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Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

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Cyan

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All right, let's get a few things out of the way.

Yes, this is a fanfic. A Harry Potter fanfic. A Mary Sue-ish self-insert-y Harry Potter fanfic.

It's didactic, it takes itself too seriously and not seriously enough, it's too strawman-y, it's too crammed with random anime and sci-fi references, it's too clever for its own good.

You know what else it is?

Awesome.

The premise is that little orphan Harry, instead of being raised by the Dursleys, was adopted by an Oxford professor who lavished him with science, rationality, and (of course) piles of scifi novels.

He's brilliant, logical... and still an immature eleven-year-old. He's Miles Vorkosigan crossed with Ender crossed with Artemis Fowl, at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

"Whoa, Cyan, stop right there. Rational Harry sounds brokener than [insert fighting game character]. Why bother reading if I'm just gonna be bored?"

Don't you worry. The author has realized that for the story to be interesting, a genius Harry Potter has to be faced with a Voldemort who is a still greater genius.

Mwahaha.

Might as well throw in this description, from earlier on in the story:
Something, somewhere, somewhen, must have happened differently…

HARRY JAMES POTTER-EVANS-VERRES grew up in a house filled to the brim with books. He once bit a math teacher who didn’t know what a logarithm was. He’s read Godel, Escher, Bach and Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases and volume one of The Feynman Lectures on Physics. He wants to discover the laws of magic and become a god.

DRACO MALFOY is exactly what you would expect an eleven-year-old boy to be like if Darth Vader were his doting father.

DUMBLEDORE is either insane, or playing some vastly deeper game which involved setting fire to a chicken.

DEPUTY HEADMISTRESS MINERVA MCGONAGALL needs to go off somewhere private and scream for a while.​

Fortunes won and lost! Battles fought to a standstill! Double Triple Quadruple Quintuple Quadruple agents! Sorting Hat blackmail (watch out, it blackmails back)! Prime factorization with time machines! Courage! Empathy! Reductionism!

Trust me, it's a blast.

Enjoy.
 
Lucille-Animated-gif-arrested-development-3695265-320-240.gif
 
Oh this reminds me of that girl who wrote S&M fanfic about those Twatlight characters but some dumbass publisher liked her fanfic so they published it and all she did was changing the character names. The book is now called 50 Shades of Grey. *smh*
 
I know someone who is obsessed with this and keeps mentioning it. I keep thinking about it but haven't bitten yet. I have standards. :|
 
remz said:
Why didn't this guy just write a story with original characters?
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I've wondered that too, since he's become a pretty good writer, and he's done some fun original fiction.

I think the answer is that the already existing story-world of Harry Potter has so much weight and lore to it that it's just more fun to play around with. That you can do things with it that would be much more difficult to do in an original world.

Well, that and if you aren't looking to get published anyway, fanfic might offer an audience more quickly. Albeit a fanfic sort of audience.

Mumei said:
I know someone who is obsessed with this and keeps mentioning it. I keep thinking about it but haven't bitten yet. I have standards. :|
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I know the feeling. I thought twice and three times about even making this thread.

Openly admitting to reading fanfic? Yikes!
 
I enjoy reading the fanfic a lot. It's getting to be quite big now and somewhat unwieldy given Harry is still in his first year, the author could probably have structured this a little better if it were planned in advance. Plus the didactic-ism of the opening chapters has been largely abandoned in later chapters which is a bit of a change in tone. And finally the fic certainly benefits from being a fanfic, there is no need for any kind of descriptions of location or characters since they readers are all already familiar with everyone from the Potter World. But apart from those minor quibbles its a good read.
 
sohois said:
I enjoy reading the fanfic a lot. It's getting to be quite big now and somewhat unwieldy given Harry is still in his first year, the author could probably have structured this a little better if it were planned in advance.
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He mentions somewhere that he thinks of it as being structured more like a TV series than a novel, with smaller individual arcs that comprise a larger story.

I agree, though, that it all seems a bit compressed. It's a squeeze getting all that stuff into Harry's first year. Guess it all needs to get finished up before Quirrell gets killed/gets fired/vanishes at the end of the school year..
 
I tried reading it some time ago. I feel it speaks a little too much as... not quite an author mouthpiece, but it's like reading someone's OC entirely. It comes off as... uh... preachy. That was just the early chapters though, maybe it gets better, but I didn't really enjoy what I read all those months ago.
 
Jintor said:
I tried reading it some time ago. I feel it speaks a little too much as... not quite an author mouthpiece, but it's like reading someone's OC entirely. It comes off as... uh... preachy. That was just the early chapters though, maybe it gets better, but I didn't really enjoy what I read all those months ago.
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It doesn't.

