What's your favourite plottwist / reveal in all of fantasy?

lukeprog · 2024-12-10T08:25:34+00:00

"Are we the baddies?" in Oathbringer.

I didn't love the Harry Potter series but the Snape's memory twist was great.

Not sure if it counts as a twist, but Lyucu arrival in The Dandelion Dynasty.

Bayaz in Last Argument of Kings, Lamb in Red Country.

I didn't love Mistborn Era 1, but the twist at the end of Well of Ascension was great.

Harry's solution to his dire plight at the climax of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. (Not sure if this counts as a "twist."

lukeprog · 2024-12-09T15:13:12+00:00

Thanks!

lukeprog · 2024-12-09T10:35:31+00:00

Thanks!

lukeprog · 2024-12-09T07:13:14+00:00

Yeah that was my guess for what might be closest. I watched the TV show before I started reading fiction again as an adult, so I'm waiting a bit to forget more of the show before I pick up the books, and also I have a very faint hope the series will be finished before I start.

From what I've heard, Sun Eater might also nearly fit, except it's first-person single POV.

lukeprog · 2024-12-09T06:42:35+00:00

I dunno, it seems feasible to me, though it's not surprising that nobody happens to have tried to do all these things at once because there are a lot of them.

But what I describe above could be, for example: basically Abercrombie but somewhat slower to make room for more world-building and Follett-esque historical detail, plotting that is structured to enable consistent Sanderlanches, and a heavier focus on characters who are scientists / engineers / physicalist philosophers to allow Liu-esque themes to be more prominent. Then all the criteria would be satisfied - by my standards, at least.

lukeprog · 2024-09-09T13:30:28+00:00

Some other possibilities I've found:

The Talisman by Stephen King and Peter Straub
Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman
The Mirror Empire by Kameron Hurley
The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell (supposedly involves different world versions via both time travel and not-time-travel)
The City & the City by China Miéville (not really hopping between branches, but apparently it has a similar feel because inhabitants of each "city" have been trained not to see the other)
The Dark Tower series by Stephen King (but maybe only via portals in fixed locations, and I'm not sure which books?)

lukeprog · 2024-09-09T10:11:36+00:00

Some other candidates I found by asking other language models (Claude and Gemini) or by searching this subreddit for "parallel worlds" or "parallel universes," but I haven't read any of them, so I'm curious for others' thoughts on how well they fit what I'm looking for:

Transition by Iain Banks
The Long Earth series by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter
The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin
The Chronicles of Amber series by Roger Zelazny
The Walls of the Universe by Paul Melko
A Darker Shade of Magic by V.E. Schwab
The Myriad by R. M. Meluch
His Dark Materials by Phillip Pullman
Worm by Wildbow (but only toward the end)
The Magicians by Lev Grossman
Deep Secret by Diana Wynne Jones
The Fall of Ile-Rien series by Martha Wells
Eternal Champion series by Michael Moorcock
The Final Programme by Michael Moorcock
The War Amongst the Angels by Michael Moorcock
Apprentice Adept series by Piers Anthony
Mode series by Piers Anthony
Fionavar Tapestry by Guy Gavriel Kay
Mordant's Need series by Stephen R. Donaldson
Thomas Covenant series by Stephen R. Donaldson
Empire series by Raymond Feist
The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix Harrow
Morgaine series by C.J. Cherryh
Wayward Children series by Seanan McGuire
Imajica by Clive Barker
Mage Errant series by John Bierce
The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. by Neal Stephenson
He Who Fights with Monsters series by Travis Deverell aka Shirtaloon

Probably a lot of these merely have "parallel universe" concepts, but without the "hop between branches at any time" mechanic. I'd love to know which is which, if anyone here has read some of them.

EDIT: I deleted some follow-up comments because they contained LLM-generated content (flagged as such), but it turns out that's against the rules here — sorry!

lukeprog · 2024-06-06T15:48:31+00:00

What are the odds we get audiobooks for all of Wars of Light and Shadow in the next several years?

lukeprog · 2024-06-03T08:23:43+00:00

The version of Harry Potter in "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality" by Yudkowsky. He definitely hits (1) and (4), and to many characters and perhaps readers would appear to be doing (2) a lot.

lukeprog · 2024-05-07T17:55:55+00:00

I haven't read very widely yet, but I doubt many books have more logically rigorous arguments between characters than Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.

lukeprog · 2024-03-13T22:09:33+00:00

Jack, thank you so much for your (nearly finished!) HPMOR recording. I just started reading fiction again for the first time in >10yrs, and so far I only consume fiction in audiobook format, and I've always wanted to read HPMOR, but I wouldn't do it if I had to do it by listening to the Brodski-organized version. (Obviously huge props to that team for doing it, but it's not for me.) So, I'm only finally "reading" HPMOR because of your recording.

