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Desrtopa 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.
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.