Not a fan fiction, like HPMoR, but rather a lengthy novel about superheroes and supervillains that takes the subject seriously and with an incredible amount of inventiveness. It may sound lame, but just try it for a chapter or two.
Honestly Worm is probably one of the best superhero stories I've ever read. Wildbow made a really cool world with some crazy superpowers, and then managed to put an amazing story in it. Fair warning, it's ~1.75 million words. It took me a solid month to read.
Another good scifi web fic is Ra: http://qntm.org/ra. It's about a world in which 'magic' was discovered in 1972 by an Indian physicist. The story largely revolves around the search for what 'magic' really is.
Fine Structure was fun. However, it seemed to take several weird turns without warning, but acted like they weren't weird turns, just completely normal. Like brain-uploading suddenly appearing in the middle of one chapter. It felt a lot like the author had proven to himself previously that brain-uploading was logically inevitable in the real world and so there was no need to foreshadow it at all.
Transhumanists tend to share… uncommon assumptions. I for one don't feel that mind-uploading is weird. If we don't blow up ourselves before, its eventual rise is near certain.
The lack of foreshadowing probably wouldn't have shocked me. I'd be very excited about how the author deals with the implications, though: while mind-uploading is relatively mundane, its consequences are huge.
In the context of the story, information is a substance that you can almost shovel around like snow. Brain-uploading isn't an inevitability in the real world but in Fine Structure it's a (relatively) simple application of informational plumbing.
I second Fine Structure. Sam Hughes does excellent short stories too, this one's appeared on HN before, and was how I was introduced to his writing: http://qntm.org/responsibility
A2: I hope to self publish and sell some somewhere down the road. Going to finish the story first and edit things as thoroughly as possible first.
Q2a: Can I have an ebook version for free? I’d like to read offline.
A2a: I have some, but I’d rather not distribute them. There’s unethical sorts who are taking others’ work and claiming it as their own (often with a title/name change) and I’d rather not make it easier for them. I know there’s a few fanmade ebook versions circulating, I accept that it’ll happen, but I don’t want to help the process along.
I’m hoping to get a polished version out at some point. Should you be interested, send me an email at Wildbowpig [at] gmail [dot] com with the subject line ‘WormPublishNews’. I’ll mass-email everyone on that list when the time comes, to let them know about release. (For all worm news, use the subject line ‘WormNews’.)
There's even a Go scraper github that will give you the most up to date version. I donated to wildblow and will probably nab a copy that way.
If this book is virally blowing up so much like this, then the author should get around to self-publishing on Amazon. I donated so I'm probably not a lost sale, but I can't speak for others whose preferred medium is epub.
Worm was so damn good, but I feel obligated to put a warning here. It's not just a lengthy novel, it's an extremely lengthy novel. Starting reading Worm can cause significantly decreased productivity for roughly the next month.
I honestly don't understand how it's not published yet. Yeah, it's extremely lengthy, and may need to get slimmed down in editing, but it's just so good, better by far than most current published SF out there.
Wildbow's new series, which is a story about Occult, Diabolism,and explores a world where mathematical precision is applied against magic and deals with the devil, is also quite good :)
Worm is pretty good, but it runs into the issue that the continuing escalation of the narrative's scope, and a considerable time-skip partway through the story, can (depending on the reader) lose the aspects that drew a reader's interest in the first place.
Now that it's finished, it seems like it would work better if edited into a print or ebook format. The narrative could be split into two or three books with each designed to have self-contained storylines, making the differences in focus and scale less jarring.
It also has the same basic problem that most superhero fiction does, where a lot of the setting as presented is constructed to allow contrived superhero punch-ups and doesn't make that all that much sense in the context of how the characters and their powers would actually affect the world.
This problem is kind of a given if you want people running around in colorful costumes and capes, though, unless it's a setting where superhumans have only just appeared, like in the excellent novel Turbulence (http://www.amazon.com/Turbulence-Samit-Basu-ebook/dp/B00B0LP...).
Wildbow didn't state that. In fact, he's compared GRRM's issues with later GoT books to the fact that GRRM needed but ultimately decided against/was forced to avoid a timeskip.
