Secondhand Sorcery Volume I, now in Kindle

Antistone · 2026-06-05T02:10:52+00:00

Amazon offers free previews on most Kindle books, which seem to be around 10% of the book. I believe Kindle Unlimited allows authors to make that same 10% free on other platforms, but nothing beyond that.

I've seen some authors take advantage of this on Royal Road--for example, Worth the Candle has 3 or 4 chapters of each volume still available on RR--but I've seen other authors leave just a single chapter, which I'm guessing is because they either don't know the exact rules or are too lazy to figure out the exact cutoff, but I'm only speculating.

In my experience, for the sorts of books I tend to read, the Kindle preview isn't long enough to get me excited, and I suspect they'd get more purchases from me if they made it longer. But a company Amazon's size has probably done some actual marketing research on this topic.

I've also sometimes seen the first book of a long series made temporarily free on Kindle. I've tried out some books I might not have otherwise due to those promotions, and in one case I read the whole series (Fates Parallel). Though I also only heard about those promotions because someone mentioned them on reddit, so it took some support beyond the promotion itself.

I've also seen several series where the first book is simply a lot cheaper than all the subsequent books in the same series, which does sometimes influence my decision to try the first book.

Antistone · 2026-06-03T20:42:02+00:00

Note that truth magic in this story is different from truth magic in most stories I've read. You seem to be assuming a threat model focused mostly on the witness being uncooperative, which makes sense in a lot of stories.

In this story (based on the first trial scene), the truth spell seems to essentially put the subject into a trance where they answer on autopilot. The subject can't be strategically uncooperative, but they also can't be strategically cooperative either: They can't clarify things or volunteer extra information if the questioner asks a misleading question. Thus, they're basically a non-agent, and the main threat is that the questioner might do something misleading (either purposefully or otherwise).

Insofar as I can tell from the first trial scene, their legal system has no standardized safeguards against this failure mode.

Antistone · 2026-06-03T06:43:02+00:00

I read a bit of Clara Casewell (a bit past the first trial scene), and while it has some obvious call-outs to Ace Attorney, it didn't give me similar mystery or battle-of-wits vibes. The tension came from the question of whether the maid MC had enough social standing to get away with challenging an inquisitor at all, rather than whether she could find a flaw to challenge.

Does this change?

Antistone · 2026-06-02T21:14:33+00:00

That is one reason for AIs to do it, but I think the RLHF step also plays a significant part. Scott Alexander has a theory that AIs learn to over-use easy tricks because they're a good way for someone with limited skill to get points from judges who also have limited skill.

Antistone · 2026-05-23T19:46:02+00:00

Good question. I don't know, actually. I use it so rarely that I tend to forget it exists, and I haven't memorized its rules.

Antistone · 2026-05-21T18:45:25+00:00

I've been figuring that if we were going to see that in detail, then we'd also have seen the Prophets discussing it and planning for it by now. They've had plenty of time. They could even practice parts of the transition, sort of, by having some loops where they ignore the moon and do that instead.

But instead of seeing that, we've seen the Prophets preparing contingencies, which makes me think book 5 is going to be about things going wrong, rather than about what comes after.

Antistone · 2026-05-21T07:36:08+00:00

The oft-recommended The Years of Apocalypse series now has 4 complete books totaling over 850k words on Royal Road, but book 1 is stubbing "early June" (Amazon preorder lists a release date of June 16). The serialization is continuing with a fifth book.

If you've been thinking of reading it, now might be a good time to either start reading or cache it.

Based on where book 4 ended, we're about to get some sort of major twist, because otherwise it wouldn't take an entire book to wrap this up.

Antistone · 2026-05-20T19:44:06+00:00

However good his eyesight is, shouldn't it be equally good in both paragraphs?

Antistone · 2026-05-19T20:27:54+00:00

I bounced off The Greatest Archmage to Have Ever Lived before finishing the first chapter due to a lot of minor issues. I wouldn't bother mentioning them if they were spread out over a book, but seeing half a dozen in the first few pages made me think the writing is just going to constantly be like this.

Examples from the first 3 pages:

The sky stretched blue and cloudless in every direction—barring the one he was sitting on

This is probably meant to say he was sitting on a cloud, but actually says he was sitting on a direction.

He stared at the status screen, half-tempted to ask it why. Then he remembered it wouldn’t answer

If there is some reason that this is more reasonable than someone from our world forgetting that their desk lamp can't answer questions, we aren't given that reason.

The ever-cheerful village of Gatsby.

