you know!

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Review: Worth the Candle

Worth the Candle by cthulhuraejepsen
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Writing reviews can be quite difficult. I serve three masters: the friend or stranger looking up this review on GoodReads to see if they should read this massive book; the googler who finds this entry on my blog because they want to read more about this great book that they've just finished; and future me, who wants to remember and keep track of some of the better books that present/past me reads.

So, in the spirit of the metafictional story Worth the Candle, I'll take each of these in order.

Alexander Wales' epic is both the greatest Isekai novel and the greatest LitRPG novel I have ever read. Juniper is rudely transported in media res from school to a strange world of magic and soft fantasy in the opening lines, and his subsequent adventures in the plane of Aerb plays out like a tabletop role-playing game, complete with HP, skills, and leveling up. Juniper is young, but has a passing understanding of rational-adjacent tropes, mostly because his childhood friend was a fan of learning about rationality online (as much as a teenager could). This means that the narrator, Juniper, is able to talk lightly about rationality using rationality language, even when it's clear that it's just a teenage-level understanding of the tropes. This results in a highly exciting adventure with believably flawed characters who try to do their best in the situation they find themselves in. The novel works at the level of the action, at the level of the narration, and at the metafictional level of the author, Alexander Wales, who writes in such a way that we get to see glimpses of what seem to be highly creative nonfictional elements behind the structure of the text.

Worth the Candle is long — very long — but if you're comfortable with reading a sprawling epic that weaves LitRPG with Isekai with metafiction all in the genre of Rational Fiction, then I highly recommend that you read this book.

However, despite my five star rating, I do have several complaints about the book. (It would be hard not to, given its epic length.) What follows from here are spoilers, so if you haven't read Worth the Candle yet, go do that first.

Jesus Christ, Wales. I don't know how much of the text came from working out your personal issues, but Gods damn I hope it helped to write through this story. It's unclear just how much the Dungeon Master in the story should be identified with Wales the author (do you really have a Dice Girls shirt?), but, to the extent that this is played straight, I honestly hope writing this book has been therapeutic.

I get that everyone has their own sex hangups. Maybe it's difficult for me to relate because I'm asexual, but the way that the DM kept pushing things made me feel uncomfortable. Yet this is on purpose; canonically, the author himself seems to be uncomfortable with his own desires of what to put on paper here, which makes for an extremely interesting expression of cognitive dissonance that we can see enacted diegetically.

What I liked most (and what I think the author himself may have liked most) was the setting. Aerb is such a mismatch of all kinds of weird rpg tropes, but it honestly feels like everything ties together well. We read about dangled threads early on which, when later explored, appear to fit in the world properly. Not seamlessly, of course, but that's on purpose: Aerb itself is not seamless, which is itself a plot point. I am disappointed that more of the threads weren't explored, but I wonder if here, too, that is intended: that these aspects only get fleshed out if the text needs them to be, yet ensures that they retain continuity with the whole nevertheless. This says something important, I think, about the ending: that Juniper will not actually get to go on. The life breathed into Juniper's existence, in the end, only happens when we (Thargox?) read it. This is not what the DM claims. It's unclear to me if the intended reading by the author is that the DM is honest here, or if we are supposed to notice that point of view does really matter. (I think it's the latter, but there's additional evidence of the former: the multiple Dahlia copies that we never see, the offscreen fleshsmith fight, and the timeskip post-Fel Seed all point to the diegetic characters experiencing events not in the POV.)

The ending feels rushed. A four year work like this must be hard on the author; I'm sure burnout was a real threat. But when so many threads started getting dropped, I at first blamed the author. Later, I saw that it was partially justified in-story, but even later that started to feel like lampshading to me. Yes, it made sense to skip things, and there were plot-relevant reasons for doing so, but also this is a fig leaf, created so that the author could rush through parts that (IMO) did not deserve to be rushed through.

If I were Wales' editor, there are several parts I would point out as needing additional attention. Some are minor, like both devil Fenn and Grakhuil keeping an arrow displayed in their home. Why the unnecessary callback here? It seems like it is because the weaker version occurred first, then the author decided not to stray from using the stronger version later since it made sense that that's what Fenn would do. If so, then this is a pure drawback of writing serial fiction, and should ideally be fixed. And some issues are major, like deviating from established point of view rules for no good reason. The vast majority of the story is told from Juniper's POV, even to the point where the author himself laments from not being able to write from Larkspur's POV, making him a weaker villain. When we occasionally do get the POV of non-Juniper characters, it always seems to be in the form of a letter than Juniper reads, or a narrator's explicit retelling from after the fact. And yet, at one point, we start to see several scenes (and chapters) from someone other than Juniper, and it's never explained why. Did the author forget? Was it a mistake that wasn't fixed because the author is committed to serial writing? Or perhaps was this another piece of evidence aimed at showing the ending would be as the DM claimed it would be?