Wildbow stated that the timeskip suffered for poor execution and a lot of IRL stuff that was going on at the time (including a semi-forced 2 week break from all internet/computer stuff mid-arc), and he intends to rewrite it and cover different bases for the published final version.
Hey, since bumping into this thread (have read much of HPMOR) I decided to check out Worm and it's excellent - have read ~1000 pages (out of around 10K on my device), half on the site and half on, for convenience's sake, an ebook version I found floating around. I'll be donating in a second here, but I really would rather (for whatever reason) have made it a transaction and bought a copy in some legit epub or mobi form from you, the author.
It's a bit late to hope for a response, but I'm somewhere around 7.08 - should I wait for a revision or just read on and revise my opinion later? At any rate thanks for writing and I hope you get the book deal you very richly deserve.
I'm re-reading Worm currently, and keep thinking about what an awesome HBO/Netflix series it would make. I've been waiting patiently for the end of HPMoR. Have also read Ra, but Ra (and Fine Structure) both start going off the rails at some point, and I find it hard to follow.
All need a solid editor, but they're awesome and I can't believe the big publishing houses don't have people looking for stuff like this.
I've been thinking the same thing. Worm would be great on HBO or Netflix, an extended drama that could give proper time to let the world and characters be expanded.
At the same time I wonder how they could convey all the details of rational thinking, internal dialogue and the like. I think it has the same issue the film of Ender's Game had in that it's just hard to include those details from an external perspective.
I keep thinking what the lead-up to the last big battle would look like. (You know what I'm talking about.) It's usually set to electronica in my head.
I think you could tell most of the story non-verbally: a good character actor should be able to get across most of the emotions. Put some more of that into conversations and I think you could get there.
(Aside: my issue with Ender's Game was that it felt "small": the whole movie felt like it occurred over a long weekend or something. There was no sense of complexity or time.)
AD. your issue with Ender's Game - mine was a bit similar. The whole movie felt like the book on fast-forward (you know, videotapes and FFWD button). I saw my friends who haven't read the book beforehand come out of cinema with confusion and not being really sure what the movie was about.
I hated the movie for the reason listed above. Visuals were great, and acting was OK, but the book has such gravitas, and it felt low rent. My wife, who hasn't read the book, liked it.
Seconding this one. I still haven't finished yet (on chapter 21/30 so far) but I've been quite impressed with it. I will say that it's important to get past the first couple sections, as the "high school" setting initially didn't grab me, but once it got into the world of capes it captured my attention. It's just nice to have characters that actually think things through and don't fall for the typical tropes of the genre.
I was undecided about it right up until the big fight with the big L in one of the early chapters. That was so emotionally captivating, so epic and detail-rich at the same time, I was just walking around in disbelief afterwards going "What the hell did I just read?! How... but how...?!"
I really like Worm (read through it once, then reread about 90% of it when preparing to write a review). My experience from recommending it a few times is that if people get a few chapters in, it's probably going to be a lot of very late nights of reading. The world building is some of the best I've ever seen, and Wildbow is really good at setting up cliffhangers that just make you read one more chapter. Probably a requirement for the web serial format.
I'm on my second read through of Worm, and it still sucks my time away almost as badly as the first! I had numerous nights where I'd read until 3 or 4 am when I had to drag myself into work the next day (and read it on the commute).
If you're looking to start reading Worm, and you want to do so in manageable chunks, you might try https://www.comic-rocket.com/explore/worm/ . That'll let you read it page-by-page (of its 306 pages) and note wherever you stop so you can return later.
What people complaining about "insufferable tone", "author inserts", etc. seem to miss is that HPMOR is not a completely stand-alone story. Eliezer is trying to get across some ideas about rationality, game theory and bayesian statistics he previously described at lenght in his non-fiction writings[0], and he often indirectly refers to them. Having read those posts before discovering HPMOR I very much enjoyed the first chapters and didn't find any "insufferable tone", but I can understand how some of the text can be confusing to people who haven't read Eliezer's blog posts before.
