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Comment by anatoly | Hacker News Reader

Worm by Wildbow is also very much worth a try: http://parahumans.wordpress.com/

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.

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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, the story Sam Hughes wrote before Ra, is also really good: http://qntm.org/structure

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

Is there an epub version of Worm?

If not, would the author object to someone scraping their site to make an epub version?

http://parahumans.wordpress.com/f-a-q/

Q2: Will there be an ebook version?

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’.)

They weren't kidding about the fan made versions.

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.

I second the recommendations of both _Worm_ and _Ra_.

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.

I think Wildbow simply finds it more interesting to work on Pact than to work on editing Worm.

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 :)

http://pactwebserial.wordpress.com/

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 has mentioned the timeskip specifically as something he wishes he hadn't done.

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.

Source: Am Wildbow.

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 read the entire comment before getting to the last line :-)

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.

I have characterized Ender's Game as "perfect, if you remove every scene with dialogue and then turn it into a screensaver".

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...?!"

>the big fight with the big L

If it's not too much trouble, I'd like to know what chapter (the beginning of) that is in.

I don't know what they mean by "The Big L", but the first MAJOR fight against an unstoppable opponent begins in Chapter 8.

edit: Oh, as soon as I posted I realized what they meant by L. WHOOPS.

It's chapter 8 (or "arc" 8 as the author calls it).

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 also find the business model to be very interesting as a sign of the times, some more thoughts on that in the aforementioned review: http://jsnell.iki.fi/blog/archive/2014-05-24-book-review-wor...

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).

I've been reading all the Worm fanfic I can find on SpaceBattles. My goodness there's a lot of it. Some even finished!

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.

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