30 KiB
[C][RST][FF] COMPLETED: Orders of Magnitude (Significant Digits/HPMOR Prequel)
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Author: u/NanashiSaito *
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Score: 22
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Created: 2017-06-29T03:07:21
Post:
Comments:
u/NanashiSaito [+5] (6 seconds later)
I'll write up a more in-depth analysis tomorrow morning, but I wanted to make sure I fulfilled my promise to complete OoM on Tau Day.
I've made a few key changes to some prior chapters, but if you prefer not to reread the whole thing, you can start from the most recent chapter, The Tragedy of Light
I tried to resolve all of the dangling threads, but if there are aspects of the world you are curious about, I'll gladly answer any questions you might have.
u/nlfblah [+4] (28 minutes later)
Good stuff as always. Congrats on the project mate.
u/surfacethoughts [+1] (a month later)
Have you already posted the analysis? I'm really interested in reading it. I really enjoyed the story as well.
u/jimbarino [+5] (6 hours later)
So this is a fanfiction... of a fanfiction... of a fanfiction? Is it any good?
u/eaterofclouds [+7] Sunshine Regiment (7 hours later)
From someone who has recently finished reading the whole thing: it's the shit. It's frickin' amazing. If you haven't read HPMOR or SD, there are a lot of references you won't get, so I'm not sure how much enjoyment you'll get from reading this fic but I'll just say it's incredibly well-written and compelling with all the cleverness of HPMOR and all the inventive world-building of SD.
u/Nulono [+2] Reverse-Oneboxer: Only takes the transparent box (14 hours later)
SD?
u/NanashiSaito [+3] (15 hours later)
Siginificant Digits, a sequel to HPMOR.
If you haven't read it, none of this will make any sense. :)
u/eaterofclouds [+1] Sunshine Regiment (16 hours later)
Significant Digits
u/NanashiSaito [+4] (11 hours later)
Don't forget the sequel- Orders of Magnitude 2: The Search for More Upvotes
u/TK17Studios [+4] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (16 hours later)
Polite but strong disagreement with the other comments in response to you (just to provide a balancing perspective/show that it is not unanimous).
u/NanashiSaito [+5] (18 hours later)
Just wanted to clarify, which part of the comments are you disagreeing with? The part about liking it? Or the part about HPMOR/SD being a prerequisite?
u/TK17Studios [+8] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (19 hours later)
The former. I respect the quantity of effort and words that went into both SD and OoM, but I enjoyed SD a significant amount less than HPMOR and there was a similar drop in quality between SD and this, for me.
That's not meant to be harsh or hatery; I just wanted to register a polite dissenting opinion to avoid echo chambers.
u/PrimeV2 [+4] (a day later)
I haven't gotten around to OoM, though I will say that I prefer SD to HPMOR, for all that HPMOR was the more transformative experience. Spoilers for HPMOR below.
I mean, don't get me wrong, HPMOR was neat and dramatically raised the bar for what I consume in fiction in a lot of ways, but its premise is at war with itself. It wants to be pedagogical via Harry but isn't rigorous about citing sources and sometimes even does so incorrectly (or has incorrect scientific info to start with), and sometimes is incorrect on purpose to be more realistic about the characters and so does neither quite right.
It tries to have the characters act realistically and intelligently in their own interests, but has the explanation for the society's estrangement from muggle science and the ability for muggle knowledge and scientific technique to be hugely important simply be that the society is mostly stupid.
It wants to make the thought processes of the characters solid enough to be genuinely emulate-able, but most often displays those processes as Harry going on a lecture about rationality to say why the person he's speaking to is wrong, and when this happens he is never interrupted and the other speaker never tries to Ad Hominem Tu Quoque with it on the spot or later on - even though those are the number one things you're going to be hit with if you try that in real life. Harry's rhetorical victories, however correct he may be in a situation, were ultimately as removed from the real world as any Sherlock Holmes chain inference, and that takes a huge chunk of the demonstrations of Harry's thought processes with it.