I enjoyed the story immensely, even if I did think the harem concept was cringey. I think the author thinks it is cringey, too, which is why I think I'm okay with it. I really liked the exploration of unexpected rape; it felt real to the characters, even if it meant that Bethel got relegated to the background where we couldn't see her progress as much as I would have liked. But most of all I enjoyed the weird combination of explained and unexplained that caused me to tag this book on GoodReads as both hard fantasy and soft fantasy. Alexander Wales is an awesome worldbuilder, just like the DM, even more than he is an awesome narrator, just like the diegetic narrator. Now if only he were willing to write non-serially so we could get some of these amazing texts edited!

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Review: Two Arms and a Head

Two Arms and a Head: The Death of a Newly Paraplegic Philosopher by Clayton Atreus
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Two days ago, I held Jasper in my arms as he died. My grief at his sudden death has overwhelmed me, and I've struggled to find ways to deal with it.

My latest method, apparently, has been to read this book-length suicide note by Clayton Atreus. I wouldn't say that it has helped much with my reaction to Jasper's passing, but I did find Two Arms and a Head compelling reading. Atreus became paraplegic in a tragic accident, and he ultimately disvalued the resulting life afterward so significantly that he committed suicide.

I doubt that I would have gotten along with Atreus, had I met him in his prime. His experience of life differs greatly from mine, and, to be quite honest, feels a bit shallow. But he is correct when he says that we are our own arbiters of our own value, and the fact that he values differently than I is not a good reason to dismiss his point of view.

Atreus gives a defense of his sanity in choosing to die prematurely, explaining his disagreements with other persons with a similar disability. He provides a cogent argument, even if in the process of doing so he shows just how different his values are from what I would consider the norm. Several times, he makes claims that I completely disagree with; I would certainly, for example, live 25 years in what he called a "head garden", as a full quadriplegic, rather than die immediately, and perhaps I fall prey to the same typical mind fallacy as he does when I say that I believe there are many who would agree with me rather than with him about this. Nevertheless, these disagreements are ultimately ones of personal value, and they do not harm the greater argument that he makes in his suicide note.

His disrespect for the larger community of activists with disabilities like his is tough to read. Rather than just argue against them, he uses derogatory terms for them that I find particularly distasteful. But, in a way, I almost want to forgive him for this, as from his perspective their actions certainly seem to have caused him a lot of unnecessary pain.

It's hard rating a text like this so highly. I can't stress how much I doubt I would have gotten along with someone as shallow as he in his prime. I find it utterly surprising that he can't even admit the possibility that people might not be lying when they say that they honestly can find life fulfilling and meaningful even with a major disability. I wonder if he would have been receptive to the argument that future humans might very well (in a post-singularity existence, for example) have access to abilities and experiences that we cannot currently imagine. Compared to these future specimens, our most thriving exemplars of humanity might be considered severely disabled. Yet we thrive nevertheless! And so could he, if he allowed himself to enjoy other things.

Then again, I imagine Atreus replying: that would not be me. And I suppose he'd be right, as he appears to define himself in just such a way that would make him impervious to this kind of argument. How convenient for him.

Jasper's death a few days ago was done as a form of euthanasia. The doctor put him to sleep, then stopped his heart. My heart broke in the process, too. Maybe it wasn't the best idea to seek out an essay that argues, in part, for allowing euthanasia of this kind. It hasn't helped me in any real way. But reading Atreus' words did help me to connect with Clayton Atreus, in an odd way, at least for the few hours that his text had me spellbound.

If you're interested in also connecting with him, I recommend the book. It's available in full at 2arms1head.com. Atreus is smart, writes well, is kind of an asshole, and he lacks sufficient epistemic humility. But his suicide note is worth reading, even if it uses unnecessary derogatory terms in several places. I'm going to go ahead and give him a break on that, given the fact that he's doing it while in the process of preparing to end his own life.

Note: While Two Arms and a Head is recommended, I didn't bother reading his contemporary account of the accident, which he also posted on forums as it happened here: advrider.com/f/threads/seattle-to-arg...

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Review: Ibyabek

Ibyabek by Hannah Blume
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

There's a rich history of good science fiction that takes contemporary political issues and gives them the trappings of a science fiction setting. It can be helpful for readers to see real-world events reflected in sci-fi, to better understand and identify with the characters involved.

Ibyabek follows in this tradition, showcasing the drama of what we might imagine a space-version of North Korea might look like through the eyes of a young boy trapped within its system. I'm not sure it succeeds at helping readers to identify any more strongly with its real-world analogues, but it definitely does an excellent job of telling a compelling tale.

While Ibyabek does include intrigue, with spies and ambassadors, and weaponry so powerful that it can melt a planet's surface to little more than glowing lava, it does all this solely in the background of a much more immediate story of romance as told by Kyeo, a relatively naive but narratively satisfying character who has lived his entire life on a totalitarian world.

In this short story, we follow Kyeo from his perspective as he learns, grows, and heals. The larger direction the story goes in is somewhat predictable, being so analogous to the real-world equivalent of North Korea for the fictional world of Ibyabek, but the details were still surprising and enjoyable to experience alongside Kyeo. Even the background details were pleasurable to go through; the author Alicorn successfully integrated reasonable descriptions of economics, politics, and the social side of futuristic technology into the background of this story, all told from the perspective of someone who has a very different worldview from us as readers. It's not quite a Flowers for Algernon-level difference between the reader and the protagonist in terms of how they see the world, but this story made the much more difficult attempt to truly give rational depictions of society and culture through that minimal viewpoint, and I'd say that, for the most part, the author succeeded.

