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Alsadius comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 20, chapter 90 - Less Wrong
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I think it's more likely that Quirrell is being sincere, and that he is trying to avert the prophecy that he heard at the end of Ch 89. As evidence, I submit:
I'm actually impressed with Quirrell's control, here. We can judge how great his fear of death is from his response to Dementor exposure, and here we have a prophecy which (to him, at least) is signalling the end of the entire universe. He's spent decades desperately trying to find a way to avoid death, and now he thinks he's looking it straight in the face. And nobody in the story has even noticed that he's concerned, although I'm pretty sure he was showing his fear a little at the end of 90 there. He must be gibbering on the inside, and holding it together out of sheer determination.
Of that much I'm fairly confident. This next bit is speculation on my part. I'm not going to give a percentage, it's just a hunch, but it is my pet hunch which I've had for a long time.
Quirrell has it all wrong. HPMORverse is actually a simulation being run at some higher level of reality, and Harry is going to figure this out and either rewrite the universe to his will, or airlift everybody in the world the hell out of there by their bootstraps, thereby mass-producing immortality. Merlin was the last wizard to know that the universe was a sim and he patched it to stop people breaking it. Unfortunately this resulted in the loss of a whole lot of useful stuff which may very well have been grandfathered in.
The funny part is, we know this to be literally true. The less-funny part is that it is incredibly difficult for an author to write himself into his own story as a character without coming off incredibly hokey. Heinlein mentioned himself in passing a couple of times and it wasn't any worse than any other in-joke, but I know of no better examples than that.
Edit: I have, of course, forgotten Godel, Escher, Bach. Not sure how. That's a bit of a special case, though.
http://www.undefined.net/1/0/
In book 2 of Don Quixote, book 1 is mentioned quite a bit and a lot of characters seem to have read it. I was actually surprised at how interesting and original Don Quixote was.
Animal Man by Grant Morrison Of course, that story eventually became exclusively about the character talking to the author.
Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse Five. I think it comes off a little awkward--more a reminder that Vonnegut was himself in Dresden than anything pertaining to the story.
Although only tangentially related,
The film 'Adaptation', by screenwriter Charlie Kaufman. Kaufman had a lot of trouble adapting a certain book into a film... And so the film is about Charlie Kaufman having difficulty turning the book into a film.
I've seen obvious knockoffs of reality and other pseudoautobiographical material done well. There's lots of those. But explicitly having the characters talking to the author, without any pretense, tends strongly towards ham-fistedness. And having the characters inside any other form of nested reality would simply be bizarre.
It's still a fun theory, but I will be greatly surprised to see it, largely because I don't think it can be made good enough to make EY think it's worth printing. Maybe a standalone story with that premise, but not as a tacked-on bit at the end.
Clive Cussler manages to write a lot of books that don't become more hokey when he shows up as a DEM.
But that is almost entirely due to how hokey the books already were. (I read lots of Cussler when I was younger, and it was an example that came to mind of author inserts. It was not exactly a positive example, however. It could be worse though, it could be the Apocalypse novel from Magic, where one of the characters blackmails the author into retconning the last twenty pages. Yes, really.)
Wait, that sounds like it could be pretty awesome.
It was within ten pages of the end of a very serious trilogy, full of interplanar warfare and dark moral decisions. Then that came right out of left field. It was possibly the most immersion-breaking thing I have ever seen in fiction.
The "author" in question was a relatively minor character, with the quirk of writing everything down as though it were a story. Near the end of the trilogy, he tells some others that he's already written the ending, and the bad guys are going to win. They respond that if the bad guys win, there won't be anyone around to read his book - so he changes his mind and frantically erases the ending as the bad guys close in around him. The character is never mentioned again.
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In Homestuck, gur fhcreivyynva xvyyf gur nhgube naq gnxrf bire gur pbzvp. Hasbeghangryl ur pnaabg qenj.