I quite enjoyed it (but I'm also a sucker for bad puns).
I highly encourage to follow the links to all the references listed at the end of chapters. Some of the more silly, outrageous or wtf objects, names, events, descriptions don't even do justice to the insanity of real things.
I just learned of Unsong today and will be reading it. The premise though sounds similar to Foundryside, where objects can be “scribed” to change their behavior. A wheel could be told, “the force of gravity is always at a forward angle,” and it would roll forward on its own. It would also pick up speed and momentum and probably break something, so the scribing to get the desired behavior (a self-propelled controllable wheel) quickly becomes more complicated.
That is book one of a trilogy, and the third book is not out yet, so be warned! It’s a great yarn so far though.
Hey, I am a big fan of HPMOR too, and can absolutely feel your pain of not being able to discuss the book with anyone. Do you have more books that went in a similar direction?
I started reading the Eternal Golden Braid after, which was really good but dense, and for some light fantasy The Name of the Wind was an overall impressive book.
HPMOR is my all time favorite book, I've read it multiple times and I am still in awe of it. From the same genre I liked stuff from Alexander Wales, mainly The Metropolitan Man [1], The Dark Wizard of Donkerk [2] and, to a lesser extent, Worth the Candle which was just finished.
While not really intended as rational fiction, Threadbare was a nice read too if you enjoy litRPG.
I’ve recently discovered fan fiction and am feeding like a pig at a trough!
Sadly Hpmor didn’t click with me though. I liked the science but found the characters themselves undeveloped. Acting rationally is great and all, but with rational people have feelings too and that felt completely missing. I just couldn’t get far into the story sadly.
I encourage you to keep at it a bit more. Lots of folks are put off by the initial "more rational than thou" style of the main character, but what's not immediately apparent is that the book is partially a critique of this kind of thinking
What's more, since this is a well written story, there are good reasons why the character is so off-putting (to some) at the start. It is definitely NOT a case of the author espousing some limited view of elite rationalists as unemotional arrogant know-it-alls.
All the main characters do reveal rich emotional lives as the story progresses.
It's well worth the read.
(I've read every book discussed in this thread, and HPMoR is my definite favorite.)
Sorry for the confusion; the parent comment was different when I replied to it.
It initially started with a quote like:
>as a big fan of Harry Potter
So I was under the impression they may've believed the post was talking about the regular Harry Potter series and recommending something based on Harry Potter rather than HPMOR.
I felt like this book was incredibly clever, but at times it felt like the pacing was infuriatingly slow. Especially near the start, it feels like there are too many chapters of world building per chapter of story.
I ended up skipping a lot of the Talmud related bits but thoroughly enjoyed the rest. As another commenter said it deserves to be printed, I suspect an editor would cut the length a bit.
This is the experience of reading a serial as though it's a novel.
Some of us like that! I'll read Dickens and Dumas cover to cover, I even read Worm at a pretty steady pace.
But I read Unsong as it was being published and it was great. I would eagerly look forward to the next chapter, and each one left me wanting more.
I suggest that the next time you take on a serial, be it a modern web serial or one of the great serials of the Western canon (David Copperfield is excellent), slow your roll. Read a chapter a day, or a chapter a week.
They have an inherently different pacing and if it's frustrating you, slow down.
I enjoyed all the interludes, the main plot seem mostly like a story on which to hang various ideas (but that might reflect my own limited ability to keep the whole story in my head).
Reminds me of "Wizard's Bane" by Rick Cook, where a programmer is summoned into a fantasy world where the magic is highly volatile, and he tames it with Forth.
> A majestic golden eagle flew onto the Vatican balcony as Pope Paul VI was addressing the faithful. The bird gingerly removed the Pontiff’s glasses with its beak, then poked out his left eye before flying away with an awful shriek.
This refers to Vatican II. Nostra Aetate. The action that removed the teeth of Christianity and spelled the beginning of the end of Western Civ.