I do have a few qualms with the story. There are parts that, if I were Alicorn's editor, I'd have them reconsider entirely. But that goes into spoiler territory, so if you haven't yet read this short story yet, stop reading this review and add it to your reading list. I heartily recommend it, especially given how fast a read it is.

If you're still here, then be forewarned: the rest of this review is spoilery.

There are two big objections I have to the story, and both are so large that I don't think they are fixable without significant effort. First: Alicorn has successfully got a story started where the point of view character has a completely different way of looking at things. This is great! When Sarham is introduced, they are reserved in what they say, which is also great. It allows us to learn things from what is deliberately not said, even when Kyeo doesn't. But then, when Sarham returns later in the story, he is allowed to speak freely -- and it turns out that he's highly competent. There isn't anything wrong with including such a character in most stories, but in this particular story we already have this great tension between what we as readers have to figure out and what Kyeo is saying to himself. Yet when Sarham is free to speak later on, he just tells us things that we no longer have to figure out on our own. I realize that reworking Sarham to be less intelligent would completely change the story, and it would no longer be the story that Alicorn wanted to write here, but I find myself wishing that I could read an alternate story that keeps that same divide between the protagonist's POV and the reader's POV all the way to the ending. The latter part of the story lost that special feeling of having to puzzle things out that the earlier parts held.

Second: Reading Sarham's account felt too much like telling instead of showing. I realize that this partially the point: we are trying to go back and see things from Sarham's point of view, after all. But there had been a build up of suspense on what Sarham might have written about, and when we finally get to the point where it is read, it is just... read. Sarham's writing is...explanative. I realize this is on purpose; it's how this Sarham would write. But it slowed the action to a crawl during the book portions. Narratively, it might have been better to show this in a different way, or to not show it at all. In a movie, I can imagine them switching to a flashback from a different character's perspective. In a short story, though, I'm not sure what would have worked better. All I know is that I had a feeling of tension that gripped me throughout the buildup before the book section, and all that tension dropped while I read Sarham's actual text.

I also was not entirely happy with the ending. I like the idea of the specific ending line and its callback to Kyeo's earlier fears, but the six paragraph section felt too rushed to me. Too much happened too quickly. At the end of the previous section, Kyeo was still the most recent arrival to Crane Mountain. In the final section, new arrivals appear, he got used to making plans, he started getting a stipend, he passed a test, and he moved out. This is several months worth of events described n only a few short paragraphs. While I do think the ending line is great, and the line necessitates him being in his new place, the speedup from the previous section was not at all expected and felt too rushed to me. The first three paragraphs of this section, in retrospect, depicts events over the course of months, but as you are reading it for the first time, you can't know this until you get to the line where he passes his "integration test", which you know must be months later. As a result, I had to stop, reinterpret the previous three paragraphs as a big time skip, and then continue to the ending. I would have instead appreciated a line like: "As the months passed, Kyeo met the new people coming in...". While not great, something like this would key in a first time reader to realizing that the events of the next few paragraphs are occurring at a much different pace than the preceding sections. I think that would help with making the steps toward the final line be a little more smooth.

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Review: The Rise and Fall of the Dark Lord Sassaflash

The Rise and Fall of the Dark Lord Sassaflash by Dromicosuchus
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

In the world of My Little Pony, the Dark Lord Sassaflash is a necromancer with ambition. But to accomplish her great tasks, she needs not only her apprentice, Sweetie Belle, but also a dedicated (not too intelligent) minion who can do her bidding. But who would be willing to take on such a job?

This fanfiction take on My Little Pony has a Lovecraftian aesthetic, yet it fits in perfectly with the show's canon. The Dark Lord Sassaflash wants to take over the world, but she thinks about doing so in just the way you might expect a denizen of the MLP universe to, and all the characters stay in character throughout the story. These are the kinds of fanfiction that I find most impressive — the author Dromicosuchus has successfully crafted a story that not only uses characters from the universe but has done so without taking you out of that universe, all while adding significant plot-relevant aspects to the larger mythos.

I came in expecting a short rationalist-style fanfic; I left having enjoyed a rare treat. I give it five stars not because it is a grand adventure that everyone must read, but because it sets out to be a rational Lovecraftian-style story set in the MLP universe, and it succeeded perfectly. Maybe I wouldn't recommend this to everyone, but only because you'd need to want to read MLP fanfiction and have interest in the Cthulu mythos to really properly enjoy this. Very well done, Dromicosuchus. I only wish I could see a sequel to this one day.

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Review: Permutation City

Permutation City by Greg Egan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I see a lot of myself in this book.

(Light spoilers follow; I think you can read this review and still enjoy the book, but if you want to go in blind, don't read this review.)

I've never killed a person, but, if I had, I wonder if I would act in a similarly perverse way as one of the characters in this book.