I didn't read the Sequences (mostly, it must be said, because they were boring), enjoyed the first few chapters, didn't mind the insufferable tone, and just ignore the unsubtle preaching. I'm more bothered by That Major Story Event in the 90s chapters than his authorial quality, really.
What worries me most about that last arc is the possibility that we have to solve the plot before it turns into a sad ending. Eliezer has mentioned the possibility before, and even has done something similar before.
We may want to read HPMOR again before the last arc goes out, in the hope of gleaning that crucial piece of information that may save the plot.
For those put off by the first few chapters, I highly recommend you try to stick with it, or skip the first 10 chapters. This story starts out with a rather insufferable tone, but after that, it becomes a lot of fun. It's what the author calls "rational fiction", meaning that there are mysteries in it that you can solve, given enough thought (unlike most of the mystery genre).
Personally, I was introduced to the story via a link to the chapter involving experiments with a time turner to factor products of large primes, or solve any other NP-style problem whose solution is easy to check but hard to find: http://hpmor.com/chapter/17
You can safely read up through the result of that experiment without any major spoilers for reading the story from the beginning. If that humor amuses you, you'll likely enjoy the rest of the story.
Also, if you find characters in the first chapters insufferable, it might be worth revisiting them after getting more used to the characters via the later chapters. The "insufferability" is actually addressed in-story and in-character, with some specific reasons given for why people might react that way.
Agreed. It started out rather insufferable, but had a good enough concept (somebody trying to figure out how magic actually works) an a good enough execution on that concept, that it was a very enjoyable read anyway. Recently, he's largely abandoned the "figure out how magic actually works" part in favor of the not terribly interesting plot and characters.
If you do not value rationality and believe in the primary of the truth, you will hate it. This is not an apolitical story, it is in many ways a manifesto.
I am very sure you could value rationality and still hate the writing. Terms like 'valuing rationality' or believing in the primacy of truth (I think that's what you meant) don't have universally accepted definitions.
A rational person might readily find the novel to an Eliezer Yudkowsky's propaganda-novel along the lines of an Ayn Rand novel, and not find it a well written or enjoyable story. The number of parallels between Rand and Yudkowsky are really fascinating to me, Rand and Yudkowsky really seem to be birds of a feather.
The converse of the original statement is that if you hate the writing, you don't value rationality and truth. You didn't state the converse, you seem to have taken it as a starting point and disproved it. But nobody was arguing the converse was true, which was my point.
You are right, I stated the alternate case of those who value rationality and truth as opposed to those who do not, rather than the converse. Sorry, I was being too loose with my language there.
As to what the other was arguing, I was chiming in, not posing a critique, so your point is peripheral. In discussions one is permitted to add thoughts that are related without it being some kind of intellectual sparring. If I were sparring I'd have debated the claim that those who don't value rationality and truth would dislike the book (which is a hard claim to justify), but that would have been a pointless exercise since I don't really care. I did care to point out that rational, truth-seeking people could find that the book was unbearable, since that was my experience and something I thought was worth noting. If you disagree, then please feel free to explain, I'd be interested to learn how rational people must agree that it was a well written piece of fan fiction.
I don't disagree. I just thought your comment, when taken as an individual statement, was obvious enough that it didn't need to be said (at least not again). I chose to interpret it as a refutation, which was my mistake.
It intuitively appeals to me that people in cults might not have the self-awareness to debate their own cultishness, but, then, I don't really know anyone in a cult. At one point I did meet a couple at a party who were involved in... something... that involved homeopathy and a spiritual leader. And they chuckled and said that they might be in a cult.
That said, having read most of LessWrong, my impression was that what is said there is mostly obvious in retrospect. Like, "Of course, how could I not see that?". My guess is, I already believed most of the sequences before I even read them.
When a community matches my own world view so closely, I just can't feel any cult, and I tend to assume there is none.
> That said, having read most of LessWrong, my impression was that what is said there is mostly obvious in retrospect. Like, "Of course, how could I not see that?". My guess is, I already believed most of the sequences before I even read them.
I had exactly the same reaction. Most of it seemed obvious in retrospect. Heck, few years ago (when I had a lot more of free time) I spent many weeks thinking about how could I code a smart virtual assistant/proto-AI. Then later, after reading the sequences I realized that I figured out many of described concepts myself, except I lacked the proper formalisms and maybe haven't thought some things thoroughly enough.