The story wanted to be about the origin of Hermione, and to demonstrate how knowing just enough to be dangerous can backfire... but also wanted to be a mystery and so withheld almost all thematic elements which would actually illustrate that origin story or that thematic arc in order to preserve the mystery, resulting in something that LOOKS like it'll be a scientific exploration of magic fic but which never really delivers on that promise.
This is to say nothing of the pacing and interspersing problems - the narrative tunnelvisioned quite a bit, resulting in stuff like the war games getting sole focus for several chapters and then ceasing to exist for a long while, with almost nothing else happening. Basic techniques about parallel narrative, and choosing what and when to show about the world which could have helped mitigate stuff from above went nearly untouched.
HPMOR was a trailblazer and did a lot of extraordinary things, but it was a deeply, deeply flawed work which tried to be too many things at once and suffered for it. SD's strength, in my mind, was that it narrowed its thematic focus as a story, planned out how it was going to achieve that, and stuck to it. It had the trappings of mystery and intelligent characters and continued the story using a much firmer literary foundation than HPMOR ever had. By giving up some of the things HPMOR tried to be, and by employing parallel narrative more liberally, it did what remained better.
Far be it from me to tell anyone else not to enjoy what they enjoy, though. There's no reason not to get the most out of our entertainment, after all.
u/TK17Studios [+5] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (a day later)
Ehr. Largely disagree, though some of your points land. Lmk if you want my rants on how SD is awful, but I won't repost them here; it feels off-topic.
u/NanashiSaito [+1] (a day later)
I think it's actually fairly relevant, as if you did not like SD, you will almost definitely not like OoM, likely for the very same literary reasons.
There's also the meta-factor here. Rational Fanfiction, by its very nature, is a genre that has to concern itself with the "meta-game" (ex-Magic player here, I still can't shake the terminology). For example, you could make the argument that Significant Digits played a major role in EY's lack of an official HPMOR epilogue. You could also argue that EY's proclamation of SD as the 'unofficial sequel' had a stifling effect on other HPMOR continuation fics. The outpouring of praise for Significant Digits does not exist in a vacuum: it obliquely impacts the thematic direction of future HPMOR-related fiction. If you vastly preferred HPMOR to SD, then the latter's success negatively impacts you.
Incidentally, my description of the SD-universe within OOM is, on one of its levels, a deliberate metaphor for this: Merlin inadvertently "binds all worlds to this one [the SD-verse]" and thus destroys his own world's chance at salvation.
u/TK17Studios [+5] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (3 days later)
All right, then, since you think it might be relevant for people. Pulling together a couple of rants:
In response to a request for critique:
SD's biggest problem as an HPMOR sequel (in my opinion) was that it simply wasn't in the same genre. Like, it didn't have complex tangles that the reader was meant to be able to unravel, or rigorously defined rules that the reader was meant to game, along with the characters. It didn't "use" rationality such that the clearest thinkers would come out on top specifically because of their clear thinking, and it didn't provide object lessons that were any more specific than "generally plan ahead, okay?"
Instead, it was just high fantasy with a modernist/transhumanist protagonist. Which is pretty neat, but not in "the spirit" of HPMOR. It wasn't rational fic, in my estimation.
As for its qualities as a work of fiction generally—it did a lot of things right (very cool spells, neat dramatic history, decent intrigue, good skipping around in time). Where it missed, for me:
—Much of the plot felt random or just-because, as opposed to emerging from the "first principles" of the universe. There's an OSC quote I really like that goes something like "fiction isn't about what happened, once—it's about what happens." A lot of the events didn't seem like they were in line with the flow of reality, like they were the sort of things I could nod along with and say "Yeah, it would happen like that!" For instance, the plot with Harry and Draco pretending to have a falling out and then just neatly tidying up the world into one largely unified package ... that's good enough for Brandon Sanderson fiction, but not for a story that purports to be realistic-fantasy.