A character ends up breaking their life apart by rigid dividing lines, considering each section to be independent.

Dust theory is horrifying to contemplate, and it seems to be contradicted in reality by the arrow of time, but it otherwise fits so well with many assumptions I have about consciousness.

The story grips me not just because it fascinates me but because it hits upon some of the themes in my own life that nag at me from time to time.

I've never killed a person (that I know of), but, like most people, I have regrets from past lives that still affect me today.

A character ends up breaking their life apart by rigid dividing lines, as though past moments were more like past lives than an earlier self.

Dust theory is fascinating to contemplate, with threads of thoughts merging and dividing in ways that seem to not be contradicted by anything we've observed in reality.

The story grips me.

(The light spoilers above shouldn't scare you away from reading the book, and this review might even make more sense after you read the text.)

I see that the author did a great job with this book. I give it five out of five stars.

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Review: The Erogamer

The Erogamer by Groon the Walker
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Let's get the obvious stuff out of the way.

First, this is porn; if you aren't okay with reading porn, then you won't be able to enjoy this story. Yet I'm asexual, I don't generally read that much pornography, and while many of the porn scenes in The Erogamer did squick me out, I'm still giving the book 4 out of 5 stars overall.

Second, I tagged this book as both hard and soft fantasy. Yes, this seems to be impossible for me to honestly do on its face. But I would maintain that both tags are warranted, and I honestly like the combination. (You'll understand after you read it.)

Third, this is not really a traditionally written book. It's written as a series of posts on a forum, and in between each post you can see other real-world readers like you talking about the story. The author holds polls, including ones where readers can write-in their own options, and then the next part of the story will respect those votes. Apparently this is an actual genre that I don't have much experience with; regardless, I am convinced without even doing more than just skimming others in this genre that The Erogamer may very well be the best written story in its genre. I know it seems that I can't possibly be so sure of this without being more familiar with "questing" stories, and yet here I am, publicly maintaining just that, and feeling assured that if you read The Erogamer too, you may very well come to agree with my assertion.

The Erogamer is about a young protagonist girl who finds herself suddenly as a character in an erotic video game. She's still the same person, in the same house she grew up in, except now she can see a status screen at will, and her quests inevitably push her toward sex scenes where she gains experience and can level up. Being genre-savvy, she tries to munchkin her way through things, except she also has very human flaws that cause her to only stumble through at first. Without spoiling anything major, I will say that when she finally reaches the point where she can really start minmaxing, she suddenly finds that the eroge itself is also genre-savvy, and its goals aren't the same as hers.

I don't want to give away too much here, as the surprises you encounter when reading this story are all worth experiencing this on your own. Suffice it to say that if you have an interest in philosophy, or at least are into rationality (any story that includes a pun on the "ominous agreement theorem" gets bonus points from me), then so long as you're okay with reading porn, you may very well get as into this story as I have.

With that said, I have a couple of spoiler-lite things to say. If you want to go in blind, stop reading this review and just get started on The Erogamer yourself.

The first spoiler-lite thing I should mention is that it may be worthwhile for you to not only read the story posts that the author, Groon the Walker, posts on the thread, but also to read the thread posts written by others. None of them is an alt of the author; that would be against forum rules. Yet the story itself is dependent not just on the author writing the main story, but also the discussion generated by the readers as each new post goes up. At the time of writing this review, the story is not yet finished; ordinarily I would recommend that new readers wait until it is finished. But because this story revolves so much upon audience participation, I actually think it would be more worthwhile to start reading now.

The second spoiler-lite thing I want to mention is something that I'm a little uncomfortable about: trigger-warning-adjacent stuff. Obviously, explicit sex is in the story. As is heavily nonconsensual stuff, torture scenes, body negativity, etc. We all know that trigger warnings should occur first, before anyone reads the text, which the author does: certain sections of the story are actually only visible if you click after reading a trigger warning for the scene within. But I'm writing the following in a spoiler-lite section because I have something _meta_ to say about the trigger warnings.

There's some pretty bad ethical ideas presented in this story. The body negativity is especially bad. And it's not just written so that a character has bad ideas on body positivity, but also the narrator's voice and ways of describing scenes is really bad about body positivity. You might think that this means the author thus has bad views on it, and that the story is promoting something bad. But (and I really don't want to spoil too much here, so I do recommend you read the story before reading this full review) I believe that this is actually a story beat. There are some weird meta-things going on in this story that go pretty deep into metaphysics and other philosophy, and some of those things happen due to the frisson occuring when what the reader (aka YOU) experiences a dissonance with what you're reading (aka the TEXT). This gets deeper when you start to consider that what the author writes depends on what the readers vote on in polls, including write-in options. So YOU affect the TEXT which sometimes disagrees with you in a way that produces frisson.