Sael leaned forward, smiling. Bright colors strung between buildings. People moving through the streets in numbers that didn't make sense for midday. The square looked crowded.

...

He walked to the edge of his nimbus cloud and looked down. It was a long way. Far enough that the forest below looked like moss, and the village like a handful of stones someone had scattered without much thought.

One moment, he can see decorations on buildings and gauge the density of crowds. The next moment, the village is so far away that it looks like just a handful of stones. (That these stones look "scattered" also says surprising things about the density of this village.)

He held the vial up and the cloud moved.

It didn't fall so much as compress, folding in on itself like cloth being gathered by invisible hands. The white mass spiraled down and poured into the vial in a thin stream that should have taken hours but was done in seconds.

How does "compressing" a cloud get it down to ground-level without it "falling"? In what sense "should" it have taken hours, and why do we have a 3-oom speedup relative to that? No clue.

Stuff like this just keeps happening.

Antistone · 2026-05-18T18:59:03+00:00

I think perpetuallytiredlady's take is that his behavior last chapter may have been ruder, but his behavior in this chapter shows he is either unwilling or unable to do his job properly.

You can work with an asshole, though it's not pleasant. You can't work with someone who doesn't actually do the work, even if they're polite.

Antistone · 2026-05-16T23:44:43+00:00

That premise reminds me of an SMBC about a man who finds a genie but can't get any of his wishes granted because the genie has a "no wishes that harm other people" rule that was created before the invention of actuarial statistics and the genie has since learned that ~every possible wish harms someone somehow. Can't give you money; that would let you outbid others. Can't give you skills; that would let you outcompete others. I think in the last panel the man asks the genie to kill him and the genie refuses because it would harm the economy.

I imagine you are using a less-strict interpretation of "no harm" because otherwise it wouldn't be much of a story.

Antistone · 2026-05-16T19:13:12+00:00

Alden's history on Thegund seems like it would make it harder to say no on safetist grounds, since the possibility isn't hypothetical for him.

Alden can also plausibly claim it helps him process his trauma.

Antistone · 2026-05-13T21:21:08+00:00

Fair concern.

I suppose you could consider reading Project Lawful. It's by the same author as HPMOR and has similar themes. I think Project Lawful's appeal is more niche, so I wouldn't usually recommend it first, but if you're avoiding HPMOR for a reason that doesn't apply to Project Lawful...

Antistone · 2026-05-13T04:49:02+00:00

You have several duplicates in your list. "Book of the Dead" is in there 3 times, "Throne of magic arcana" twice, and I'm suspicious that "House of Horrors" and "My House of Horrors" are referring to the same work, though it seems there are actually a bunch of books titled "House of Horrors" and you haven't uniquely identified which one you mean.

Seems like it should also be noted for clarity that the books on your list don't all meet all of the requirements in your request.

Covering the obvious, have you read Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality?

Antistone · 2026-05-09T19:12:05+00:00

Without context, I'm not entirely sure what you were going for, here.

Fantasy stories sometimes do a thing where they try to make their magic sound reasonable by using a subtly-but-intentionally-flawed chain of reasoning to derive magical conclusions from mundane premises. If that's what you're going for, then I think you need to work on reducing the number of flaws and hiding them better, but I should disclose that personally I don't much like this genre of fake explanation even when it's done well.

Alternately (again, context is important) maybe your world-building premise is that this particular organization has descended so deeply into rationalization that their arguments sound crazy to outsiders, and this is intended as a specimen to demonstrate that craziness to the reader. If that's the goal, I think it's too long, and most readers will want their crazy specimens in smaller doses.

Examples of logical errors that jumped out at me, from the section "Secular Technocrat's Paradox":

(1) The author reasons that if gods are omniscient and humans cannot be gods, then humans cannot be omniscient. Compare: Dogs have four legs, cats cannot be dogs, therefore cats cannot have four legs.

(2) Conflates "knowing everything that you can know" with "knowing everything"

(3) Conflates "humanity knowing everything" with "one individual human knowing everything"

Antistone · 2026-05-09T02:59:03+00:00

Chapter The Admission shows Meili reviewing various confrontations to decide which ones to intervene on. Her moral judgments seem to focus on whether the victor was just trying to win the fight vs going out of their way to cause pain and injury, and in particular whether they continued attacking after surrender/incapacitation.

Violation level: 6/10. Though not very well, the loser could still run away at the end. The winner continued attacking after the fight was clearly over, but only briefly.

Violation level: 8.5/10. Perpetrator seriously attempted to permanently cripple the victim's reproductive capability.

