15 KiB
[D] This may not be directly related to anything. But I haven't found what I want to read.
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Author: u/Taygetea *
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URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/2ejj07/d_this_may_not_be_directly_related_to_anything/
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Score: 14
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Created: 2014-08-25T16:38:32
Post:
This might meander a bit. Might be a bit melodramatic.
I want to read about what happens after the character Wins. I get frustrated when the only thing after "And then I was a god" is the end of the story. I get annoyed when the only thing for powerful characters to do is have tortured arguments or interact with themselves in some unsatisfying self-reference loop. I want to see the fine detail in worldshaking events.
I want inhuman minds. Really inhuman. Human ambassador characters are cop-outs. I want inhuman minds that would take years to understand properly.
I want to be able to at least conceive of, if not read or write textbook length books on minor tangential disciplines and phenomena.
I don't care quite as much about stories with plots. I'd be much happier reading a history of a setting that manages something like this.
Did that make any sense? Am I nuts? Does anyone share this desire? Does anyone know of anything like what I want? Can this even exist?
Comments:
u/Nepene [+9] (2 hours later)
Plug- /r/mistborn and /r/stormlight_archive
The first one is what happens after the villain wins, the second one is what happens after the devil kills god and takes over.
Awesome prompt, what happens after Lucifer wins.
http://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/the-last-angel.244209/
What happens after aliens destroy all of humanity except one AI.
u/GeeJo [+7] Custom Flair (3 hours later)
Also to some degree, A Song of Ice and Fire follows this format. The story that most fantasy authors would tell is that of Robert's Rebellion, where a brave young knight, tutored by one of the wisest men in the realm, rides against the Mad King and his evil son who has captured the young man's beloved. After harrowing fights and tragedies he slays the fearsome Young Dragon in single combat, topples the tyrant-king and is himself crowned, a new hope for the Seven Kingdoms.
A Game of Thrones starts some years later, with the young hero gone to fat and drink, with the "lovely queen" that he won despising him and the best friend who had fought so long beside him retreated back north; the two haven't spoken in years.
And then things get worse, of course.
u/alexanderwales [+5] Time flies like an arrow (3 hours later)
It's kind of my impression that OP wants that, but without things getting worse - which I can't really think of many (any) examples of.
u/Nepene [+1] (3 hours later)
Another excellent story.
u/FeepingCreature [+3] GCV Literally The Entire Culture (a day later)
What happens after aliens destroy all of humanity except one AI.
Welp, there went my night. You should post this separately, it's great. Not strictly rationality, but very David Weber meets Farscape with a dash of Lovecraft.
u/Nepene [+4] (a day later)
I shall. It's an excellent story.
u/Zephyr1011 [+1] Potentially Unfriendly Aspiring Divinity (18 hours later)
Mistborn and Stormlight Archive are excellent, but I don't think they're what OP is looking for. They seem to be looking for what happens after the hero wins
u/Nepene [+1] (19 hours later)
If they did they should have been more explicit.
u/None [+1] (6 days later)
GLORY TO SPACEBATTLES.
u/alexanderwales [+15] Time flies like an arrow (an hour later)
It makes sense, and I understand where you're coming from, but ... it doesn't tend to make for a good story, it's quite hard to do, and most people don't really want to read that. Just for clarification, you are talking about essentially having the section that would make up the epilogue extended to encompass a whole book, right?
So your start would be something like this:
Matarisvan walked across the marbled floor, with the Sword of a Thousand Forms dragging behind him and cutting a neat groove in the black stone. The spurts of blood from the vizier's neck slowed down to a trickle as his heart gave out, and in the second when he died, the Hyperborean Crown blinked across the distance between them and settled on Matarisvan's head. Matarisvan grunted; the Hyperborean Crown was made of solid gold, and the Ancients had left it free of enchantments in some misguided effort to make the burden of rule a physical thing. He continued on, towards the Elder Throne, and collapsed into it.