—Chekov's Gun misfires. The amount of words spilled on (e.g.) the spaceships and the pocket worlds and Neville/Fred/George and the whole American scene just ... didn't really seem to pay off? Like, the spaceships paid off because they allowed Luna (off-screen!) to take the Mirror into space, and the Neville/Fred/George bits paid off because they allowed Neville his (exquisite) badass moment, but both of those climaxes could've been purchased with fewer words, or alternately could have been better fleshed out and felt more important, to match how much time was spent on them earlier on. Similarly, Hig never really mattered except as a random background character ... we could have replaced him with a different guy or a woman or a magical creature or a lump of furniture, and it wouldn't have changed the plot (i.e. his specific personality and motivations didn't really affect anything, and therefore I conclude we spent too much time "getting to know" him).
—The climax was incredibly, incredibly dumb. I'm sorry, I know that's not constructive, but it was such a letdown, Harry's tone was off, Merlin's behavior matched that of an idiot who'd never thought things through when it should've matched that of a cautious immortal who's spent literal centuries thinking about all of the consequences of all of his actions, it felt (to me) like the scene at the end of Avatar where all of the humans leave as if that's a happy ending, as if they're not just going to come back and nuke the place from orbit. It makes no sense for Merlin to both have failed to put two and two together for the past decade, and also to be the kind of rational quick-updater who will just nod and walk away. It's not consistent, and if it was going to be consistent, the conversation should have been 3x longer and more nuanced, allowing Harry to actually, y'know, be persuasive instead of basically just pulling a Doctor-Who-on-Trenzalor and saying "I'm so awesome you don't even KNOW how you're going to lose, but it's definitely a foregone conclusion, so don't even bother to try." An actual rational Merlin (and here I just mean a level-one rational character with consistent motivations, not even a particularly intelligent one) would either have not been there in the first place, or would've just killed Harry anyway, and if the point is to show that Harry leveled up Merlin's awareness and perspective during the conversation, then that needs to be far better underlined and far better justified, given that he's rationalsplaining to someone who's survived for over a thousand years.
—Pacing, but it seems like you guys [beta readers] are already aware of/on top of that.
In general, I posit that the problem was poor back-chaining. Like, either he didn't really know how the story was supposed to end, and kind of wrote himself into corners, or he knew how he wanted it to end all along, but didn't do enough diligent work along the lines of "okay, these are my themes, this is the end state of the board, this is the message I want to get across/impact I want to have on the reader, now let's work backwards and not do anything just because it seems cool."
Had he done so, the climax would've been larger and fuller, extraneous storylines would've been tightened and streamlined to make room for the stuff that really matters to rise above (thereby focusing the readers), and we would've known which aspects of characterization to pay attention to and which events had real consequence and should be concerning. Another OSC example ... he talks about how you shouldn't start a story as a mystery, and then end with the widow falling in love and getting happily remarried without ever solving whodunit. There's a kind of promise you make, to your reader, that the initial questions you pose will be the ones you answer in the climax—that once you've told your readers what your story is about, they'll know when it's over, because they'll feel closure and resolution.
What was SD "about"? It's hard to tell. Was it about convincing Merlin that magic should be allowed to continue, and isn't an existential threat? Was it about overwhelming Merlin through the use of rationality, even though he couldn't be convinced? Was it about the friendships of Harry, Draco, and Hermione, and how those friendships deepened and changed? Was it a Shadow Puppets-esque, Tom Clancyish story of politics and intrigue, telling the tale of the unification of the magical world? Was it about the merger of magical power with scientific principle, and the first steps into a brave new frontier?
