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Now I've finished reading it, and come up for air, maybe I can start doing other things again. Like posting here, and sleeping.
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality is a web-published serial alternate version of the HP stories, and personally I prefer it to the original. I expect people who love HP will like this: I'm sure people who quite liked HP but were exasperated by some of the plot holes and lack of consistent background logic will love it.
As it says, there "is not a strict single-point-of-departure", but the main is that Harry's adopted parents weren't the Dursleys. Well, not both of them.
"And when I had just graduated from university, I was going out with this boy, Vernon Dursley, he was fat and he was the only boy who would talk to me. And he said he wanted children, and that his first son would be named Dudley. And I thought to myself, what kind of parent names their child Dudley Dursley? It was like I saw my whole future life stretching out in front of me, and I couldn't stand it..."
So with a bit of help from her sister, the witch, she married Professor Michael Verres-Evans (teaching biochemistry at Oxford), and between them they brought up their adopted son to be happy, well-read, and devastatingly intelligent.
So, how does this Harry react to a demonstration that magic is real, given by a witch turning herself into a cat? "You turned into a cat! A SMALL cat! You violated Conservation of Energy! That's not just an arbitrary rule, it's implied by the form of the quantum Hamiltonian!"
Yes, exactly, and 70-odd chapters later, he's still trying to wotk that out.
Then there's the fact that Harry thinks the same way I do about bits of the HP universe. "Who invents the words to these spells, preschool children?"
The more I read of this, the more I think that what we have here is Harry Potter as played by Miles Vorkosigan.
Safety warning. Do not start reading this unless you have time to read all 70+ chapters in one go. They even put a kindly suggestion at the head of one of the chapters that if it's now three hours past your bedtime, don't worry, the story probably won't 404 overnight. I ignored the advice.
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality is a web-published serial alternate version of the HP stories, and personally I prefer it to the original. I expect people who love HP will like this: I'm sure people who quite liked HP but were exasperated by some of the plot holes and lack of consistent background logic will love it.
As it says, there "is not a strict single-point-of-departure", but the main is that Harry's adopted parents weren't the Dursleys. Well, not both of them.
"And when I had just graduated from university, I was going out with this boy, Vernon Dursley, he was fat and he was the only boy who would talk to me. And he said he wanted children, and that his first son would be named Dudley. And I thought to myself, what kind of parent names their child Dudley Dursley? It was like I saw my whole future life stretching out in front of me, and I couldn't stand it..."
So with a bit of help from her sister, the witch, she married Professor Michael Verres-Evans (teaching biochemistry at Oxford), and between them they brought up their adopted son to be happy, well-read, and devastatingly intelligent.
So, how does this Harry react to a demonstration that magic is real, given by a witch turning herself into a cat? "You turned into a cat! A SMALL cat! You violated Conservation of Energy! That's not just an arbitrary rule, it's implied by the form of the quantum Hamiltonian!"
Yes, exactly, and 70-odd chapters later, he's still trying to wotk that out.
Then there's the fact that Harry thinks the same way I do about bits of the HP universe. "Who invents the words to these spells, preschool children?"
The more I read of this, the more I think that what we have here is Harry Potter as played by Miles Vorkosigan.
Safety warning. Do not start reading this unless you have time to read all 70+ chapters in one go. They even put a kindly suggestion at the head of one of the chapters that if it's now three hours past your bedtime, don't worry, the story probably won't 404 overnight. I ignored the advice.