For example, a character at one point describes a person as getting "more beautiful" and does gives as evidence that her breasts are bigger. At first you may think this is just that character's view, but it doesn't get challenged and then the story itself then completely legitimizes it by having the BOD stat of the video game positively correspond with breast size. Which kind of means that the author himself is legitimizing this point of view, by making the main system of the story they are writing have this be actualized. Yet at the same time, it becomes clear that this is _not_ what the author actually thinks is true, when you later see scenes outside the view of the main protagonist playing the erogame. The body negative view of equating larger breast sizes with having a better body is then shown to not being played straight, even though from the text itself at the time it looks quite a bit like the author is holding these views either explicitly or implicitly.

The same kind of thing happens when you see a character thinking that fat is bad. Followed by other characters thinking fat is bad. Followed by the world of the story itself thinking fat is bad. After reading all this, you the reader might then rush into a conclusion that the author himself is thinking fat is bad, and is actively pushing that view onto his readers. But I suspect that this is more of a modest-proposal-type situation than the author actually espousing those views. The point of the story is that you are being pushed further and further into situations that you get less and less comfortable with until you realize that the earlier things you just went along with in chapter one were also things that you should have felt uncomfortable about, too.

Now I realize that not everyone can handle this kind of fiction. Maybe you can't handle reading about rape. But even if you can, can you handle characters arguing intelligently (and perhaps somewhat convincingly) that some forms of rape are actually good? Maybe you're okay with that, too, but then do you continue to be okay with it when the description turns especially graphic? Maybe you're okay with even that, but then what about when you reach the end of one of the author's posts and see the next post by a reader who apparently viciously enjoyed reading that description? You _will_ reach a point where you feel uncomfortable in this story, especially when you truly realize that the story itself is propelled by the readers voting on what happens next in the story. It is the desires of those reading that cause the story itself to be written as it is. You cannot just scapegoat the author, because YOU are also the author. Even if you don't post in the forum thread, you _could_. Your non-participation makes the votes of those you disagree with even stronger. YOU are a part of this story in a way that you probably won't realize until _after_ you read the story yourself.

This is not to say that the author is blameless; Groon the Walker has cleverly taken a page from how John Marshall dealt with Marbury vs. Madison, granting himself power by negating votes in ways that follow from the rules of the 'questing' genre itself, acting like an evil genie monkey's-paw-style.

And there do seem to be some legitimate blind spots in the ethics of the author that bother me, though they aren't dealbreakers. He uses the word "harem" positively; I'm polyamorous, and I realize that this is legitimately the name of a specific eroge genre, but that word has too many negative connotations in today's non-eroge world to be acceptable to an outside audience (like the non-protagonists' world in The Erogamer). (This is unacceptable in the same way that the n-word isn't acceptable in a story about non-blacks participating in black culture by appropriating that word, but to a much lesser degree.) And while there is a difference between rape-with-physical-force and rape-where-the-rapist-was-using-deceit, that difference might not include a local human-scope-comparable moral difference in the same way that destroying just the Milky Way isn’t locally human-scope-comparably good compared to destroying the Virgo Supercluster. (This will make more sense after having read the text.) These are not modest-proposal-style disconnects. They seem to genuinely be a difference between how I and how Groon view the world.

Finally, the biggest issue I have is one of shame. This is a major negative trait of the protagonist that MUST be resolved by the end of this story or else it will feel unsatisfying to me. In a pretend world where a character can jump higher than physics might otherwise dictate, you can have characters be fat and/or old and yet have no drawbacks. If you can erase the health drawbacks, the speed drawbacks, the endurance drawbacks, etc., then the only reason left to look down on them is to say that they aren't desirable aesthetically. But if an erogame wants variety among hair color, freckles, race, etc., shouldn't it also include variety among body sizes and ages? This is a lesson that the protagonist should be made to learn, and so far I see only the smallest steps toward learning that type of lesson in-story.

However, even if these small flaws don't get resolved, I'll still maintain that this is among the best books I've ever read and it is very likely to be near the best in its own 'questing' genre. If I can enjoy The Fountainhead and Ender's Game despite objectivism and gay-bashing being present within them, then I can enjoy The Erogamer despite it taking a few ethical positions that I'm not okay with in real life.

Some of the math systems aren't that great, and if I were an editor, I'd suggest several changes before recommending its publication, but overall I've found The Erogamer to be an excellent example of philosophical fiction that anyone into philosophy or rationality should at least consider reading. It's the best sex-oriented fiction I've read. It’s the best choose-your-own-adventure style story I’ve ever read. It’s among the best meta-meta-stories I’ve ever read. It’s among the best weird metaphysics stories I’ve ever read. And while I disagree with the philosophies of many of the characters, the author, and even the reader-voters, I truly enjoyed the various philosophies described within. I also appreciated the unexpected ace-representation in an eroge story.

Very well done.

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Review: Nyssa in the Realm of Possibility

Nyssa in the Realm of Possibility by Alicorn
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

You might at first expect that a rational retelling of Norton Justen's The Phantom Tollbooth would require at least that the reader be familiar with the source material. But just such an unwarranted assumption is exactly the kind of thing that this fantasy tale may cause you to reconsider.