I think it tried to be all of those things, and ended up being none of them, where if it had tried to be one or two first and foremost, and let the others play backup harmony, it would've been far, far stronger, as a story. I would've liked to read any of the stories listed in the previous paragraph, pure and unalloyed and done with the skill this author has at his disposal (because he does generally know how to write, even though he's not an expert yet; the Egeustimentis chapter in Harry's head is the scariest thing I've ever read). If it's a character story, it's a character story; if it's political drama, it's political drama; if it's high fantasy, let it be high fantasy. And most particularly, if it's intended to be a showcase of rationality, it can't make the mistakes SD made (the number of enthusiastic fans on reddit notwithstanding).
u/TK17Studios [+3] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (3 days later)
In response to a counterpoint on that critique:
In general, I think we disagree on the percentage level—for instance, you point to the arrival of a hundred phoenixes and don't think of that as cheating for a cool moment, whereas I think it is cheating for a cool moment. There's nothing about that moment in the battle, or even that battle in general, to imply that it's more phoenix-worthy than any other moments throughout history (or even in the story itself) to have a suspension-of-disbelief-breaking HUNDRED phoenixes show up. So I imagine it's just an issue of where each of us draws the line.
Same thing for idiot ball. Merlin firmly held it throughout the entire story, in my opinion. Same thing for explicit rationality, of which I think Harry and Hermione did basically zero, except "generally plan ahead." Same thing for the repeated "oh, the problem will be solved by an ancient magical artifact" sort-of deus-exes.
Re: worldbuilding, there's good and bad side stuff. Speaking as someone who loves the Wheel of Time and has read every book in it at least four times, I love me some ancillary action. But ancillary action has to pay off in itself, if it's just there to enrich the world, or otherwise it's wasted time. Again, I think it's just that we have different tolerance levels? I notice that you more-or-less agreed to the majority of my points, and basically just felt that each was either enjoyable anyway, or less egregious than I was making it out to be.
Probably the only point I have an ... antagonistic? As opposed to friendly debate-y? ... reaction to is your last one, about the strengths and weaknesses of publish-as-you-go. I think you make a fair appraisal of the situation, but I personally don't think that explanation suffices for an excuse. I recently got into a long back-and-forth about how terrible the book Elantris is, and someone was like, hey, give the guy a break, it was his first novel. To which my response was, no one made him publish before he learned how to write passably well.
I think there's a similar deal with serial fiction. I'm writing serial fiction myself—I'll be up until two or three in the morning tonight, working on r!Animorphs. But if one of my chapters sucks because it's branching, verbose, or haphazard, I think I should still be criticized for that. Saying "but but but it's because I'm publishing as I go!" seems, to me, like saying "but but but this is only my tenth painting ever!" Sure, and it deserves credit for trying, and maybe the hundredth one will be better. But that doesn't make it good, and if it's bad, valid criticisms should be "allowed" to be spoken. The immaturity of a given artist or a given draft is no defense—if a creator doesn't want to be criticized for those flaws, they can always just ... wait until their work doesn't have those flaws.
u/TK17Studios [+3] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (3 days later)
In response to gushing enthusiasm after Eliezer made a comment about SigDig:
"A worthy successor on grounds of worldbuilding and humanism" isn't quite the same as "a worthy successor, no qualifications needed." I've enjoyed following Significant Digits a lot, and I'm looking forward to the finale, but I also think that the overflowing praise and admiration in this thread isn't fully grounded, and is counter to the author's own (repeatedly) stated desire to improve. I think there's a bit of a halo effect thing going on, where the good qualities of the writing and the general Hufflepuff impressiveness of having spilled this many words are causing people to gloss over real flaws.
Or maybe it's just that the people who identify those traits as flaws aren't speaking up? There could be a self-selection effect along the lines of not-wanting-to-ruin-people's-party or being afraid that offering critique will cause others to get upset, or something. But I'm feeling willing to risk the ire of die-hard fans if it means bringing the conversation back to a place where it's not all about gush. Based on mrphaethon's response to my last criticism, I predict he'd prefer that, too.
Speaking as someone who's read HPMOR about eight times all the way through and rates it at about a B+, I think Significant Digits comes in somewhere between C and C+ [I later revised this down to a C- after the conclusion]. I don't think it would obviously clinch EY's declaration were there five works of similar length, and I doubt mrphaethon wants his trophy to be based on "nobody else put as much time into it."