Matarisvan closed his eyes and delved into his memory palace, walking quickly through the battered hallways where the vizier had done his damage. The battle had been fought in both the physical and mental realms, and while Matarisvan had ultimately prevailed in the combat of muscles and swords, the vizier had come dangerously close to achieving a total victory in the realm of the mind. Matarisvan pulled a brick from the wall in one very specific location, and pulled out the Elder Sequence. As soon as his imagined fingertips touched it, the Elder Throne grasped at it greedily, and three seconds later, Matarisvan achieved godhood.
For the first time in his life, he felt both the physical and mental realms with equal clarity, not having to trade one for the other. His mental self repaired the memory palace, while his physical self worked complicated bits of magic that had suddenly been made simple. He stitched his body back together, sealing the wounds and setting the bones in his left arm. There were manifold improvements to make, muscles to strengthen and bones to solidify, but even as he began to make the changes, he realized that there would be no point to it. He scrapped much of the body, and watched with preternatural calm as his organs dissolved away into nothingness. With his new power there was no need for muscle or bone, no need to breathe or keep a beating heart.
He idly cleaned the throne room as his gaze swept over it, putting the marble columns back together and cleaning the liters of blood that had been spilled. The vizier was dead, but his brain was still intact, and Matarisvan scooped out the mind that was trapped within it before vanishing the body from existence. Then he turned his view to the wider world, cracked his metaphorical knuckles, and got to work.
u/Taygetea [+3] (5 hours later)
I very much approve. You're exactly right.
u/EliezerYudkowsky [+6] Godric Gryffindor (14 hours later)
It's not quite the same, but perhaps you would approve of Iain Banks's Culture.
u/ArmokGoB [+2] (6 days later)
Most urgent; stopping death and current suffering. He spun of a shard of will and shaped it with spells of indestructibility, unconsciousness, and stasis, then sent it to nigh instantly duplicate itself over the entire planet seeking out any and all living cells to pause and preserve their exact state while the detail work was being done.
Speed and raw IQ was nice, but he didn't trust any automated spell to improve creativity, wisdom, emotional maturity, and ethics, and those were the things truly needed for determine what to do next. Spinning of a copy of his full mind (minus the knowledge of the Elder Sequence and privileges) and subconsciously accessing the thrones knowledge of neuroscience he started quickly iterating through various modification.
Enchantments changing the relative weighting, power, speed, and parallelism of different areas. Locking and altering the levels of hundreds of different neurotransmitters, looking at various brains out in the world locked in various states of flow, concentration, and clarity but also those known to be especially compassionate, caught in moments of epiphany about the beauty of nature, or overwhelmed with love for the world. Copying the memories from a myriad different experts and tenderly weaving them together, merging duplicate concept-nodes and checking muscle memories and intuitions with quick practical tests in a temporary body. Powerful scries and arithmancy of mindboggling complexity woven into each cubic millimeter of tissue constantly checking for errors and providing truth on a level below even the subconscious. He must have labored for subjective weeks, even months on this without rest or distraction, but in the movement of celestial bodies but minutes passed.
Then, the god with the mind of a man, and the prisoner with the mind of a god, simply talked. About everything, big and small, laughing and crying, as hours became days. Their minds embraced, and again they were one, smiling.
Again he spun of a copy, this time putting it to sleep and letting it's memories drift away. A decade ago he had met a wandering beggar who he had gotten to know over the few weeks he'd stayed in the area, and who were the wisest and kindest person he knew of, an after all this time would have trusted with his life ten times over. His minds eye sought out where he was now and copied the memories wholesale into the sleeping mind through one of the most powerful spells ever devised so streaming them with the true, full formative power of having experienced that life.
Many lives were streamed - lived - this way. The common man, unusual in no way. A rich and lazy king. The leader of a world religion hailed as just and wise even by those opposing it. An old genius polymath, who had puzzled out from scratch ideas which would change the world several times and all other could but see as miracles. A girl abused in ways no man could ever comprehend, grown up to be stronger in spite of it. The vizier. A starving child. A slave. A master. A mother. The last of a people wiped out. The conqueror, victorious. A fully representative sample of the width, breath, and depth of human experience. Lastly, himself.