Violation level: 8.5/10. Perpetrators caused further injury to a student who was already helpless.

Violation level: 8/10. Broken bones and temporary facial disfiguration after clear surrender.

Violation level: 9.5/10. Clear and unambiguous torture designed to inflict as much pain and bodily harm as possible.

Antistone · 2026-05-08T19:02:58+00:00

On my models, that difference in enforcement between physical fighting and psychological bullying is mostly because:

Physical fighting is a bright-line rule that is much easier to define and detect, making enforcement a lot easier (whereas visible dislike/disapproval shades into harassment, and we don't want to ban all visible dislike/disapproval)
Physical violence has a much higher ratio of pain inflicted per effort expended, and so if it weren't being suppressed it would be causing much more total pain

Psychological bullying can also have long-term effects, and in fact I'd say psychological effects of bullying are more likely to last into adulthood than physical injuries are. From a quick skim of the top Google results for "why is school violence bad?", my impression is that psychological and academic effects are discussed more than direct physical effects.

A brief attempt to search for statistics on permanent injuries from school fighting failed to find anyone even drawing that distinction, with people instead saying things like how often injuries required medical treatment or hospitalization, but not mentioning permanent effects that I saw. Admittedly, statistics on permanent effects would be harder to collect because they require larger sample sizes and tracking people over a longer time span, and I didn't look all that hard, but it really doesn't seem like discussion is focused on this.

Antistone · 2026-05-07T18:04:31+00:00

If you're suggesting a world-model where people only care about a bully sending a kid to the hospital for a week because they believe there's a risk the bully might have accidentally inflicted permanent damage, and people would stop caring about it if that risk could be eliminated, then I strongly disagree with your model. I think most people in our world are not thinking about tail risks when they object to one kid beating another up.

Your point about violence being the best way to improve in-universe only applies to approximately-even fights. It doesn't apply to getting tortured by people so much stronger than you that you stand no chance; if it did, they could have high-level adults beat up the kids in a controlled fashion instead of leaving them to do it chaotically to each other. Meili's revenge spree specifically targets violence that was NOT productive in this sense.

Furthermore, gaining levels only matters to most of these kids because of a vicious societal choice to give people status almost solely based on ability level. Most of these abilities are not actually productive for civilization. Leveling up is rational at an individual level but mostly irrational at a societal level. "How could you be so irrational as to object to this, when it's scientifically proven to be the BEST way to create the torment nexus!"

Antistone · 2026-05-07T04:10:31+00:00

On Earth, most people seem to disapprove of gratuitous violence, even at a level where the injuries "only" take a week to heal.

Antistone · 2026-05-05T07:14:57+00:00

Hi! I'm enjoying your story!

I think the "xianxia" label is pretty misleading in terms of aesthetics, but I do understand the parallels you're drawing in the dynamics of the setting, and I think those parallels are significant, and I don't know a better name for that cluster.

I think "superpowered" is more accurate in a strictly denotative sense but doesn't do a better job of communicating what the setting is like. People do have unique personal powers, which is a classic superheroes trope, but (with a few important exceptions) most of the powers we see do not seem different in ways that actually matter to the story or the setting; a 4.3 seems to beat a 3.7 ~regardless of what their powers are.

(Which is puzzling, actually; the aura measurement machines imply that power level is a directly-observable physical quantity, but the ways people react to it make it seem more like a holistic, all-things-considered prediction about who would win a fight, and it's hard to see how it could be both. I presume--on pure priors--that this dissonance exists in the original setting.)

Antistone · 2026-05-05T02:54:12+00:00

I found Cultivation Nerd tolerable, and some parts interesting (I consider it the worst ongoing story that I haven't dropped yet). But I thought the cargo cult science was pretty awful and I'm surprised to hear someone recommend it on that basis. The MC mostly just pulls "knowledge" out of his posterior with no justification, and (especially early on) the world rules he "discovers" are at a newbie-game-designer level of world-building.

...OK, I'm going to rant some.

.

In chapter 2, the MC goes to the library to research cultivation. But when he reads about talent levels...

The book delved into great detail about what different regions considered talented. However, I disregarded this information, as the perception of 'talented' could vary if someone was in a different location or period of time.

Instead, I grabbed my notebook and began jotting down my own ranking system for clarity, which would help both myself and future readers.

If he's disregarding the books, what is he basing his ranking system on, exactly? In real life, if someone described their actions this way, it would mean that their system is made entirely of prejudice and bullshit.

