(inherently unpublishable)
It's getting published all the time on fanfiction.net. You just can't ask people money for copies.
It looks like a pretty weird situation for original fiction right now. Traditional publishing has massive inertia and cruft in a world where you can just put your manuscript online for everyone to read, particularly for someone who is more concerned about getting as many readers as possible than getting sales profits. On the other hand, everyone assumes, mostly correctly, that original fiction online is horrible crap and not worth even trying to read, so there's no good method of discovering if some of it is actually good, and no incentive for actually good writers to get to the top of this discovery queue. It actually seems better for fanfiction, since there's a centralized site for it with lots and lots of review aggregation.
Fanfiction is kinda shitty as fiction compared to good original fiction, but it actually does seem to make more sense than original fiction with the rationalist fiction thing, which basically wants to reach a maximum number of roughly age 12 to 30 readers and try to change their mind.
Even if physical publishing is not a concern here, fanfiction by itself carries a stigma, even among many of those same 12-30-year-olds that would be its target audience. And it can negatively reflect on the author and the community by association if said fanfiction is given excessive emphasis.
"Yudkowsky? Is that the one who's writing an insanely long Harry Potter fanfic?" "Well ummmm..."
(If you don't know what Gurren Lagann is, don't hesitate to google & watch it, unless you have an aversion to anime in general, in which case ignore this altogether.)
I feel that a fanfic like HPMOR but with Gurren Lagann's setting and characters could be 1) absolutely kickass (given EY-level writing) and 2) in fact better suited to treatises on rationalism, logic and science than Harry Potter. The premise I saw on /a/, an indeterminate time ago, without any connection to HPMOR (hell, it was probably before HPMOR), but it struck me then as surprisingly well-conceived. It went like: "The heroes relieve the entire history of science, first inventing the scientific method, then examining specific fields, one per arc, for useful and creative stuff to use against the powers-that-be keeping humanity down through their ancient, rigid knowledge." Now, this is easy enough to fit into the specific setting of TTGL, first using older tech and basic rationality against Lordgenome, then, after the timeskip, going for current and speculative science to bring down the vastly more powerful but anti-creative Anti-Spirals, ultimately aiming for FAI. The divergence point could be, like in HPMOR, Simon's upbringing, e.g. his parents surviving and teaching him the few remaining scraps of the Lost Arts... then Kamina convinces him to improve on it, think freely, try new methods instead of just new applications, etc.
I should also make it clear that I'm not writing that anytime that could be reasonably defined as "soon", and am in fact looking to force the idea onto someone of you fine folks.
Well, discuss!
Possible structure:
v001
- ep. 1: Divergence point, state of humanity. Fallacies & biases: "It can't be any other way", "Must be a good reason for us to be kept underground".
- Kamina makes his first breakout attempt. Village Elder makes a very early point about heedless risk, existential or otherwise. Contrarianism. Reversed stupidity is not intelligence.
- The Beastman-driven mech falls down, kills Simon's parents. World-shattering event from outside the box. Kamina drags Simon kicking and screaming into battle, makes a point: why no-one truly wants to just die on an unfair universe.
- They figure out how to start up and control Lagann. Black box. Basics of experimentation.
v002
- Simon's parents had an archeotech laptop, so, besides knowing a tiny bit of BASIC, he had played a couple of RPGs; when Yoko arrives on the Beastman's heels, he tries to tank while she snipes; extrapolation from fictional evidence nearly fails, as he screams that reality is unlike any kind of game, his spiral power starts failing as he circles back into despair and blacks out, but it has already (barely) worked - the Fallacy Fallacy.
Beastman pilot bails out; they haul his mech to Yoko's village; she shows them basic cryptography & related as they figure out Lagann's interface I'm not sure what Yoko's rationalist power set should be, suggest please. Simon wallows in despair, lampshades being an expy of Shinji. Strategies for dealing with nihilism.
The potentially universe-destroying Spiral Nemesis IS the Happy Death Spiral, of course!!! This only really comes up in the final arc, but what a glorious EY shoutout. [pause] No cult.
(to be continued)
Still on it, just really preoccupied atm.