Nyssa is a young girl who doesn't quite grasp what knowledge truly is, but who is already at the level of being able to guess her teachers' passwords. By walking through a portal into the Realm of Possibility, she goes on an adventure Wonderland-style that takes her on a journey full of references and lessons common in the rationality community. Whether it's the robin who blocks her hansom to lecture on why she's really doing what she's doing, or her half-hour friend Pomodoro who yells with a voice like an alarm bell whenever she wastes too much time, there's always something around the corner that will hearken back to the kinds of things that rationalists might find generally amusing.

Yet this is not just a case of the author making a reference-laden story that doesn't actually speak to the plot. You won't find Cory Doctorow-style references that serve just to make the reader feel good if they get the hidden reference. Yet you also won't find deep conceptually important references in the style of James Joyce that are the actual story behind the surface level text. Instead, the references that Alicorn uses in Nyssa in the Realm of Possibility are the story itself. Nyssa learns to like real learning through seeing the examples of each reference used in the story themselves. It's not just a reference to Flow; the Flow literally propels her forward. It's not just a reference to akrasia; the demon Akrasia literally shows her power by making Nyssa overcome her in the story. This is a story full of references, yes, but the references are a part of the story itself, and thus integral to the plot.

I was enamored by Nyssa in the Realm of Possibility, even though I had never read nor even heard of The Phantom Tollbooth before reading. Alicorn has done an exemplary job of bringing the reader into the world she created without needing any foreknowledge of the source text nor even (I think) the rationality concepts that she puts on display throughout the story.

I would heartily recommend this relatively short story to both children and adults, so long as they are receptive to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland-style lessons on how (and why) we might think better. This is not the best "go learning!" book I've read (that title still remains with Hal Clement's Mission of Gravity), but it is definitely within the top few. Thank you, Alicorn, for writing such an entertaining and enlightening short story.

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Review: Unsong

Unsong by Scott Alexander

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Imagine that Judaism is actually true, and this becomes glaringly obvious when the Apollo mission bumps into the firmament and miracles start happening across the world.

Author Scott Alexander takes us on a wild ride in this alternate-history-esque story, filled with puns galore and references to all the kinds of things that people in the effective altruism and/or rationality space care about. While the story is not an example of rationalist fiction, people who like rational fiction will probably really like this novel.

Some of the revelations in the book are especially excellent, and the philosophical positions portrayed as truth in this world make for excellent world-building. Without spoiling anything, the position taken on the problem of evil is exceedingly close to my actual favorite response IRL (minus p-zombies for fairness reasons); and the various descriptions of what the cognates of our real-world people are in this fictional universe is beyond compelling.

The book doesn't take itself too seriously, preferring to set up puns constantly, but while that would be annoying in other books because other authors would be sacrificing the story to make those puns, Alexander actually weaves these puns as actual story points. Kabbalah is real here, so knowing how to make links between things by using their names and connections to other things is a real part of this book's world. Chapters that at first may seem to only be written for the sake of a pun are thus revealed to be information that legitimately propels the story forward. I've never read another book that did such a good job with this.

I recommend this book to anyone who pattern matches to any two of the following:
you like puns;
you're fascinated by sephirot/kabbalah/jewish mysticism;
you like rational fantasy, but are okay with reading something rational-adjacent;
you are interested in fiction that has effective altruism as a plot device; or
you already read Scott Alexander's excellent fiction and/or non-fiction.

A word of warning: Alexander has written some great nonfiction short stories, and while none of them are a part of this book, it would be better to read Unsong first, and only then read his short fiction. Usually when I'm recommending a new author to someone, I tell them to read a short story first to see if they like the author's style, but Alexander has a tendency to re-use great ideas. So things that should come as big surprises at various points in Unsong will be spoiled if you read his other fiction (and sometimes even his nonfiction!), some of which have the same surprise as their climax. So if you are new to this author, read Unsong first. Then you can look at his other works, almost all of which I'd consider excellent as well.



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Review: Mother of Learning

Mother of Learning by Nobody103

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Hard sci-fi pioneer Hal Clement once said that science fiction is all about the setting. Mother of Learning is fantasy, but it really takes this idea to heart.

Mother of Learning has excellent worldbuilding in terms of how things work. Everything feels interconnected in ways that most fantasy authors fail. There are some notable issues, though: the author has a tendency to use occasional metaphors that don't make sense in this setting, some characters seem to be sexist and homophobic for no real reason. (In a fantasy setting where females are equally good at magic, it makes no sense that 1950s era ideas about females would be in _any_ character, and what is the point in making any characters anti-gay when this is a brand-new world that doesn't require that kind of prejudice? (If prejudice is desired, make a new prejudice! It's fantasy, after all, and the anti-gay sentiment was never a story beat.) (Thankfully these anti-gay/anti-female sentiments only occur four times in the story and could easily be removed.))

While these seem like strong objections to the story, and they definitely took me out of the story when they occured, they only happened four times in a story so long that, if the story were published, they would only appear less than once in each book of the series. The author has already said that they intend to go back and fix these issues (and the many typos throughout the story), so I do think that these problems will be fixed before too much longer. Ultimately, I am easily able to overlook these issues in favor of the excellent rational story and awesome worldbuilding. This is easily my favorite read in 2020 so far and has earned a place in the top ten rationality stories I have ever read.