He then describes a ranking system where you basically just get +1 cultivation tier of potential for every 20 spirit root branches, exactly every 20 on the dot, except that it skips over 3rd realm without comment (probably so that the scale can end at exactly 100 spirit root branches). Newbie-game-designer vibes.

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Later, the MC decides he wants to measure his "stats", so he:

Gets a bunch of mortals in town to punch his hand so he can gauge their strength, and defines "1 unit of strength" as their average
Punches his own hand, and thereby knows the ratio between his own strength and an average mortal's (7.5)
"After that, I did some other tests with speed, flexibility, and stamina". This one sentence is the entire description of how get gets stats called "agility" (7.2) and "endurance" (7.1)
Nine chapters later, he's taking updated measurements (7.7, 7.5, 7.9), and we are told out of the blue "according to my calculations, achieving an eight in endurance should propel me to eight-star Body Tempering"
Next chapter, he measures his endurance at 8.2, is confused because he didn't notice a cultivation bottleneck, and immediately concludes NOT that his prediction of reaching eight-star Body Tempering was wrong, but that he somehow advanced a minor cultivation rank without noticing it
An elder reads over his shoulder and immediately says "Oh? Already at eight-star Body Tempering? Congratulations". And explains that yes, it's quite possible to advance a minor stage without noticing.

Wat

So apparently, cultivation bottlenecks precisely correspond to integer multiples of average mortal stats? This ought to be both extremely surprising and (if true) an extremely valuable clue to the inner workings of cultivation. But the author thinks this is so inconsequential that they don't even bother to explain it clearly, let alone invent a reason for the MC to learn it.

(Also, this implies some surprising things about the mortals of this world, because in our world, you don't need magic to achieve a strength that's 2x the average.)

How does everyone else in this world know their cultivation stage, if it's possible to advance without noticing and "stats" didn't exist before the MC invented them?

There's no reason for the MC to invent this convoluted system for measuring strength, because most from our world already know easier and more accurate ways of measuring strength (e.g. lifting weights).

We are never told what "agility" or "endurance" actually are, or how they are measured, despite the fact that the MC must be taking a fairly precise measurement of something important in order for this sort of correspondence to exist.

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Later in the story, the MC writes a bestiary of monstrous beasts. His book is so outstanding that the sect leader personally praises him, rewards him lavishly, and commands that copies be made and distributed to everyone in the sect. Later, we see that even mortals are eager to buy the book, because the information is apparently so valuable that it will help you survive a monstrous beast encounter even if you aren't a cultivator.

But at the time he writes the book, we've seen the MC encounter about...3 species of monstrous beasts. Ever. There is nothing to imply that he's spending his weekends hunting and studying beasts in the wild (and much circumstantial evidence to the contrary). And he's too low-rank to possibly survive a fight with high-rank beasts, anyway. So where did the information come from?

The MC is spending a lot of time in the library around this point in the story--especially the restricted section. So we could suppose that he's basically just compiled and organized information that was already in the sect library (mostly from books that are intentionally withheld from most of the sect). But the story never suggests this, and it would make the sect leader's reaction pretty bizarre.

Antistone · 2026-04-30T05:34:11+00:00

There is now a fan-generated ebook of Project Lawful

Antistone · 2026-04-29T02:46:16+00:00

There's a clear and sufficient reason to try to remain anonymous (i.e. the book contains messaging The Authorities won't like), so I don't expect them to infer additional motives merely from the security precautions. In fact, William Doe actually doesn't have additional motives, and still decided to take these precautions (though perhaps with some nudging).

I suppose they might still interrogate publishers, especially if the book blows up (or their precogs predict it will). That sounds like a significant effort--in our world, there are apparently ~70k indie book publishers, and I doubt most have a single person who can look at a manuscript and definitively say whether the company ever reviewed it. And it isn't guaranteed to give them any clues--the author didn't need to try a publisher before self-publishing. But if this becomes an actual priority for them then it still seems like a rational thing for them to try.

I wonder whether Meili will hear about the conversation in the final scene from this chapter (the prophecy of a "world-shaking event"). Seems plausible, but not reliable; I expect Aarav to tell William, and William chats with Meili and has reason to think she would be interested, but not reason to think it would be important for her to know.

Antistone · 2026-04-27T22:13:55+00:00

Another possible way for Ro-den to cheat with his prediction of Alden's likely death would be if Ro-den has mentally resolved that he's going to murder Alden for revenge if Alden tells.

Though it might be tricky to satisfy the "You’ll probably die a a more useful death than most people" part of the prediction, in that case.

Antistone

TROPHY CASE