It's actually fairly typical for cults to rationalize and explain away their cultish behaviors. That's not to argue that the lesswrong group is a cult, just that it's not any kind of argument against it.
My take is that during the first 12-15 chapters or so, LessWrong was using the context of the Potter-verse as a pretext to write about his vision on what constitutes "rationality", which may be called "Bayesianism", but I am not really sure. And YES, this part is insufferable. I found that dialogs between Harry and McGonagall were specially awful since those pushed me out of suspension of disbelief almost on a sentence by sentence basis.
The history however gets better, at least in the sense that the author stops preaching through the main characters and begins to actually write a story. There are multiple ways this story may offend a portion of its readers, so it is not for every one, but strictly speaking the flow gets better after the first few chapters.
Without giving spoilers away, some of the things that tend to annoy people the most are:
* Whether the main character (Harry) is a mary sue or not.
* The promotion or demotion of certain support characters in comparison with the canon.
* The value system of the author, which keeps leaking through the whole story and may touch one sensible fiber or another from time to time.
Personally, these issues do not bother me a lot. However I am aware of the shortcomings and would set the story a PG-18+ rating. While it is one of my guilty pleasures, I would not stand any of my children dwell in this kind of "rationality porn" before they have had some exposure to the real world and have pondered over some of the ethical issues that are fiercely debated in our society.
There's a line somewhere in the story where I think Harry is delighted to have found at Hogwarts a group of people who talk like people in novels instead of all the other people he knows from school. It's a line that resonated with me for sure but gets at some of what I don't like about this philosophy.
Is it done yet? I refuse to read it again until it is. It has, so far, sucked in a week of my time twice, because I had to re-read all of it to remember how the new chapters came about.
It's really great writing (as sirsar says, after a while) - at least, I enjoyed it. But it does keep going well after you think it would.
Warning: the (real world) point of the fanfic is to recruit people into a cult whose goal is to prevent evil artificial intelligence from taking over the world.
> to prevent evil artificial intelligence from taking over the world
Many smart people find good reasons to care about that. But even if it's a personal goal for the author, it doesn't mean it's what he wants other people to do.
> I've never heard of Paul Graham saying or doing a single thing that smacks of cultishness
I love how he implicitly acknowledges that he does a lot of things that smacks of cultishness :)
But yes, believe it or not, I was the first person who posted "Paul Graham Ate Breakfast" as a comment in reddit, and someboy created a fake news webpage and submitted it.
> I love how he implicitly acknowledges that he does a lot of things that smacks of cultishness :)
Well he does and doesn't hide from it, and the "Eliezer Cult" is a running joke on LessWrong. Someone close to him even made a cover for his writings [0] ;).
Most of his writings are basic maths + some good thinking, but there are points where he holds opinions many find eccentric. He also discusses cults at length, you might find [1] interesting ;).
That is hard to assess. Apparently, AI requires more insights than hard work. Hard work is predictable, and gives us things like Moore's law. Insight on the other hand, can emerge at any time.
When we solve those insights, we will be more able to accurately estimate when AI is due. It may be no time at all however, if hardware proves to be capable enough already.
Funny there's always this one little thing one can bring up to point that a non-mainstream group is definitely a cult and thus are a bunch of loons :).
I used to be involved with a religious group many outsiders consider to be a cult. There was always this event that everyone outside kept bringing up - that one little prediction 40 years ago that some people took too seriously and ended up making stupid life decisions. (I'm not close to that group anymore, but I still value those people as the most honest and consistent in their thinking folks I ever met)
Yes, people who extrapolate things from their beliefs to guide their life decisions can and do make mistakes. They will reach stupid conclusions and believe them until they figure out that those conclusions are stupid and rethink things again. I still respect them more than the usual crowd (both in religious and non-religious groups) who claim to believe (or believe that they believe) one thing and actually believe something else. I value consistency in thinking.
