siduri comments on Three Worlds Collide (0/8) - Less Wrong
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I thought this was very, very good, probably my favorite of your writings that I've read so far. I think it's quite a bit better than the Harry Potter fanfic--which is itself good fanfic, but "good for fanfic" is a much more forgiving category than "good fiction." When you mentioned trying to get a Hugo for HPMOR I thought you were revealing an embarrassing inability to self-calibrate your own skills as a writer: HPMOR is not good enough to be publishable (even leaving copyright issues aside), and it's very far from being at a Hugo-winning level. It is not, however, ridiculous to think that fiction of the "Three Worlds Collide" caliber could compete for Hugo-type prizes.
In summary, I'd like to see more of your original fiction, and if you chose to I don't doubt that you could publish stories in major-market genre magazines.
Really? What makes HPMoR not good enough to be publishable?
50 Shades of Gray was a twilight fanfiction, and apparently it was good enough to be publishable.
What does it actually mean for a piece of fiction to be 'good'? HPMoR can be an author tract at times, but it also has one of the most intricate plots I've ever read, specifically designed so that thinking about it with knowledge of bayesian cognition and rationality allows the reader to discover more things about the story. There aren't many stories like this.
What about the actual quality of the writing isn't good enough? I would say it is at least as good, in terms of whatever it is that makes me enjoy it, as 80% of all fiction I've ever read.
And sometimes when I read Humanism Part 3 I think it's better than 100% of other fiction I've read.
I've not read it, but I'm given to understand that it has more fucking in it than HPMOR.
Also, I'm under the impression that people read it out of curiosity because it's famous for having lots of fucking in it, but when they've read it they don't think it's actually that great. (I haven't read it either, and I'm not going to read it in the foreseeable future either.)
It's the first book I've ever had to put down after a few pages because the writing was so very awful.
Keep in mind that 50 Shades of Gray was "good" enough to be popular among roughly the same target audience that were already fans of Twilight.
That said, I'm also very curious about why Siduri thinks that HPMoR isn't good enough to be publishable. It's certainly not without its flaws, and I think a professional editor would improve rather than detract from it, but I've found it to be a more fun read than any published book I've read since before it even started being written. A book doesn't need to be flawless to be publishable, it just needs to be able to find an audience willing to buy it.
Unlike 50 Shades of Gray, it's almost certainly utterly unpublishable though, because removing it from the context of the Harry Potter setting would destroy the basis of the plot.
50 shades of gray WAS a twilight fanfiction. After it got adapted, it didn't have twilight in it. I don't think you could adapt HPMoR for non copyright infringing publication without ruining it.
All else being equal this is evidence that it is not publishable.
Honestly, I don't really understand what the grandparent could be thinking. I may be said to know something about literature at this point, and the literary level of HPMOR is far, far above 3WC. Maybe grandparent only read the first 10 chapters or something, I was still somewhat catching my stride then (not to mention writing chapters with much less editing and effort invested).
There was some interest from professional SF writers in 3WC (e.g. Peter Watts) but nowhere near the level of buzz at SF conventions that's been reported to me for HPMOR.
Much though I like HPMOR, it's simply too long to keep the same level of sustained awesome. 3WC is awesome all the way through. HPMOR is probably better at it's best, but on average it's simply not as good - although it's certainly better at times, it can also be worse at times, because it has more space to make mistakes and recover.
In my expert opinion.
If I had to guess, I'd say it's a genetic heuristic thing. Assuming that since HPMOR is a fanfic, and since most of the possible arguments for why a particular fanfic is good are wrong, arguments for why HPMOR is good must be wrong.
He also said it wasn't good enough to publish, but when asked why, said there were legal issues with publishing fanfiction, which isn't evidence either way for its 'goodness'. This makes me think he has no arguments addressing the actual goodness of the writing.
Just because someone has trouble articulating the issues inherent in something does not necessarily mean they are unable to recognize that said issues exist.
I think the argument, however, is moot - HPMOR is on the internet, and therefore already has been "published" in a sense.