There are things SD does exceptionally well. The early parts of the Lethe touch arc, for example, were both well-imagined and incredibly chilling—the chapter internal to Harry's consciousness was some of the finest writing I've seen, and it's far from the only bit that's really, really good.
But there are many more things that come to mind as uncanny-valley versions of HPMOR, rather than actually feeling true to the spirit. Harry and Hermione simply don't feel like HPMOR!Harry and HPMOR!Hermione + some years, in the same way that many of the scenes in Ender in Exile felt false-note untrue to canon Ender Wiggin (Draco does seem spot-on, FWIW, but I don't buy his role within the larger context of the world ). The inclusion of a wider/wilder magical feel, more in line with standard high fantasy, doesn't click—I like the magic on its own, but I can't reconcile this universe with the HPMOR universe, because HPMOR rules with this history = world already destroyed a dozen times over. Half of the broadening of the world re: politics, other races, flashbacks/historical examples works, and half of it bores or feels overwrought or irrelevant.
Et cetera, et cetera—I would enumerate more of the things that are good about SD's writing, except that the whole point of this post is to provide a reasonable counterpoint. And there are a couple of elements that I think are outright bad, though I'm going to refrain from posting those here as well because I'm not trying to flame or troll. Again, I've enjoyed this ride, and I'm looking forward to the ending.
But as a sequel, this falls in the reference class of [Matrix Reloaded, Dune Messiah, and Ender's Shadow], rather than [Empire Strikes Back, Dark Knight, or even Speaker for the Dead]. In fact, Ender's Shadow may be the perfect analogue—some amazing parts, a significant number of mediocre parts, a couple of terrible elements, weird pacing, doesn't-quite-feel-like-exactly-the-same-universe, and steals some of its power in a zero-sum way from the original.
I think that, if SD ultimately ends up being considered the "true" or "official" continuation of HPMOR, the overall result will be a lowering of the average quality-per-word of the combined work by a meaningful amount, and the final impression will be one of a "meh" conclusion that [prediction based on reference class forecasting and outside view synthesis of previous chapters] didn't quite stick the landing.
In a certain sense, that feels like the saddest possibility of them all, because if SD were terrible, no one would think to give it the successor endorsement in the first place. But now, because it's good enough, it feels like it's being handed the seal of approval in a sort of "Well, sure, I guess" spirit, and the result will be nobody bothering to spend time writing something better.
u/NanashiSaito [+3] (3 days later)
I fully acknowledge all of the weaknesses that you identify in your post.
It is definitely not in the same genre as HPMOR. Whether or not that's a bad thing up to the individual reader. I personally have a hard time the pedagogy of purely rational fics, because it's easy to be a rational protagonist when the universe is designed to fit your needs. For example, Harry "winning" the final battle against Quirrell just as easily could have been a spectacular loss if just one of about twelve different obvious failure points had gone off. For the most part, in any rational fic, if characters were ACTUALLY rational, there'd be no story. So either the author has to create an implausibly convenient universe or they have to deliberately write flaws into the characters, neither of which bode particular well for trying to teach people things.
I do muse on this very subject in the chapter "The Tragedy of Light". But ultimately if you came into OoM looking for lessons in rationality, you will definitely be disappointed because the only real lesson here is: Spoiler
As for the drivers of the plot, it's funny that you mention Brandon Sanderson because at some point in OoM I make a deliberate reference to the Sandersonian style of fiction where things just "happen" to work out in a very specific way. But being self-aware of a problem isn't the same as fixing it. OOM fully acknowledges the inherent capriciousness of the Magical universe and specifically seeks to explain it Spoiler Whether or not you will find the explanation satisfying is a different question entirely.