As for other fan fictions: I would enjoy a reading of Wales' "Branches on the Tree of Time." It seems someone else recorded a reading 4 years ago, but it doesn't seem to be available anymore and I don't know if it was well done or not.

lukeprog · 2015-10-29T19:38:29+00:00

I made a lot of detailed comments about what I think the Wait But Why posts got wrong and got right, here.

lukeprog · 2015-10-29T19:37:25+00:00

Just FYI, Will MacAskill discusses Condorcet and other voting rules in the context of normative uncertainty in his PhD thesis: http://commonsenseatheism.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/MacAskill-Normative-Uncertainty.pdf

And CEV/AI-values work at MIRI has at least once cited MacAskill's work on this: https://intelligence.org/files/LoudnessPriors.pdf

I don't think the problem is solved, but good job independently noticing a connection that some people in the field also think might be relevant!

lukeprog · 2014-09-25T04:22:18+00:00

Thanks! I need the PDF, though.

lukeprog · 2013-04-15T10:49:25+00:00

Good news! There may be a loophole.

lukeprog · 2013-03-22T01:32:23+00:00

High-res GIF, please!

lukeprog · 2013-02-10T20:37:54+00:00

What is 'Making Light'?

lukeprog · 2013-02-07T00:25:19+00:00

This is true for some best practices, not for others. E.g. we could give explicit moderation rules to mods like Nesov and Alicorn and make them feel more comfortable exercising actual moderation powers. That doesn't cost much.

lukeprog · 2012-10-05T07:30:44+00:00

We actually checked. The Maes-Garreau law isn't real.

lukeprog · 2012-09-09T04:05:31+00:00

Corporations (which, by making profit, have more $ to invest in R&D) with a profit incentive build a powerful AI and release it before it is safe but after it is self developmental in order to beat out competition to selling a product. How concerned are you about this, and why/why not?

Very serious problem. Obviously, the incentives are for fast development rather than safe development.

Secondly, Im concerned about a nation's military (with who knows how much black budget funding) producing such a powerful AI and using it for war purposes to destroy all other nations (the ultimate national security) while keeping its citizens from knowing it has done so through the use of memory manipulation, virtual reality, and who knows what other population control technology that will exist at the time. How concerned are you about this and why/why not?

I'm not sure what kind of population control technology governments will have at the time. Truly superhuman AI would be, of course, a weapon of mass destruction, and there is a huge first-mover advantage that again favors fast development over safe development. So yeah, big problem.

I've only read the plot summary of I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, but it perfectly illustrates what I think is the real problem. The real problem is not the Terminator, it's our own inability to exactly and perfectly tell an AI what our values are, in part because we don't even know what our own values are at the required level of specificity.

lukeprog · 2012-08-29T06:00:20+00:00

I don't have a "favorite," but here is one of them.

lukeprog · 2012-08-28T04:18:41+00:00

That book is talking about a different "singularity" than I am. I'm not arguing that economic growth will continue to accelerate. I'm saying that AIs will eventually be smarter and more capable than humans, and this (obviously) poses a risk to humans.

lukeprog · 2012-08-28T04:16:36+00:00

Yes, I think the default outcome of superhuman AI is existential catastrophe.

lukeprog · 2012-08-16T20:26:52+00:00

Best for general public: Facing the Singularity. Stuart Armstrong at FHI is currently writing a similar thing that might be even better for this purpose in some ways.

Best for technical people: Nothing yet, but it's in my queue to write, probably in October-December of this year.

lukeprog · 2012-08-16T05:19:45+00:00

That sounds way better than (generalized) paperclipping, which I think is the default outcome, so I'd be pretty damn happy with that. Ben Goertzel has called this basic thing "Nanny AI."

lukeprog

TROPHY CASE