If I had to complain about something that can't easily be fixed, it would be the lack of diversity of thought among major characters. If you blacked out the name of who is speaking, there would be several points where dialogue could be coming from any of a number of characters. But Hal Clement had the exact same problem: his dialogue was atrocious, and yet he was able to write some of the best hard scifi stories anyway just from worldbuilding alone, and the same is true here for Mother of Learning. Its flaws do not take away from the fact that this is a great story that I would recommend to anyone interested in rational fiction or hard fantasy.



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Review: Judge on a Boat

Judge on a Boat by Alan Manuel K. Gloria
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Historically, science fiction has been big on setting. Characters and dialog are important, too — otherwise it's unlikely to be well written — but the key signifier of science fiction is that setting is much more important. Sci-fi is all about transporting you to a wondrous place and making you believe that you are there. All too often this means that authors of sci-fi will spend way more time on setting than authors of other genres. Think Hal Clement going pages upon pages about gravitational minutiae in A Mission of Gravity; or Asimov insisting on describing at length complex social structures in his Foundation series. These are great stories, and they are what makes good sci-fi so memorable to me. But Gloria bucks this trend beautifully in Judge on a Boat.

Judge on a Boat is undeniably sci-fi, but instead of describing a wondrous place as its setting, Gloria instead describes a world where rationality already won. It is a vision of the future that's as alien as, well, Alien, yet it isn't the description of space travel and drop pods that makes this sci-fi. It's the casual description of LessWrong-esque ideas from the rationalist community that makes this short text stand out. Reading this transports me into a world that is alien by virtue of its ideas, rather than by its technology.

At heart, Judge on a Boat is a mystery novel. Clues are interspersed within and commented on throughout. But, again, it stands out because the mystery itself doesn't adhere to common mystery tropes — and this is explicitly pointed out in-universe, so that the reader can fairly understand the rules of the game and play along, trying to solve the mystery before the end.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, and I highly recommend it to anyone well-versed with the rationality community. However, the density of jargon is such that if you aren't already at least loosely acquainted with these ideas, then going through this text will be a slog. I hesitate to make the comparison, but imagine reading Joyce's Ulysses without having first read the classics. It would be impossible to enjoy, because at nearly every step you'd need to look in the margin for notes, or, in the case of this text, you'd need to refer to the Sequences.

The bottom line: if you don't know what the Sequences are, then you probably won't enjoy this book. It's just not written for you. But if you are aware of the rationalist community (even if you don't self-identify in that group), then this short mystery novel is a great way to spend a few hours of fun. For the correct audience, it deserves this 5 star rating (and, more impressively, was so good that it got me to avoid my akrasia and post a review on goodreads for the first time in several years).

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Review: Dark Lord's Answer

Dark Lord's Answer by Eliezer Yudkowsky
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The Dark Lord will answer whatever question you most need answered, but the answer you receive might not appear good in itself. The Dark Lord's Answer will always be instrumentally good, but your conscience may cause you to hesitate before following through with the implementation.

Yudkowsky does an excellent job of setting up a fascinating story here, but he fails at following through. The genre is rational fiction, but good rational fiction should not be as explainy as this is. At times, the text just isn't light enough, and a reader who isn't already familiar with economics might consider the book too preachy. I'm reminded of bad educational video games from the 1990s; it's a lesson wrapped up in a shell of entertainment -- except it's not entertaining if you don't want to learn the material.

If you are already moderately knowledgable about economics, then this is an interesting read. The setting is great; the characters are great; the way the characters solve problems is great. But after finishing the too short text, all I can think about is how I wanted the story to be more about the Dark Lord, and less about the intricacies of the main problem that the Dark Lord solved in the book.

If you like rational fiction, read this book. It's short and it has great ideas that make it worthwhile. If you already know some economics, then you won't get too put out by the explainy sections, which is a bonus.

But if you don't know economics, then this book will feel as preachy as Ayn Rand, but without the length nor inanity. If you haven't read rational fiction before, then this is not a good starting point. Try The Sword of Good by the same author instead.

I give it three stars because I liked it more than most short books, but it's at the bottom of the barrel when it comes to rational fiction.

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Review: Pact

Pact by Wildbow
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In this world of magic, most battles between practicioners are not won by strength of magic alone, but by rule-following, whether it is to gain the favor of a god that will allow you to perform some great feat; to gain the favor of the local spirits so that the things you want to happen become easier while the things you don't become harder; or to gain the favor of fellow practicioners, who may help or harm your ability to perform in any battle. But there is one group that stands apart: diabolists.

Diabolists call upon the power of demons to achieve their ends, but everything has its price. Deals with demons often have grave consequences, sometimes quite literally. When a practicioner battles a diabolist, the question is not who has more power nor who has gained more favor; rather, the question is: how badly does the diabolist want to win? Because if your desire to win is great enough, you can always enact one more pact with a demon strong enough to make you the victor.