HPMOR has several issues, however:
1) The writing has a very odd quality to it. After reading the comments on this site for a while, as well as the dialogue in this story, it is obvious that there is some sort of shared language amongst this group of rationalists that is employed by the author of HPMOR - or that many people here simply imitate his writing style. This strange quality to it leads it to feel somewhat strange and stilted.
2) The work meanders too much. It is not written concisely, and a paragraph is often used when a sentence would do.
3) The work is inaccessible to a general audience. There is a certain sort of person who enjoys works like that. I suspect that the internet is thusly an ideal medium for reaching them.
4) The work is a work of fanfiction, and thus is unpublishable.
5) The work is a work of fanfiction, and as such, creates certain expectations regarding the characters and the setting which can be disconcerting.
Indeed, the sheer amount of work that went into HPMOR kind of saddens me, like a great deal of fanfiction that I read. It is not that there cannot be good fanfiction, but that fanfiction has certain constraints on it (including inability to publish) which hurt it. I would have loved to have seen something like HPMOR which was a wholly original rather than a derived work, and it strikes me that many who write fanfiction are rather limiting themselves by not allowing themselves to go beyond such.
I would be surprised if fanfiction for a popular piece of media didn't get far more eyes looking at it than equally-good (or equally-poor) original work, even taking into account the larger number of eyes drawn to published work.
So if my goal is to maximize number of eyes looking at my words, the constraints of fanfiction might hurt it less (in terms of what I value) than the constraints of original work.
Fanfiction inherently limits the number of people who will ever look at it; an independent work stands on its own merits, but a fanfiction stands on both its own merits and the merits of the continuity to which it is attached. Write the best fanfic ever about Harry Potter, and most people still will never read it because your audience is restricted to Harry Potter fans who read fanfiction - a doubly restricted group.
While it is undeniable that it can act to promote your material, you are forever constrained in audience size by the above factors, as well as the composition of said audience by said people who consume fanfiction of fandom X.
Write an original work, and unless you are both very lucky and very good, the number of people who see it is more or less zero.
If you write an original work, then I am very sorry, but I probably will not read it. There is a barrier to diving into a new world, a trivial inconvenience, but nonetheless, a cost to high for the expected return, which by Sturgeon's Law is near zero. On the other hand, in fanfiction I already know the world, and that makes it easier to jump in.
Yes, for fanfiction there is an upper bound to the readership numbers, but in practice, that isn't what you should be worrying about when trying to get people to read your work. The hard part is separating yourself out from the Sturgeon's Law chaff surrounding you, and that is an easier task if your work is a work of fanfiction.
The second factor is much more important for most authors for most stories. I read a lot of fanfiction by people whose original works I never would have found, because their original works aren't stored in a fanfiction repository. It's like how you could go to DeviantArt and look at people's original works, but you're much more likely to come across drawings they've done of things you're both fans of.
Worrying that you are forever constrained in audience size seems odd; most people never read most stories. The question is how many you can get to read it, and when.
Using another rationalist fanfic as an illustration I've read Luminosity, but never twilight.
I agree that fanfic has a lower ceiling than original work. But it isn't necessarily better to raise my ceiling than to raise my average.
There's quite a number of HPMOR readers who've never read HP. Admittedly this may be a special case, and it's not HPMOR's original intended optimal use-case either (reading Philosopher's Stone first is a good idea if you can).
I tried the original after HPMOR, and it reads like mediocre fanfic :) Harry is just all wrong...
I was a lifelong HP fan before reading HPMOR - and I would almost certainly never have read it if it wasn't HP fanfiction. (Or popular on TVtropes, but that's another matter.)
Woah, I never though of it like that before.
We should be writing crossovers!
What have I done? ; ;
Relevant link is relevant:
The Finale of the Ultimate Meta Mega Crossover
I thought crossovers only appeal to fans of both works, and hence that works the opposite of the way you thought it would?
Huh. Now that you mention it, maybe they do. I've certainly read crossovers of series I don't read, but...