He sat on the throne, weary, seeing with his eyeless vision the sleeping mind, hesitant. But he woke it up, and spoke. About everything, far and near, in argument and in agreement, as days become weeks. Their minds made love, and again they were one, a tear on his cheek.
Three slow breaths. Constructing a chamber of of inhuman humanity to banish worry. Another spell to assign a number to each person in the world.
He summoned the first person, an old man, restored their body to ease any pains, and woke them up. Explained the situation, made a bit of small talk getting to know him, asked abaut what he wanted to happen now, his fears and his values. Put him back in stasis. He summoned the second person, a young child. This was going to be a very long night.
u/eaglejarl [+6] (4 hours later)
Easiest way to find what you want to read: write it. There are a couple of people just in this comments section saying they would read it.
As a point of information, John Campbell had a challenge for all of his writers: "write me aliens who think as well as humans, but not like humans." Given that any such story of decent quality would have been published in the premiere magazine of the time, you can see that it's not people "shying away from" the challenge that's to blame. It's that asking a human being to convincingly write about something that thinks thoughts a human is not capable of...that's obviously impossible. The best you're going to get is a clever facade, where the thing has a strange mental process / value system / etc.
u/SoundLogic2236 [+4] (27 minutes later)
I wish for this as well-one issue though is that it is difficult to properly show what comes after 'and then I was a god'. You can sometimes find short stories about things similar to this-showing a mind going over and resurrecting other minds, improving them, but the details are usually pretty sketchy. Also, one thing is to define 'inhuman'-there is the section of mind space which is things that have human values, but are exceptionally beyond any human comprehension. The biggest issue is that writing such things is HARD. See-That Alien Message for a sort of glimpse of such a thing, and I can look around for some sort of super human intelligence stuff, but it is very limited just by the fact that it is very hard. Your desire is shared though.
u/artifex0 [+3] (2 hours later)
Yes. What I'm always looking for in sci-fi/fantasy, and what I hope to find more of in this subreddit, are stories that are truly fearless in their imagination. Stories that don't shy away from interesting ideas just because they're too alien, too big or too consequential, by authors who never got the memo that good stories outside of the scope of human experience were impossible, and just went ahead and wrote them.
I think Greg Egan comes as close to that as anyone I've read. A few of the stories in Ted Chiang's Stories of Your Life And Others share that same sort of creative fearlessness. Other sci-fi authors like Stanislaw Lem and Charles Stross often approach it, but never dive all the way in.
Despite a lot of searching, I'm yet to find a good fantasy author willing to write that sort of story.
u/thakil [+2] (16 hours later)
Peter F Hamilton's dreaming void series is a "sequel" of sorts to his Pandora's star series. It follows humanity well in the distant future when many have self improved to an alienlike state. It does have human characters (as well as a fantasy subplot with very human characters), but also does feature some posthumans with slightly odd goals. Its not quite what you're looking for, but it springs to mind.
u/Noir_Bass [+2] (3 days later)
If you don't mind some pony content (the story takes place in the real world and deals with a super intelligent pony AI) you would probably like Friendship is Optimal. Hell, even if you don't like stuff with ponies it's still a really good read, and I think it matches pretty well with what you want.
u/ArmokGoB [+2] (6 days later)
A bunch of the meta-fanfiction of it is even more like what OP is asking for.
u/None [+1] (6 days later)
I want inhuman minds. Really inhuman. Human ambassador characters are cop-outs. I want inhuman minds that would take years to understand properly.
Thinking those up requires extensive study and experience in cognitive science. You have to know how minds are built to build one that's not just an imitation of your own.
EDIT: Actually, I just realized what a weird story you could write if you took seriously the concept of an entire civilization of countryball-like minds. Those things are broadly inhuman, even if the concepts sorta-kinda make sense from a human point of view, when the human is particularly stupid or insane.
u/Topher876 [+1] (7 days later)
There's a simpler version of this, its the reevers in firefly, or the raiders in fallout. These things have the idea of what if these people just went crazy, the hardest part of righting an innately crazy society would be figuring out how they'd ever develop into a considerable threat.