EDIT:
Disclaimer, before I get labelled as a cult priest for replying in the cult thread for the fourth time: I have my pet peeve with cult accusations, because I've been close with many groups accused of cultishness - both religious and secular, and I know how this is an impossible accusation to defend from. If you try to tell "hey, it's not a cult, because X" then it's definitely a cult, because that's obviously what a cult member would say.
Also, you want to see real cults? Try political parties ;).
There's some pretty salient characteristics of an actual cult that make it different from just a group of very devoted followers. Namely:
- Cults usually employ a number of heavy-handed psychological manipulation techniques, often together (e.g. 12-hour conference sessions; speakers that drone on at at about 50 beats per minute; loud, lengthy chanting that exhausts your brain's oxygen and makes you less critical; preying on people who are desperate for some reason)
- It's not enough for a cult to have you as a member - they also have to remove the influence of other movements from your life, lest you might realise who stupid it all is and break off. So part of a cult's mode of control will involve breaking off your relationships with other groups important in your life: family, religion, work... and replacing them with social ties within the cult.
- Cults generally require escalating levels of contribution. At first maybe you just need to donate a bit of money, but by the end your entire life is at the service of the cult.
If the accused cult doesn't fit any of these criteria, it's probably not a cult, just a bunch of very devoted zealots. If it fits even one of these criteria, start to worry. If it fits more than one, it's almost certainly a "bad" cult.
Source: my dad's a psychologist and studied cults, but this is just from memory.
I don't think they are a cult in the strict sense. They are a lot like Objectivists, a group who got into an autodidact offering grand claims based on a lot of jargon and handwaving, throwing out invented jargon and redefining terms creatively, and with a bad habit of narcissistically dismissing anything that doesn't fit the model. Since their intellectual, EY, is an autodidact who isn't trained/involved in the fields he claims to have expertise in, there's no body of peers there who will put him in line as he wanders in error, and naturally he's naively dismissive of the academics/experts who bother to offer critiques, or hand-waves away critiques with impenetrable jargon.
They are more frustratingly ignorant, over-certain of thing that are far from knowable, than a cult. People really want to be certain, they want answers, and they will latch onto all kinds of things to get it, even believing in an 'friendly AI' as an ersatz God, with an inevitable singularity as an ersatz rapture, and quantum mechanics substituting for metaphysics.
"Silly over-extrapolations of local memes, jargon and concepts are posted to LessWrong quite a lot; almost all are just downvoted and ignored. But for this one, Eliezer Yudkowsky, the site's founder and patriarch, reacted to it hugely. The basilisk is completely banned from discussion on LessWrong, where almost any mention of it is deleted.[4]"
The "what if" concept is an interesting one, but you can really only keep that up for a few chapters, to show how all the obvious consequences will pan out.
After that, the author has to create additional divergences to justify an original story line, particularly with respect to Quirrell. There is a bit too much emphasis on deconstructing the very powerful, yet somehow mysteriously unimportant, plot devices from the source material, particularly the time turners.
Yes, a device that allows you to travel backwards in time that is somehow available to barely competent wizarding students probably would not have been used once as a plot device and discarded forevermore. But there is such a thing as the MST3K rule: it's just a book; I should really just relax. We purposefully ignore more details like the fact that spacecraft drive systems powerful enough to not be boring must necessarily be powerful enough to completely demolish whatever interesting plot we had in mind, simply because it gets in the way of the story. If you look at Star Wars, you know in your rational mind--from the first moment a hyperdrive engages--that Death Stars are not the best way to destroy planets, but you throw popcorn at that part of your brain and scream at it to shut up and watch the movie.
HPMoR doesn't throw that popcorn. It enthusiastically joins in, and spoils the suspension of disbelief for everyone.
But there is that one little bit of the very first original HP book that justifies the premise. It didn't even make it into the film version. Prof. Snape protects the MacGuffin with a logic puzzle, rather than magic, because the vast majority of wizards are completely unfamiliar with common sense.
But you can't have a hyperrational wizard among cloudcuckoolander wizards, in the same way that you can't have an interstellar hyperdrive that doesn't destroy planets. Because then you end up with an undestroyable horcrux and a first-year wizarding student who performs tasks nearly without assistance that a full caper crew of adults might find insurmountable. Your suspension of disbelief just has to attach to the chassis at a different point.
