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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   2874 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 16, 2025

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So, what are you reading?

Still on The End of Faith, Menace of the Herd and Non-Computable You.

I just caught up with Thresholder , by Alexander Wales.

TL;DR, it's a cross-over isekai/Highlander kinda deal, where characters from across a multiverse are invited to cross through portals and find themselves in a new world. There's another one, and in true Highlander fashion, there can only be one. Once defeated, or victorious, a portal opens up to let the winner through, and if the loser is incapacitated but alive, they get one for themselves.

The MC starts off in media res, as knock-off Iron Man. Good AI assistant, but a suit that's far less powerful. He started off in 2022 Earth, went to Earth 2 that's about 20 years more advanced, where he picked up a genius inventor girlfriend and said suit. He rapidly loses said girlfriend at the hands of another Thresholder, and then continues journeying through worlds in an effort to find a way to resurrect her.

I'd say it's a 7.5/10 fic. Nowhere near as good as Worth The Candle or Metropolitan Man, but a decent enough progression fantasy and a way to kill the time.

Any thoughts on "Shadows of the Limelight"? I loved "Worth the Candle" and "Metropolitan Man" (and "The Randi Prize", and "Instruments of Destruction"), but I couldn't get in to SotL and I still wonder if I just gave up too soon and didn't make it to the good part.

I enjoyed it, but this was long enough ago that I can’t remember most of the plot beats. I don’t believe there was an obvious inflection point aside from the finale.

Contrast something like Worm, where I can comfortably say “push through the first arc!” Or “If you got to Leviathan and weren’t sold, it’s not for you.”

That's exactly the sort of contrast I was thinking of. I personally liked Worm from the start, but I had to tell my kids "wait until chapter 5 before we decide whether to finish reading this or not" about Mother of Learning.

Are there really people who need to read like 25% of Worm before they're hooked? That would finally be something to tie with Babylon 5 as the world champion of Most Difficult Fiction To Recommend. "Just spend 15 hours or so on this so you don't miss important backstory, and then, THEN it really gets good! Unless it's just not to your taste after all, in which case I'll be out of town for a while; I can come back when you're no longer enraged."

Couldn’t say. In a rare exercise of self-awareness, I never actually told a doubter to stick with it through Arc 8. But if someone had read that far and then asked if it were going to get better, I’d confidently tell them no.

Worm had me from the beginning. It was also my gateway from Potter fanfic to a broader world of rationalfic, and then the LessWrong and Scott spheres. So I guess I was pretty invested.

I do think it had the Tvtropes page that said something like, “for those skeptical of high school fiction, it quickly moves on to the far more pleasant setting of a bombed-out city.”

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