The author gets more and more smug in his tone.

Its a terrible story imo.
 
I remember reading the leaked Deathly Hollows book.

Then Harry and Ginny started fucking in a tent.

That's when I realized I just read a 700 page fucking fanfic.
 
SpectreFire said:
I remember reading the leaked Deathly Hollows book.

Then Harry and Ginny started fucking in a tent.

That's when I realized I just read a 700 page fucking fanfic.
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Wow.

So the writing was consistent enough that it didn't immediately spring to mind that this wasn't JKR?
 
Jintor said:
Wow.

So the writing was consistent enough that it didn't immediately spring to mind that this wasn't JKR?
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Actually, the writing kind of stood out because it was better than Rowling's usual work.

The weird thing is, while events were different, the fanfic was on a similar trajectory as the real work.

Edit: Found it

http://au.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20071005181006AAfgVNO

A link to the fanfic and a detailed summary comparing it to the real work.
 
Huh. Maybe I should read that leaked copy.

by the time it rolled around I wasn't sufficiently invested enough to bother finding a leaked version, but I was invested enough to pick up my copy and tear through it in a day at launch.
 
I read some chapters of HP MOR, and while it can be fun to toy around HP's concepts and lore, the fact the characters all act OOC is very troubling. You don't take well established characters and give them a whole new different interpretation.

It would've been better if it was set in HP's universe but with new characters, I think.
 
I tried to actually read this once. And it was fucking terrible! Not that it wasn't well written but the OOC'ness of every character became really annoying. The internet is full of horrible harry potter fan fiction and this is one of the worst because it so well written.

And the author really needs to be honest with his/her self and just admit she want Harry Potter and Draco to fuck already.

Fucking terrible!
 
googleplex said:
I tried to actually read this once. And it was fucking terrible! Not that it wasn't well written but the OOC'ness of every character became really annoying. The internet is full of horrible harry potter fan fiction and this is one of the worst because it so well written.

And the author really needs to be honest with his/her self and just admit she want Harry Potter and Draco to fuck already.

Fucking terrible!
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Let's all do Fermi's calculation and ruin Great Britain's economy !

EDIT : And what ? You don't like awesomecool blonde hair ?
 
The author gets too into the science bits sometimes for me.

People don't just drop whatever they're doing and launch into long winded monologues about history and science at the drop of a hat, especially not 10 year olds.

I liked everything else though.
 
Chapter 6 :
Great Scott!" Harry said. (This was an expression he'd learned from the mad scientist Doc Brown in Back to the Future.)
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Oh dear that's the kind of thing I did when I was writing my novel when I was 14. "HAY GUYS LOOK I'M DOING A REFERENCE TO A CLASSIC MOVIE LOOK I'M SO CULTURED AND SHOULD FEEL THAT WAY TOO IF YOU UNDERSTOOD IT IMMEDIATELY"
 
Replicant said:
Oh this reminds me of that girl who wrote S&M fanfic about those Twatlight characters but some dumbass publisher liked her fanfic so they published it and all she did was changing the character names. The book is now called 50 Shades of Grey. *smh*
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HAHAHAHAHAH
 
Tribes of Trusty said:
Isn't that the fanfic where
Voldemort made the Pioneer plaque one of his horcruxes ? You gotta give it to him, that's quite a good idea
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Yes! Badass.

Jintor said:
I tried reading it some time ago. I feel it speaks a little too much as... not quite an author mouthpiece, but it's like reading someone's OC entirely. It comes off as... uh... preachy. That was just the early chapters though, maybe it gets better, but I didn't really enjoy what I read all those months ago.
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Yeah, that's what I meant about it being didactic. There are a few chapters where it really gets over the top (discussing the afterlife, argh), but for the most part it didn't bother me too much. Though it did at first.

I think it's not so much that the tone changed as that the writing got good enough and the story interesting enough that the tone wasn't so irritating anymore.

Tribes of Trusty said:
I read some chapters of HP MOR, and while it can be fun to toy around HP's concepts and lore, the fact the characters all act OOC is very troubling. You don't take well established characters and give them a whole new different interpretation.

It would've been better if it was set in HP's universe but with new characters, I think.
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But that's part of the fun! Harry is totally different, but most of the other characters are similar to their canon selves, but with a bump in competency and smarts. I definitely wouldn't have enjoyed it so much with new characters.

Tribes of Trusty said:
Oh dear that's the kind of thing I did when I was writing my novel when I was 14. "HAY GUYS LOOK I'M DOING A REFERENCE TO A CLASSIC MOVIE LOOK I'M SO CULTURED AND SHOULD FEEL THAT WAY TOO IF YOU UNDERSTOOD IT IMMEDIATELY"
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Yeah. There are a few more of those jarring ones (Ghostbusters, give me a goddamn break), but the author later figured out to cover it up better.
 
