Alicorn

This story is a bit of a reconstruction of the Twilight storyline via the alternate-reality mechanism of altering some fundamental characteristic(s) of the protagonist.

I found this story pretty engaging. It's definitely better than both the snippets of the original Stephenie Meyer books that I've read and the impression of it I have from reading others' descriptions of having read the original.

While this gets categorized as "ratfic" (or "rational fiction") for obvious reasons, I find that beyond some early emphasis on how the protagonist thinks about things using a semi-standardized set of questions, that quickly fades into the background. Thereafter, the intrusion of "ratfic" into the Twilight world in this story mostly revolves around these deviations:

1. The protagonist is curious enough to follow loose threads in the weave of most people's expectations, where the canon characters are pretty much all just deeply incurious in much the same way many software developers never think to question whether floating point number implementations in their programming languages actually do what they expect. To put it another way, most people never bother to be curious enough about the ingredients on some food product from a supermarket to learn that when it says "dextrose" in the ingredient list that means it includes added sugar.

2. The protagonist follows the pattern (established by [b:Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality|10016013|Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality|Eliezer Yudkowsky|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1293582551l/10016013._SY75_.jpg|14911331]) of formulating breathtakingly ambitious plans to eliminate all human death. This is a clearly rational thing to do if one has the capacity for it, and both the sudden realization magic is real and the sudden realization immortal vampires exist (and humans can become them) should serve as great sources of inspiration to look into eliminating death. On the other hand, it's also not the only Hard Problem to solve. While Harry in HPMOR sets about manufacturing rational allies to pursue ambitious plans, though, Bella in Luminosity goes it alone.

The results of Bella's lonely pursuit of the end of death are predictable. She overestimates her chances of success, underestimates the dangers involved, fails to consider consequences of her short-term approaches to long-term plans, and makes other mistakes that arise when one doesn't get an outsider viewpoint to check one's work.

I'm a little disappointed in the unreality of one particular aspect of this book and, to a lesser extent, also to HPMOR: the fact that actually coming to correct conclusions and articulating them well is evidently convincing to many people. In the real world, those two factors have very little to do with one's chances of success. Perhaps people in the LessWrong, Bayesian Conspiracy, pragmatic rationalism subculture(s) suffer from some amount of selection bias, in that they join a community that attracts people more susceptible than most to logic/reason, and forget that this is a community self-selecting for such characteristics, while just being presented with people in any subculture at all who are not necessarily prone to more rational thinking yields very different results in the susceptibility of such people to logic/reason, or even substantive evidence.

While HPMOR continued to be excellent throughout, I found that Luminosity felt less well-developed as it went on: more sparsely finished, less polished. It never got to the point of being bad, but it became less great, the writing itself less absorbing, over time -- as if the author started losing a little inspiration for the act of writing in and of itself. The events, on the other hand, drove me on anyway. I was invested by that point.

It doesn't have an ending, exactly. It stops on an intermission, basically. It's time to pick up the sequel, Radiance, next.

I'm conflicted about whether to give it three or four stars. I'll just pick one, and maybe change my mind later (perhaps several times). As I hinted above, though, it's definitely interesting enough for me to want to read the next book. I suspect how the sequel plays out will alter my sense of how many stars this book deserves, in some way. I hope it's a positive change.… (mais)