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self_made_human  amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi  3mo ago (ussri.substack.com)   2920 thread views

Pokémon for Unrepentant Sociopaths: A Review of Reverend Insanity

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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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?

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.

I'm in the same boat - ratfic in the sci-fi genre is where my interest lies

can you recommend some?

In increasing order of wordcount:

  • Friendship is Optimal: "Hanna, the CEO of Hofvarpnir Studios, just won the contract to write the official My Little Pony MMO. Hanna has built an A.I. Princess Celestia and given her one basic drive: to satisfy everybody's values through friendship and ponies. And Princess Celestia will follow those instructions to the letter...even if you don't want her to." [39k words, complete]
  • Luna is a Harsh Mistress: "When Celestia banished Nightmare Moon, she didn't go alone, but with her loyal army. Now they're trapped in an alien environment, with tensions high and the air running out. If they don't work together, their princess will soon be alone after all." [230k words, complete]
  • The Moon's Apprentice: "Twilight Sparkle failed her entrance exams for Celestia's school. Worse, she is a danger to both herself and others, resulting in her magic being suppressed. Dreams crushed and now one of the weakest unicorns, a nightmare comes to her." [412k words, complete]
  • Message in a Bottle: "Humanity's space exploration ultimately took the form of billions of identical probes, capable of building anything (including astronauts themselves) upon arrival at their destinations. One lands in Equestria. Things go downhill from there." [514k words, complete]
  • Changeling Space Program & The Maretian: "The space race is on, and Chrysalis is determined to win it. With an earth pony test pilot and a hive full of brave-but-dim changelings, can she be the first pony on the moon? / Mark Watney is stranded- the only human on Mars. But he's not alone- five astronauts from a magical kingdom are shipwrecked with him." [797k words, complete]
  • To the Stars: "Kyubey promised that humanity would reach the stars one day. The Incubator tactfully refrained from saying too much about what they would find there." [948k words, ongoing]

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.

Why is this all pony literature?

The question is not why; the question is, why not?

But if you absolutely need a non-pony option, try The Number by NothingnessAbove.

why not?

Because that's ridiculous if not disconcerting.

Why is this all pony literature?

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...

DataPacRat: S.I.

...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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