ZAK said:
I like this quite a bit. The Hermione hero club chapters are a chore, though.
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The author came out and said he regretted having put those in at all. They were meant to be setup for a few things that he later realized could've been done far more simply.

It was especially irritating to read them as they came out, because it dragged on forever.

Don't seem quite as bad in retrospect, though.
 
I haven't read any of the Harry Potter stuff, or this whole thing, but I've seen this fanfic mentioned in some conversation talking about time travel shenanigans, and went to find the passage that was referenced.


"Excuse me can you do something for me?" said Harry. He was flipping through the book's index as he spoke, found the page with the first ten thousand primes, flipped to that page, and thrust the book at Anthony Goldstein. "Pick two three-digit numbers from this list. Don't tell me what they are. Just multiply them together and tell me the product. Oh, and can you do the calculation twice to double-check? Please make really sure you've got the right answer, I'm not sure what's going to happen to me or the universe if you make a multiplication error."

It said a lot about what life in that dorm had been like over the past few days that Anthony didn't even bother saying anything like "Why'd you suddenly flip out?" or "That seems really weird, what are your reasons for asking?" or "What do you mean, you're not sure what's going to happen to the universe?"

Anthony wordlessly accepted the book and took out a parchment and quill. Harry spun around and shut his eyes, making sure not to see anything, dancing back and forth and bouncing up and down with impatience. He got a pad of paper and a mechanical pencil and got ready to write.

"Okay," Anthony said, "One hundred eighty-one thousand, four hundred twenty-nine."

Harry wrote down 181,429. He repeated what he'd just written down, and Anthony confirmed it.

Then Harry raced back down into the cavern level of his trunk, glanced at his watch (the watch said 4:28 which meant 7:28) and then shut his eyes.

Around thirty seconds later, Harry heard the sound of steps, followed by the sound of the cavern level of the trunk sliding shut. (Harry wasn't worried about suffocating. An automatic Air-Freshening Charm was part of what you got if you were willing to buy a really good trunk. Wasn't magic wonderful, it didn't have to worry about electric bills.)

And when Harry opened his eyes, he saw just what he'd been hoping to see, a folded piece of paper left on the floor, the gift of his future self.

Call that piece of paper "Paper-2".

Harry tore a piece of paper off his pad.

Call that "Paper-1". It was, of course, the same piece of paper. You could even see, if you looked closely, that the ragged edges matched.

Harry reviewed in his mind the algorithm that he would follow.

If Harry opened up Paper-2 and it was blank, then he would write "101 x 101" down on Paper-1, fold it up, study for an hour, go back in time, drop off Paper-1 (which would thereby become Paper-2), and head on up out of the cavern level to join his dorm mates for breakfast.

If Harry opened up Paper-2 and it had two numbers written on it, Harry would multiply those numbers together.

If their product equaled 181,429, Harry would write down those two numbers on Paper-1 and send Paper-1 back in time.

Otherwise Harry would add 2 to the number on the right and write down the new pair of numbers on Paper-1. Unless that made the number on the right greater than 997, in which case Harry would add 2 to the number on the left and write down 101 on the right.

And if Paper-2 said 997 x 997, Harry would leave Paper-1 blank.

Which meant that the only possible stable time loop was the one in which Paper-2 contained the two prime factors of 181,429.

If this worked, Harry could use it to recover any sort of answer that was easy to check but hard to find. He wouldn't have just shown that P=NP once you had a Time-Turner, this trick was more general than that. Harry could use it to find the combinations on combination locks, or passwords of every sort. Maybe even find the entrance to Slytherin's Chamber of Secrets, if Harry could figure out some systematic way of describing all the locations in Hogwarts. It would be an awesome cheat even by Harry's standards of cheating.

Harry took Paper-2 in his trembling hand, and unfolded it.

Paper-2 said in slightly shaky handwriting:

DO NOT MESS WITH TIME

Harry wrote down "DO NOT MESS WITH TIME" on Paper-1 in slightly shaky handwriting, folded it neatly, and resolved not to do any more truly brilliant experiments on Time until he was at least fifteen years old.

To the best of Harry's knowledge, that had been the scariest experimental result in the entire history of science.
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I'm 60 chapters in and I don't see myself stopping anytime soon.

Characters aren't exactly as they are in the canon, but they do seem to be at least consistent. It's one of the most intelligently written pieces of fiction I've encountered by virtue of the sheer amount of referenced scientific and philosophical materials alone. It's really hard to have multiple chessmaster type characters and have it still seem interesting, but this fanfic pulls it off. Sure, occasionally characters (especially Harry) get all monologue-y, but they're written as intelligent enough for it to not be out of the question.