As for the Chekhov Gun misfirings: I'm guilty of a few of these but I feel like I did a decent job of wrapping up all those loose ends. I even quite painfully had to get rid of about 30,000 words worth of writing because it just didn't contribute to the main plot. I think if this was a reader's chief complaint with SD, they may actually enjoy OoM. (But realistically I think that for most people, this particular point isn't the primary problem they have with SD, it's one of the secondary)
As for the climax- one of the biggest points of OoM was to offer an alternate explanation to the climax of SD wherein Merlin's actions actually make sense. HOWEVER: OoM's explanation in many ways is cheating an in a certain sense has all the literary satisfaction of Spoiler. The fact that is heavily foreshadowed probably doesn't make it any more palatable.
So to summarize, if you didn't enjoy SD because of the tonal/genre shift from HPMOR, you probably won't enjoy OoM. If you didn't enjoy SD because of the climax or the Chekhov Gun misfirings, you still have a chance of enjoying OoM.
Edit: as for the other two posts, I think I generally acknowledged the meta-impact of EY's declaration in a previous comment. And I agree about serial publishing not being an excuse. If anything I have even less of an excuse because I specifically eschewed the serial approach multiple times, having significantly rewritten the story and structure twice, and publishing the final arc all at once.
u/TK17Studios [+3] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (3 days later)
I like all of your thinking here.
u/Altoid_Addict [+1] (a day later)
Ok, that actually helps to clarify why I enjoy HPMOR so much, and why I couldn't really get into Significant Digits. HPMOR was kind of crazy and all over the place, but I guess I see that as acceptable in serial fiction, and while it does have quite a lot of loose ends, that just leaves fertile ground for meta-fic.
Speaking of which, I really ought to get to writing myself.
u/NanashiSaito [+3] (20 hours later)
Gotcha. I think that's a fair point to bring up. If you didn't enjoy the direction that SD took HPMOR in, you'll almost definitely not enjoy OoM. It continues in the direction that SD pointed, and abandons much of what drew people to HPMOR.
There's very little of the HPMOR charm, action, or intrigue. It doesn't attempt to teach any lessons and there's no clear protagonist, it's really only a rationalist fic in a very meta, global sense and there's very little transparency or solvable mysteries within the context of the individual storylines.
u/eroticas [+2] (2 days later)
I'm in the middle of SD now and I feel the same way. My friend told me it was of comparable quality and that is what made me start reading. While I am very much enjoying SD, it lacks whatever quality MoR had that caused me to obsess over it.
I may change my mind as I keep reading, but I have to say, MoR had me hooked immediately and kept me hooked continuously.
u/FeluriansCloak [+1] (13 hours later)
Yes, I enjoyed it. But do read significant digits first... If you like that you'll almost certainly enjoy oom, if you don't, then you probably (but not necessarily) won't. Significant digits did a LOT of really fascinating world building, far beyond canon or hpmor, and oom uses and builds on it.
u/idiomaddict [+2] (8 days later)
You know, I liked both hpmor and sd, but I just don't get oom. I'm not stupid, but I don't know anything about programming and I had just enough background information to know that most of the references went over my head. The others were both accessible to someone who understands logic from a non computer orientation, but oom really wasn't.
From a comment, I realized that the light and lawliet bit was about deathnote, and I googled to find other references that didn't make sense to me. I feel like I missed a large part of the story and it might have made more sense to me if there had been fewer references or if they had been more integrated into the story.
u/PM_me_couchsurfing [+3] (17 hours later)
That's awesome!! Due to my commitment to only consume completed fiction, I've been looking forward to starting this for months.
Phone and computer got mugged recently, but there isn't a mobi/ebook version out there, is there? (Or should I wait a week for bug fixes?)
u/NanashiSaito [+3] (a day later)
I'll put one together shortly. I just realized somehow Wordpress ate one of the paragraphs in the last chapter, which is unfortunate, so I'll be adding that back in.
u/None [+2] (14 hours later)
Wow, congrats on finishing this!
u/josephwdye [+1] I love you (a day later)
Awesome! Does anyone have an epub or mobi of the finished story?
u/NanashiSaito [+2] (a day later)
I'll put one together shortly. I just realized somehow Wordpress ate one of the paragraphs in the last chapter, which is unfortunate, so I'll be adding that back in.