I loved HPMOR for what it is, but I would suggest The Glass Bead Game ("Das Glasperlenspiel") by Hermann Hesse. I read it around the same time as HPMOR and it works its way back into my thoughts more frequently.
If you like novels of ideas, consider this endorsement of it from the 1946 Nobel Prize committee:
In Hesse’s more recent work the vast novel Das Glasperlenspiel (1943) occupies a special position. It is a fantasy about a mysterious intellectual order, on the same heroic and ascetic level as that of the Jesuits, based on the exercise of meditation as a kind of therapy. The novel has an imperious structure in which the concept of the game and its role in civilization has surprising parallels with the ingenious study Homo ludens by the Dutch scholar Huizinga. Hesse’s attitude is ambiguous. In a period of collapse it is a precious task to preserve the cultural tradition. But civilization cannot be permanently kept alive by turning it into a cult for the few. If it is possible to reduce the variety of knowledge to an abstract system of formulas, we have on the one hand proof that civilization rests on an organic system; on the other, this high knowledge cannot be considered permanent. It is as fragile and destructible as the glass pearls themselves, and the child that finds the glittering pearls in the rubble no longer knows their meaning. A philosophical novel of this kind easily runs the risk of being called recondite, but Hesse defended his with a few gentle lines in the motto of the book, «…then in certain cases and for irresponsible men it may be that non-existent things can be described more easily and with less responsibility in words than the existent, and therefore the reverse applies for pious and scholarly historians; for nothing destroys description so much as words, and yet there is nothing more necessary than to place before the eyes of men certain things the existence of which is neither provable nor probable, but which, for this very reason, pious and scholarly men treat to a certain extent as existent in order that they may be led a step further toward their being and their becoming.»
I do think this is begging the question, what others have you read?
I'm a total bigot about HPMOR. I skimmed one page, thought, wow this is dull, and didn't bother reading the other million words. Same with Dan Brown. I might be wrong! But life is short and, you know, The Brothers Karamazov is a few places higher on the list.
But if somebody can't be bothered to make the first 8 chapters any good... you see my point? There's a lot of brilliant, talented authors out there who pour out their lives and souls trying to make great work.
if it's honestly the "wisest work of fiction" you've ever read, you're ngmi. it isn't a well-written or well-constructed work, the ideas it presents don't stand up to scrutiny.
it sounds like you have an impoverished information diet. you need to read more. just anything, I don't have any specific recommendations. if you like "rationalist fiction", read worm maybe? it'll scratch the same itch without having an insufferable ubermensch author insert protagonist.
I did read worm, didn't even come close. If you think HPMOR satiates as you say "an impoverished information diet" then it is by your own definition, very good because it must have a lot of useful information right? I've been exposed to nearly everything it tried to teach before I read it so I don't think I learned all that much from it but his writing style is unparalleled imo. It weaves humor, drama, references to stuff I love in a way nothing else has come close since. There's a reason every popular TV show and movie has references to stuff, because people love it.
What is curious to me is the hate, you could simply say you didn't enjoy it but you are attacking random people on the internet, implying they're dumb because something wasn't to your taste..?
>If you think HPMOR satiates as you say "an impoverished information diet" then it is by your own definition, very good because it must have a lot of useful information right?
... no, I meant that you can't possibly have read much actual quality literature if hpmor is the best you've read. it's like a kid saying chicken tendies are the best food ever.
that exchange you posted is just cringeworthy. dumbledore is lazily written as a complete fool in every scene just so that the self-insert protagonist can easily trounce him (and sometimes with flawed logic, which he is never called out on). this happens with every opponent, aside from quirrel, who is also a creepy weird author self-insert. and then it mangles a lot of the actual science it purports to teach.
I do think that's a bit unfair. I consider one of the morals of HPMoR to be "at every stage, Dumbledore did the only thing he could do to avoid disaster, and everyone was really awful to him for it but he did the right thing anyway as best as he could". What you read as "Harry is the sane one and Dumbledore is a fool", I read as a cautionary tale about what happens when you think you're much smarter than everyone else and you have no idea what's actually going on. "Trouncing" someone is easy; being right is extremely hard.
idk what kind of genius people you've been surrounded by your whole life but dumbledore in that whole chapter presents his philosophy very clearly. Dumbledore is the non-rational soft-hearted man that had to learn his rationality through bitter life lessons instead of books, his character is entirely self consistent and believeable.
You haven't read the book and it shows, it's the only book I've ever read that is in stark contrast to all the rest because every character has its own life and it doesn't feel at all lazily written. Worm on the other hand felt entirely rushed and badly written because of the brisk pace it was released on. Worm didn't feel planned and coherent at all. If your bias with the book started with danluu's review and you confirmed that bias from one page / chapter then I'm truly sorry for you.
Since you seem like you'll never actually read it I'll go ahead and spoil it for you.. Harry's reason for being that wise and smart for his age is because he's basically a 50-year old hyper-rational individual that lost all his memories but kept his patterns of thinking, if that's not a good reason for the smartest 11-year old that ever lived idk what else is.
look, I have read it. I know what the plot is, I know the "justification". I just linked the danluu review because it's a thorough dissection.
other than quirrel, the hpmor characters do not have their own lives, they are pure foils for the self-insert protagonist. they behave in stupid ways to make the plot happen and to make the protagonist look smart. harry and quirrel are like a pair of orbiting black holes; they distort the fabric of the narrative around them so that every direction points towards how "smart" and "awesome" they are.
dumbledore is written as a senile idiot. this is indisputable: "this is your father's rock". yes, there's a payoff to it, no, it doesn't make him less of a senile idiot.
worm is superior in every way despite being rushed, because a) most characters have rich enough internal lives that they could be main characters of their own stories (because they were in discarded drafts), b) the protagonist does both awesome and unhinged things without being an annoying author self-insert, c) it doesn't purport to teach the reader science and then get it wrong.
and worm is just a YA novel, it's not highbrow literature. the last novel I read was Master and Margarita ... go read that I guess. even an uncultured dipshit like me can tell you it's on a whole other plane of quality entirely.
this will be my last reply since I'm in the rate-limit sin bin.
