Book Blog #228: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality by Eliezer Yudkowsky

Title: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality
Author: Eliezer Yudkowsky
# of Pages: 2007 (ebook)
Genre: Fan Fiction, Fantasy, Philosophy
Rating: ★★★★☆
Synopsis: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality is a work of alternate-universe Harry Potter fan-fiction wherein Petunia Evans has married an Oxford biochemistry professor and young genius Harry grows up fascinated by science and science fiction. When he finds out that he is a wizard, he tries to apply scientific principles to his study of magic, with sometimes surprising results.
Review: This is probably the best, most well-written fan fiction I've ever read.

This is not your ordinary fan fiction. It's not written by a 12 year old girl in her dark bedroom typing out her pubescent fantasies. Eliezer Yudkowsky is an AI researcher who put a playful twist on the Harry Potter story by making Harry more rational than he is in the original series. When you read HPMOR, you'll forget you're reading something that is technically clumped in the same genre as dracoxharry erotica.

I was wavering between giving HPMOR 3 stars and 4 stars (so it's actual rating is probably more like a 3.5). I loved the beginning and ending third of the book, but some plots made me lose interest in the story (and made me want to stop reading the fic in general).

One example of this would be Hermione's feminism subplot. I'm all for feminism, but the way it was portrayed was foolish and mostly useless to the rest of the story.

The second subplot I didn't enjoy was the ongoing battle between Chaos (Harry's army), Sunshine (Hermione's army), and Dragon (Draco's army). Maybe it's just my overall distaste for reading about a lot of action, but I found myself skimming a lot of those parts.

However, after I finished reading, I couldn't stop thinking about what I read. I browsed the HPMOR subreddit to fill the new void in my life (I've been slowly reading the first half of this book since January and read the second half over the last few days). I like a book that leaves me thinking, thus the additional star.

That being said, it's difficult to rate this book amongst traditionally published books. There are other factors working against it; it didn't get a run through by a professional editor (this could have helped Yudkowsky tie the subplots closer together or remove ones that are unnecessary).

It is also EXTREMELY long (this might be the nature of fan fictions as they are not constrained length-wise as ebooks). Goodreads has this book listed twice; one being one large book and the other being a series of 6 stories (the large book is broken up into 6 parts). If this were a traditionally-published work, this would be closer to how it would appear in book stores.

However, each of these 6 parts is not a self-contained story. It is best read as a whole, back to back, thus should be considered to be one book. The problem with this is 2000 pages is a huge commitment for most readers (I was reading it through the HPMOR website and was wondering why it was taking me so long to get through it). To prevent reading fatigue, this book SHOULD have somehow been broken up into multiple, self-contained parts.

Nevertheless, I would HIGHLY recommend this fan fiction to anyone who is already a fan of the Harry Potter series. Some parts of this fan fiction act as a parody of the original (which includes poking fun at it), but this is a big part of the fun of the book. Not only will it have you thinking about certain situations from the original Harry Potter books more rationally, but it will also have you laughing throughout the journey.