It does get frustrating when there's the occasional misstep, but the awesomeness of "Harry Potter for Ravenclaws" is usually enough to get things back on track quickly.

If you're the sort of person to like this sort of thing, you'll like it a lot. If not, you probably won't like it at all.
 
Actually got time to read. I am confused as in if I am missing text between Chapter 1 & 2.

End of Chapter one:

There was a long silence in the backyard.

Then a boy's voice said, calmly and quietly, "What."
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Beginning of Chapter 2:

"Now, just to be clear," Harry said, "if the professor does levitate you, Dad, when you know you haven't been attached to any wires, that's going to be sufficient evidence. You're not going to turn around and say that it's a magician's trick. That wouldn't be fair play. If you feel that way, you should say so now, and we can figure out a different experiment instead."
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So am I missing text in between the chapters?
 
jdogmoney said:
I'm 60 chapters in and I don't see myself stopping anytime soon.
...
If you're the sort of person to like this sort of thing, you'll like it a lot. If not, you probably won't like it at all.
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Nice. And yeah, that's a good summation.

Sarcasm said:
Actually got time to read. I am confused as in if I am missing text between Chapter 1 & 2.

End of Chapter one:

Beginning of Chapter 2:

So am I missing text in between the chapters?
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Nope, not missing anything. It's just a time jump to the next scene.
 
At the end of the last arc, Yudkowsky promised to update readers as to his progress on the next arc, starting on June 1.

The upshot is that I’m just now getting back to HPMOR, literally yesterday.
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Ha!

Sounds like it might be a while before any more story goes up. Apparently, though, he's revising the early chapters in the meantime. Not a bad idea, since his writing has improved a lot along the way. And maybe he'll ditch some of the worse fanficcy stuff (the Ghostbusters thing, urk).
 
On one hand my favorite genre is "intelligent people doing clever things", on the other hand this is an incomplete Harry Potter Fanfic.
 
Cyan said:
Sounds like it might be a while before any more story goes up. Apparently, though, he's revising the early chapters in the meantime.
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I heard about this earlier (and was a little tempted by the premise), but I don't want to read something that's might be undergoing such changes...just give me one whole book please.
 
I stumbled on this a while back and I think the OP is pretty much spot on. Yes, you're going to roll your eyes at a few things, and I get very frustrated on occasion when the author uses the story to "prove" that the world works a certain way (it sometimes feels like Atlas Shrugged that way). But it's actually a lot of fun, and I think it'd be enjoyable for almost anyone who read the books and found themselves thinking that the world-building made no sense.

You definitely have to be the sort to enjoy or at least tolerate extended asides exploring what people could actually do in the world of the setting. That's not my girlfriend's thing at all, and she got disgusted with the stories pretty early on.
 
I'm down for fanfics set in the HP universe, since there is so much about it that has not been explored. We know very little about what the wizarding world is like outside of hogwarts. What's it like in the USA? Japan? Africa? Yeah, we get it: HP was the only one who could defeat Voldemort. But that's not the only interesting story there is to tell, surely?

Why people chose to do fanfics that re-interpret stuff we already know is far less interesting to me.

Thanks though.
 
For all my pride, I cannot stomach to read a Harry Potter Fanfic, even if it is brilliantly written. I'm sorry, I can't.

Now if it was an original story, I wouldn't mind. Hell, I'd jump on it. I'm not a fan-fic guy, but the majority here are loving his work, so I wouldn't mind reading it.

Just not Harry Potter.
 
Vaporak said:
On one hand my favorite genre is "intelligent people doing clever things", on the other hand this is an incomplete Harry Potter Fanfic.
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He uses a time machine to find prime factors!

Verelios said:
For all my pride, I cannot stomach to read a Harry Potter Fanfic, even if it is brilliantly written. I'm sorry, I can't.

Now if it was an original story, I wouldn't mind. Hell, I'd jump on it. I'm not a fan-fic guy, but the majority here are loving his work, so I wouldn't mind reading it.

Just not Harry Potter.
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Sure, understandable. I felt the same way at first.
 
Verelios said:
For all my pride, I cannot stomach to read a Harry Potter Fanfic, even if it is brilliantly written. I'm sorry, I can't.

Now if it was an original story, I wouldn't mind. Hell, I'd jump on it. I'm not a fan-fic guy, but the majority here are loving his work, so I wouldn't mind reading it.

Just not Harry Potter.
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There's actually good Harry Potter stuff out there, but this isn't it
 
Why are you all complaining about characters being OOC? Yes, at a certain point there's a limit, but if I wanted the characters to stay in character I'd read the books.
 
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