I enjoyed J.C. McCrae's writing in Pact. He did an excellent job of creating a world of fantasy that isn't quite hard fantasy, but that nevertheless adheres to rules that are strongly hinted at. In several parts of the story, it becomes apparent that an observant reader could potentially figure out how the main characters would get out of situations by thinking hard enough about the hints included earlier in the story. This is not common with most fantasy stories, and I truly appreciate that Wildbow has written Pact in this way. Even so, I would not quite call this hard fantasy, mostly because many of the rules of how magic works in this world are only just specific enough to make the mysteries solvable and the drama sensible. Maybe we can say this in the hard-ish fantasy genre. It's rational fiction-adjacent.

If you like stories about deals with the devil, where wishes are granted a la The Monkey's Paw but you won't like how they come true, then Pact is definitely for you. The story defies conventions in ways that I can't say here without giving spoilers, so don't expect it to be like other fantasy stories in this vein, but this is to its benefit. When a character in Pact is shown to be holding the idiot ball, it either makes complete sense why that is, or you may find that things are not quite what they at first seem. For these reasons, I strongly recommend Pact to anyone interested in hard fantasy.

However, there are a few problems. The most glaring is the grammar and typographical issues, which isn't quite at the standards readers might be used to. There are several places where typos may temporarily take you out of the story, and there are two or three sections where Wildbow could really use an editor to change the pacing or cut a significant number of paragraphs that don't add enough to the flow of the story. But the story itself more than makes up for these small issues, and I truly do recommend the book to others regardless.

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Review: Crystal Society

Crystal Society by Max Harms
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I'm a sucker for hard scifi, so I went into this thinking I might like it. Yet even with that expectation, I was utterly surprised by just how good this book is. The author has not only created (1) an excellent setting that uses truly realistic scientific explanations that drive the workings of the world itself; and (2) an exciting plot with mystery, humor, and action that keeps me interested from start to finish; but also (3) characters that feel true-to-life in ways that most hard scifi authors just can't seem to achieve.

Every character feels distinct and alive, with their motivation not only clearly expressed, but always adhered to -- except in a few cases as plot points, and those cases work well. The setting is great; I love the vision of the future that the author has come up with. Small details like descriptions of new genres of music and the drift of the English language seem realistic, if a bit graphic. The best part of the setting is that it isn't just technology that has been extrapolated, but mores as well. I'm very happy to see characters that express feminist ideas, even while main characters remain flawed as a story point. But, surprisingly, I have yet to get to the best part of all.

More than anything else, what I enjoyed about this book was that the aliens are alien. In the first chapter, you begin to read about an artificial intelligence, and right away I was afraid that the book wouldn't be as hard scifi as I had heard, because scifi writers are notoriously bad at depicting realistic AI. But then I kept reading, and I realized that this author got AI right.

Most scifi authors anthropomorphize AIs. A few go to the other extreme and treat them as Lovecraftian ununderstandables. But this author has successfully trod the path between these two extremes that really and truly feels like something that could actually happen in reality. The AI is so well written that you might expect that that the author is an actual AI researcher.

Even though this is only book one in a trilogy, and I have yet to read either sequel (because they're not yet released), I nevertheless feel comfortable in saying that this is my current favorite book. Sure, I'm usually biased toward whatever I just finished reading, and sure, I really am a sucker for hard scifi, but this book goes above and beyond. This is not a Hal Clement story with great setting and science, but terrible dialogue. This is not a Cory Doctorow story with great extrapolations and epic scope, but terrible character motivation. No, this is a Max Harms story, and it has everything I could ask for. I not only award five stars, but also would recommend this to any adult reader with an interest in hard scifi.

(With that said, the book is not perfect. There is a point where the story changes style fairly abruptly. I liked both styles, but I can see where others might not like one or the other style. There are also parts of the text that seem to reference outside material just to reference outside material. Referencing obscure stuff is worthwhile when it serves a purpose, like with James Joyce in Ulysses, but when it is just used as a Robin Hanson-style signal to readers that the author knows about these trivia, and those trivia don't actually drive the plot, then it really should be cut, no matter how in-groupy the reference might make readers feel. There's also a single plot point that gets resolved in a way that feels narratively unsatisfying. For spoiler reasons, I won't mention which plot point I'm referencing, but it is unsatisfying enough that I am hoping the sequels will fix the issue. However, I should mention that overall this isn't a big deal, since the vast majority of plot points get resolved in a thoroughly satisfying way.)

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Review: A Girl Corrupted by the Internet is the Summoned Hero?!

A Girl Corrupted by the Internet is the Summoned Hero?! by Eliezer Yudkowsky
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The intersection of decision theory and sexual depravity is not my usual go-to place for light reading, but in this case the combination works beautifully.

Although the book is woefully short, the author has managed to set up a rational hard fantasy premise that successfully thrusts the reader from beginning to climax. (Puns intended.)

The book will be more enjoyable if you have some familiarity with Japanese light novels, tropes concerning B theory time travel paradoxes (or, more specifically, consistency re: decision theory), and ...advanced... pornography. But it's readable even without these prerequisites.

I'm giving it five stars because it was really good; but at the same time I'm quite disappointed at the extremely short length. I feel teased by how short it lasted!

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