Jews now rule the West with hatred. Sorry, not sorry. The record is clear on this and anything to the contrary is gradeschool propaganda meant to deceive the foolish into believing that the aggressors are the victims.
Didn‘t read it yet, but I certainly will. This was what i was thinking about when i read an introduction to the Kabbalah and about the hebrew letters. This book sounds very
exciting. Thank you.
I have to say the title and the concept of "a universe programmable in some kind of special language" reminds me very much of a webcomic I follow (and wholeheartedly recommend), called Unsounded (https://unsoundedupdates.tumblr.com/). It has the concept of "pymary" (http://www.casualvillain.com/Unsounded/world/index.php?title...), which can be used to "reprogram" reality (which to the uninitiated is indistinguishable from magic), and for that it uses a mysterious language called "Old Tainish". And before anyone raises that objection, from what I can see the comic is older than the novel by ~ 5 years. Of course, there's nothing wrong with that, and both these works could be inspired by another source which I'm not aware of...
From Wikipedia: One vital aspect of magic is that it is impossible to lie in the old language, so that magic works by forcing the universe to conform to the words spoken by the magician.
Disclaimer: it's been a few decades since I read that. I may be completely wrong.
It's not like you can simply say something universe-altering just because you know the right words. You still need the magical ability and if you're not powerful enough in that ability for what you want to say, you simply can't say it.
But otherwise, if the mage is THAT powerful, then, yes, the rest of the universe has to deal with it.
Elantris is an interesting mirror / inversion of this trope.
There's also "The Gods are Bastards" (currently on hiatus due to author burnout but there's a huge amount of content to go through for first-time readers), which turns out to be something of a created infosphere, the entirety of the setting's "magic" is really sufficiently advanced technology, which is then used by the "mortals" of the world to emulate technology (through sufficiently advanced magic).
'Magic as programming' is a relatively common trope - conceptually, the two have a lot in common, and it ties in nicely to old legends about true names etc.
One nice thing about this book is that is reverses the relation between "magic stuff" and "normal stuff".
[Worldbuilding Spoiler Alert]
In Unsong the world is purely magic to begin with, sustained purely by the divine light until the Archangel Uriel converts all the divine light into science and mathematic to stop the war between hell and heaven.
(Unsounded is not the best fantasy story nor the best fantasy story told in graphical medium, but it is one the best fantasy webcomics around.
But yeah, magic as a secret language (or version where knowledge of the "true names" of things grants power) is old as anything. LeGuin's series was one the most popular studies of the idea, but it crops up in many mythologies. TvTropes has an non-exhaustive list of works that use the idea:
I love the idea that "consciousness" is a self replicating idea that we as humans have learned somewhere in our past and spread to each other like a virus.
The idea that positive memes can improve the human race over time gives me hope for the future as an antidote distopia. :D
How interesting. I'd like to know how heavily this is drawing on Qabalah. And a cursory glance gives the impression that the author is familiar with the Anglican tradition. I'd buy this if it was available in physical form.
EDIT: References to RA Wilson on first click. Very interesting indeed.
It draws very heavily on Qabalah and the rest of Jewish mythology. I'm tempted to spoiler it, but let's just say if you're familiar with Jewish mythology you will have a lot of kneeslapper moments as you read through Unsong.
The book is amazing, but Scott Alexander having such a prodigious writing pace (he also kept writing his blog posts, and working full-time as a psychiatrist) hurts the final rendering of the book. It definitely needs some editing made and changes in the plot pace (MINOR SPOILER: the plot goes slows at first, and suddenly fast in the middle...) but definitely one of the best things I've ever read.
This dropped on hackernews literally the day after I discovered Grabovoy numbers, supposed "cheat codes" to the universe used by Law of Attraction types to enhance their putative manifestation powers.
Grabovoy is an anti-Semite.
None of this is a coincidence, because nothing is a coincidence.
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