Ra already has the Sun, which contains 99.98% of the solar system’s total mass.

So why does Ra need to dismantle the other 0.02% of the solar system for computronium, when it could more easily convert 0.02% of the sun’s mass instead, without significantly denting the sun’s energy output or lifetime?

https://archiveofourown.org/works/59935375 We can all agree that we need more FS fanworks, right?

https://notebooklm.google.com/notebook/e39371e6-dae0-44f1-802e-7c863a072d6b/audio

It kinda goes off the rails at the end, missing understanding about the actual plot.

https://preview.redd.it/99lsq7bcyumd1.png?width=1211&format=png&auto=webp&s=11e859576f1e7bfae609f1d86ba4aa2f243fff8f

Am I the only one who thinks there are a lot of similarities between the book Ed and the Rick and Morty series? I don't even think Ed inspired Rick and Morty because Ed was released in Feb 2013 and Rick and Morty came out that same year in December. Not sure there's enough time there, Rick and Morty was probably already in development.

Do you see it too? Ed and Sam, Rick and Morty? Sort of the same but different? It all clicked in the time travel story.

Any advice on where to start reading the books as a person that havent read (sci fi) a lot?

I just read about what SCP is and where it came from. But I've heard other terms such as fiveism. What topics do I need to read about (and where) to prepare for the novel?

If magic was all made up by the wheel group 30 years earlier, how/why did the giant med ring in the jungle exist in chapter Jesus? I figured things like abstract weapon and the Bridge were from before the war ended, left over that the wheel group missed, but that doesn't explain the giant med ring. Even then, Abstract Weapon understood the akashic records and how the kara rings worked and stuff, which didn't exist in its time, so how does that fit in?

Second, why did the naturally occurring geological mana exist? What was the point of it? At first, I thought it was waste mana from the listening post, but that was below Australia, on the other side of the world, and also that would be a different type of mana.

Lastly, if they had non-locality, why did the bridge exist in the first place? What would they have needed it for? The Bridge just lets you use Ra for non-locality right? Wasn't that what people could do just by thinking anyway?

I just watched the first episode of season six of Black Mirror, “Joan is Awful”, and was pleasantly surprised to see a plot device that I remember from “I don’t know Timmy, being God is a big responsibility” (link) - I’m sure the idea of recursive simulations has come up in other fiction before but I couldn’t help but wonder if qntm’s short story inspired some of the story!

These little tales were like crack, and I need more. I've already read Antimemetics, and I just ordered Fine Structure, does anyone have recommendations for stuff from other authors that will scratch the same itch?

Thanks

Some intriguing snippets from "Driver" (the follow-up to "Lena" from Valuable Humans in Transit and Other Stories) talking about a human middle-manager uploaded by the "A Incorporation" to oversee other uploaded workers:

A.LHall.1 predates and does not comprehend the ele phenomenon, and cannot administer workload tasks related to her. [...]

In private, he expressed mixed feelings about having been uploaded, saying that the snapshot had been taken "at a bad time". A terminated his contract in late 2053 due to an unspecified ethical dispute, and he became part of ele in 2059.

I'd thought this was a reference to some other story, but apparently not. Perhaps foreshadowing for an eventual sequel?

My working theories:

• It's a sidelong reference to the "Meltdown Madonna" concept from Peter Watts' Rifters novels -- a viral meme complex of sentient software that manifests as a female spirit pushing voluntary human extinction and apocalypse-cult hysteria. Seems like a plausible response to nightmarish industrial-scale virtual slavery. It also crops up in the 2050s in both universes.

• More optimistically, you could read ele as a pronoun (Wiktionary sez it's Romanian for an all-female group), and think of it as some sort of mystical AI hive mind -- maybe like the end state of the OS's in her (another evocative lower-case pronoun title). Surely mind-uploading could be used for good instead of banal evil? It would also explain why it's italicized, if it's borrowed from another language.

What do you think ele might be?

1. Ra's explanation of the existence of magic is probably the most rational adjacent explanation I've ever read. Even HPMOR (which was my previous favorite attempt) doesn't go beneath the surface of exploring the rules if magic. Ra actually comes up with a perfectly plausible explanation to the listener problem.