From where I'm sitting, this is an inappropriate level of spoilers to include in a comment here. Could you perhaps edit (or cut) your next to last sentence?
Or just prefix with a spoiler warning. However I think they are appropriate. Some people need a little more incentive to start reading or watching something besides a link to it, or an empty recommendation from a friend or community, and the "spoilers" often found in some reviewer's blurb on a back of a book/movie box serve that purpose well. And anyway, those "spoilers" from the perspective of the whole story are really just cool little blurbs about what you might expect without spoiling the actually interesting parts of how, why, and the aftermath.
A succinct blurb about what to expect plot-wise could be something like "covers many of the events of the actual series, but all in the first year and more rationally". If someone has read the canon HP books, they can probably infer Azkaban, Horcruxes, Polyjuice, portkeys, Quidditch, and so on will make an appearance in some fashion. They might not think about the time turner though, and if you're trying to get someone to read the book, and that someone knows about NP problems, mentioning the author addresses possibly solving NP problems with time travel, that's such a small spoiler but can pique the interest enough that someone may read it who otherwise wouldn't have. (Can you get talk about NP problems in fiction outside of sci-fi? Would you expect it from a Harry Potter fanfic?)
To be fair, the bit about the horcrux is speculation. The author never explicitly states what that particular character was actually doing at that particular event of real-world historical importance. But anyone with two brain cells to rub together and some ability at predicting the behavior of storybook villains could figure it out.
I had skipped the first few chapters (as had been suggested by others) and then started reading. I really liked the bits where Harry tried to figure out the nature of magic by using the scientific method (do wizards call upon magical power directly? or are their magic words and gestures simply controls for a sort of machine which unleashes the real power? Does magical ability follow Mendelian genetics? What kinds of materials can we make using magic?)
Later on, it got bogged down in an intra-school magic battle and Hermione and her crew attempting to be recognized as heroes, and that's where I stopped. It just seemed like the author gave up the whole "Methods of Rationality" thing and decided to write straight fanfic: stories and situations in which he'd like to see the characters. I gave up on it.
People seem to either love this book or vocally hate it with passion. There doesn't seem to be much middle ground, or at least those people never speak up.
I suspect it's because the world itself breaks along those lines.
It's a bit like how Republicans and Democrats look to a non-statist a hell of a lot like how Protestants and Catholics look to an atheist: they agree on far, far more fundamental things than their actual disagreements, which are mostly at the edges, not at the core.
Similarly, whenever Randian-style "reason" is promoted as it is in Methods (to a degree), the world breaks strongly on people who really, REALLY like that sort of thing, and people who truly, absolutely hate it with a passion.
(Funny anecdote: a friend of ours in college—a mild, sweet, good-tempered female—tried to read Any Rand's "Anthem" in the school library one day and physically threw the book against the wall she was so upset by it!)
Actually, I like the Harry Potter takedowns he does, but I find the zomgrationality bits boring and just skip the preaching.
As fanfiction, it is surprisingly good prose. But you know, it's still fanfiction, namely Harry Potter fanfiction, and thus has trouble actually rising above that. I like Darths and Droids for the same reason.
I think that the divide might stem from the fact that initially, HPMOR was mostly "zomgrationality preaching" in the form of fan-fic, not the other way around. Maybe this changed recently; I haven't read the last 20 or so chapters.
MoR? Bleh. It's basically a half-inch away from a self-insert story, with every Doylist weakness in the narrative brutally exploited in a Watsonian manner and every other character made into a drooling moron so that Harry can be a genius by comparison.
I much prefer stories like Applied Cultural Anthropology, which takes the informed attributes of characters and runs with them to better flesh out the background and to give every character, including the villains, more Doylist competence.
I don't think that's a fair analysis of the characters as the story progresses (except maybe for Ron, but who likes Ron anyway?) How far into HPMOR did you get?
I have my issues with the rest of the series, but I really liked the part where Ron says "if you are a friend of Malfoy, you can't be my friend" and Harry tells him to go pound sand. It's just a horrible thing for the supposed heroes of the original book to roll along with.
