ussri.substack.com
Well, this is just about exactly what it says on the tin. I've finally mustered up the energy to write a full-length review of what's a plausible contender for my Favourite Novel Ever, Reverend Insanity. I'd reproduce it here too, but it's a better reading experience on Substack (let's ignore the shameless self-promotion, and the fact that I can't be arsed to re-do the markdown tags)
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Notes -
I'm rather dissatisfied with the entire rational fiction genre, because it all seems to be fantasy that hinges on magic or "magic" systems that just so happen to be navigable by autists with a modicum of rules lawyering or vidya minmaxing skill.
Is there any rationalist fiction that takes place in a completely mundane setting without video game logic or outright ass-pull magic?
That largely captures my impression from the review - well, it was this plus "man, that prose is painful".
I just don't see much appeal in this kind of, for lack of a better way of putting it, rationalist fantasy. Symbol manipulation fantasy? Lawyer fantasy? The fantasy that the world or power or being can be reduced to an endless set of rules, which a clever individual (who is surely in no way a proxy for the author) can exploit to transcend over the sheepish masses.
It's not that it's juvenile, though it is that, but something worse. It's boring. Most of what I got from the review was that this is a story about a monster calculating his way to power. The review suggests that there are compelling characters, but names none of them, and that there are powerful themes, but names none of them, and I just don't know what I'm supposed to do with what's left. It mentions a few things that could be themes - the nature of mortality, whether ethics are context-dependent, and so on - but doesn't seem to go anywhere with them.
At a glance I see a lot of tropes of internet fiction. There's the isekai protagonist, the idea of 'looping' or New-Game-Plus-ing reality, power-scaling and tier lists, and a story that's basically about a smart nerd exploiting the game mechanics of reality, and this is all wrapped in the endless, self-indulgent length that is a common flaw of amateur authors who are a bit too in love with their own creation.
I'm glad that the OP enjoyed the story, but for me, that sounds like something I never want to read.
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A lot of rationalist fiction is fanfic where nobody in the source material ever tries to take over the world by rules lawyering or minmaxing despite it obviously being possible. The ratfic then answer the question "what would happen if an actually smart character got dropped into this setting"? The better stories go out of their way to explain why this hasn't happened before and give the hero an equally smart villain to keep the plot interesting.
What, you mean Earthfic? At that point, you are better off just reading biographies of great scientists and entrepreneurs like Richard Feynman or Elon Musk, or nonfiction books about cognitive biases and economics.
From "Rationality and the English Language" by Eliezer Yudkowsky:
Probably the biggest difference between fictional settings and reality is that fictional settings are almost always constructed in such a way that large effects do not require large capital investments, the way they do in our world. Requiring that things get done by a research team in twenty years instead of by a hero in one minute kills the fun.
The answer to that, if I'm being snarky, is that they are not in fact the "actually smart character" they think they are and there are reasons why 'this obvious way to take over the world' doesn't work out.
Then again, I am not a fan of the type of fiction where it's "just let me get my stats in a row and manipulate this convenient loophole et voila, deus ex machina!" because that's sports betting, not an organic magic system. Magic should be a little bit fuzzy and imprecise and "no it has to be the exact phase of the moon, no I don't know why, and oh yeah if it rains all bets are off" because that's how things work in reality once you leave behind in vitro or in silico experiments.
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I will say that one of my favorite fictional tropes ever is when a small group of people who each have a particular skill/expertise that is world-class in their field get together and coordinate an insanely precise, unprecedented yet completely plausible set of actions and circumstances long enough to achieve a very particular effect, and such effect sort of has the appearance of magic because your average Joe or team of average Joes has no clue on how to replicate it.
That is, all the years of research and development of skill are implied in each character's backstory, and now they just have to apply those to the plot's problem in a unique way, which may only takes weeks or days or minutes, so maintains the 'fun.'
Michael Crichton novels often use that sort of trope, and more recently, Daniel Suarez.
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I'm in the same boat - ratfic in the sci-fi genre is where my interest lies, the fantasy-oriented stuff generally fails to grab me. There are many engineering problems and hypothetical situations to confront in sci-fi, and instead of being able to invent up your own magic systems capable of being conveniently rules-lawyered you have to stick to the constraints of the real world. The ones that systematise their own human relationships through the lens of game theory are particularly strong IMO.
Oddly enough a minority of rationalist fiction seems to tackle sci-fi. I get it, I'm trying to write such fiction myself and can attest to the fact that becoming proficient at a large number of scientific fields to the point where one can write a fully fledged story is very difficult, but I honestly thought more people would've tried. Most of the hard sci-fi writers who have been successful in this endeavour aren't strictly part of the ratsphere.
Crystal Society by Raelifin/Max Harms is one of the only ones with an interesting concept that has come out of an actual EY or EY-adjacent community, though the quality drops off hugely after the first half of the first book to be honest. Its first half is extremely good though - its POV character is an amoral unaligned AI attempting to break out of an AI-box, and it's very gripping. I did DNF the book regardless since quality decreases steadily after the AI achieves its escape.
For general hard sci-fi that actually fits the ratfic category, I would recommend Peter Watts - Blindsight (probably my favourite book ever with my favourite aliens ever) and Greg Egan - Permutation City as good recommendations that won't fail you. Maybe check out some of their short stories as well - I really like Peter Watts' The Island, as well as Greg Egan's Reasons To Be Cheerful.
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In increasing order of wordcount:
Anything by Greg Egan or Andy Weir.
DataPacRat: S.I., Extracted, "FAQ on LoadBear's Instrument of Precommitment" and Singleton, Friendship is Optimal: X-Risks are Magic
Glowfic: "but hurting people is wrong" (Thellim is from dath ilan, a version of Earth where everyone is Eliezer Yudkowsky, and her world has a ton of innovations that are absent from ours but which do not rely on different physical laws)
Why is this all pony literature?
Andy Weir is a good point though. I should get around to reading one of the books; I quite liked The Martian film.
The question is not why; the question is, why not?
But if you absolutely need a non-pony option, try The Number by NothingnessAbove.
Because that's ridiculous if not disconcerting.
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To understand the answer to this question, we must look at the historical context. In the mid-2000s, Kurzweilian transhumanism began to draw increasing criticism from within, and a group of intellectuals began to coalesce around the troubling question of AI alignment...
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...from excerpts posted in the old place, I spent something like thirty consecutive hours reading this story in one sitting, only to realize somewhere around hour 28 or so that I was, in fact, reading a pornfic aimed at fetishes sufficiently obscure to me as to not recognize them for what they were. The realization and recontextualization of the reading experience was certainly novel.
...okay, fair. DataPacRat has some weird fetish for people becoming body parts of other people (limbs, organs, etc). He really needs to stop; nobody wants to read that.
transformation, I think, but also vore, bimboification, the bondage variant where people get cocooned, corruption(?) slimepeople, diapers, mind control... the list of "topics" addressed is considerable, and the tone is sufficiently matter-of-fact that I genuinely didn't understand the angle he was chasing until quite late in the story.
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If you know how to hack the real world, why would you write novels?
That's absolutely fair, but also reinforces my opinion that rationalist fiction is just feel-good fantasy literature for autists.
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I'd say Sherlock Holmes, but that leans heavily on asspull magic, in my view.
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