2. The story somehow manages to be an excellent hard sci-fi story while primarily being about magic. I'll definitely recommend the book to fans of both genres.

3. The story successfully manages sidestep most annoying tropes, the primary being the protagonist taking 1 rash decision after other and the universe conforming to prove them right. In this story, the protagonist is stupid, reckless, arrogant and power-hungry and she suffers the proper consequences for it. Huge kudos to the Author from my side.

Now for some thoughts and nitpicks -

1. The first compromise between the virtualites and actualites in distributing 3 arms of the RA engine to virtuals and 1 arm to Actuals would never happen in real life. People would either a)fight until 1 group won b) Divide RA's net computation exactly equal and write the system so that any system wide change would require access permission from both groups c) with the tech level on display, simply build a second RA on proxima centauri. The general point is that everyone would recognise the in story compromise as flawed and predicted a conflict in future.

2. Similarly, the wheel group would not have sat down to decide what to do with RA's power after they hijacked it, found differing opinions and then left for a year and come back with still different opinions and split. Any competent group would have pregamed such scenarios before the mission and come to a consensus. Democracy has its place, but when a decision needs to be made about the literal fate of humanity, that is not the place. Also, granting wheel group access to the traitor (who I assume was the one who said in triton that the virtuals were right) was so magnificently stupid that it boggles the mind.

3. I dont get why thaumic magic had to exist in the first place. RA's maya explanation and magic wanting to be used and so leaking was clearly a lie, it was all a nonlocality engine. If you were the wheel group and recreated earth, why would you create magic in the first place?? just lock all access to RA to the general public and keep admin access for yourselves.

4. Even though I got really annoyed by both Adam King and Laura's character (why I consider a sign of really good writing since my annoyance was with the characters, not the way they were written, kudos to the author again), I fully support their hardline stance against virtualization. I would have literally gone insane if I knew there was a real universe to explore and we were instead stuck inside an artificial simulation. "Bottom feeding" was a really good description.

The cover of the book seems to represent the skeleton of an octahedron (six arms, with three behind and three in front), but in the book Ra is described as a caltrop, or the skeleton of a tetrahedron.

Am I mistaken about this in some way? It seems like the cover is wrong.

https://qntm.org/parable

In 2022, Anoo Nkube and Mikhail Zykov betray the Russian Federation. Complete and tested femtoassembler instructions are forwarded to a hand-picked thousand email inboxes. From there they go viral. The technology hundreds of now-unemployed people have helped them to develop goes from being Russia's most closely guarded industrial secret to the most widespread piece of information on the planet Earth.

Alas.

Laura is paranoid about who attacked her at the beginning of the book, but I don't recall that thread ever being picked up again. Was she really jumped by some randos, or were they working for one of the factions?

This fact is thrown around a couple of times in a matter-of-fact manner, but I don't think it's ever explained in the text. If there is a single "main timeline", and travelling through time creates new destinations... then wouldn't it be much more likely to be in a destination timeline than a source with no destinations?

Even if there are infinite parallel realities, then in each of those realities there are infinite possibilities to be the source of a time travel event... so however many sources there are, there are "more" destination universes, right?

This isn't to say there are more entries than exits, only that there are more realities which began due to time travel.

I'm pretty sure I've read a satisfactory explanation before, but having just re-read those stories again, I seem to have forgotten.

Has anyone made an ebook compilation of all the miscellaneous short stories? I've almost finished reading everything else, and I'd really love to be able to go through all the short fiction on an e-reader.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59233722

There are strong antimemetic themes, but it’s a really different direction than qntm’s work. The memory-disjointed pastiche does remind me of the parts toward the end of qntm’s antimemetic series though. It reminds me of Catch-22, actually.

I enjoyed thinking about it though.

Memetics is the study of ideas optimized to spread. It’s a useful lens on religions, image macros, and catchy songs. Antimemetics is its less well-known (ha!) cousin, the study of ideas optimized not to spread. “But I can’t think of any ideas like that!” Exactly. A low-grade antimeme is merely boring. A medium-grade antimeme is invisible in plain sight. A high-grade antimeme is worst of all; you can attend an entire college course about one, come out the end thinking “man, that was a good course”, get an A+, and still not get it at all.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-sadly-porn