You could argue that the original JKR work also portrays Dumbledore in a somewhat unflattering light. (He sent children after known dark wizards on multiple occasions, lied to Harry on several occasions, arguably stood by while Sirius was sentenced, etc.) As readers, we like Dumbledore, but he is hardly a paragon of virtue. I rather enjoy how MOR spins that.
Yeah, I did not like that one either. Though claiming that Dumbledore is portrayed as a "drooling moron" there (or anywhere else for the matter) is not precisely correct.
Read on. Dumbledore is clearly one of the smartest characters in the book, not a drooling moron at all. He puts on a pretence of being completely bonkers to confuse his enemies, but he's very smart and thinks fifteen steps ahead (just one short of Harry...) and is one of the few characters in the book who's an Agent rather than an NPC.
As for the other characters, their level of agency varies, but at the very least Quirrel, Hermione and Draco are also agents (i.e. smart enough to be capable of driving the story in a meaningful way), and the other characters are portrayed fairly accurately given their stupidity in the original books.
In the original book, ALL the characters are stupid. In HP:MoR, 5 characters are not stupid. I think that's an improvement.
Another interesting take along these lines (although intended as just a story rather than as educational material) is "A Study In Magic" [1]. It's a Harry Potter/BBC's Sherlock crossover. The Dursley's were killed (in a Moriarty plot), and Holmes and Watson end up adopting Harry. He has learned a lot from Holmes and Watson, and brings this knowledge to Hogwarts. Holmes takes quite an interest in the criminal aspects of the wizarding world.
Not that I know of, other than grabbing each chapter with something like curl or wget (change the /1/ in the URL to /n/ to get chapter n), processing it to extract the text, and concatenating them, and then sending that to your Kindle over USB or by mailing it to your Amazon "send to my Kindle" address.
If you change the www in the URL to m, you get the mobile version, which has less complicated HTML, which might make extracting the text easier.
You could also try reading it online in the Kindle browser. I have not tried reading anything from fanfiction.net there, so I don't know how well that works.
"'I don't see why it wouldn't be,' Harry said. 'A buckytube is just a graphite sheet wrapped into a circular tube, basically, and graphite is the same stuff used in pencils -'"
Graphite is used in pencils by being mixed with clay and compressed, then heated in a kiln. It's essentially a ceramic. Diamonds, pure graphite, buckminsterfullerenes, etc., are pure carbon.
I love the story, and am currently waiting for the next installment.
One very tiny nitpick is about the title; the story is (at least currently) intended for web-based distribution, and in Chrome (Mac), Chrome (Windows), and Firefox (Mac), the title when rendered in the tab bar is truncated to "Harry Potter and the Meth", which frankly I'm embarrassed to have on my screen. A simple change such as using "&" instead of "and" would fix this.
I tried reading this, and I found that I wasn't a fan for two very specific reasons: First, Harry is imbued with a level of knowledge you'd be hard pressed to find at the world's top universities, and that always takes me out of a story. Its not his intelligence that bothers me, but the fact that he's a veritable walking scientific encyclopedia. Secondly, by adding rationality to Harry, the author also seems to have added a healthy dose of irrational fears. There's a moment that is the polar opposite of the original stories where harry decides that "voldemort" is a terrifying name and should be replaced with with "He-who-must-not-be-named". Which is silly and a clear misunderstanding of what drives harry potter and a clear misunderstanding of what "rationality" means.
Also, I hate to bring this on, but is it possible to set a dead man switch to distribute your unedited notes on the final arc... just in case you get hit by a bus over the next couple of months/years?
I really enjoyed reading this, although after satirizing how contrived the original harry potter is, in the later chapters the story itself becomes somewhat contrived.
I read a few dozen chapters of this while I was laid up sick a few years ago and after the first few it was with increasing revulsion and curiosity of just how terrible it would get.
Not a fan fiction, like HPMoR, but rather a lengthy novel about superheroes and supervillains that takes the subject seriously and with an incredible amount of inventiveness. It may sound lame, but just try it for a chapter or two.