Oh la la.

Not seeing anything. This just popped up on my RSS...?

Shnakepup, click Thaumic City

YES YES YES YES YES YES. I've missed Sam's fiction wayyyyyyyy too much.

Also, please tell me you're going to do more on Magic NASA. Because those stories were AWESOME.

I swear I've already read this. Posted somewhere else on the site? Or I've had the absolute most amazing deja-vu.

Oh, I'm glad to be seeing you doing fiction again.
I have missed your narrative style.

+1 to the four posts above me. It is BEYOND AWESOME that we will finally have some propper fiction to look forward to again!

By the way, does the magic in "Ra" still operate on the "you need to believe"-basis?

You're not wrong. He has already wrote this one, when he did that 'a-story-every-day-during-a-month' challenge. It ends with [censored due to spoilers]. I am glad he is revisiting it. Maybe now we will see how the rest of the story goes? Will Laura manage to [censored due to spoilers]?

To quote my comment from elsewhere:

You should assume that NaNoWriMo is entirely "non-canon" and that Ra is a whole new story. Anything that is being reused, you'll know I'm reusing it because I'll reuse it explicitly. For example, you shouldn't assume that magic Space Shuttles exist, or that Laura Ferno is her own adoptive grandmother.

But I want to see the end of that story!!! :'(

I never wrote an end to that story. You'll have to figure out one of your own, sorry!

This is so awesome.

As always your work is fiercely inspiring!

RSS posted "What You Don't Know" ahead of time. What happened, Sam?

What You Don't Know
from Things Of Interest
Ra » Previously Dr. Dan Czarnecki arrives at the lecture theatre thirty seconds after the lecture was supposed to begin and stalks down to the front through a noisy cloud of conversations-in-progress. He throws his leather briefcase at a chair, grabs a marker pen from the nearest shelf and begins scrawling a board-wide equation on the far left whiteboard. His handwriting is appalling, even worse on the board than it is on the heavily photocopied notes he sometimes remembers to hand out. Today, the marker pen is running out. Czarnecki realises this halfway through the equation, glares at what he's written, glares at the pen, caps it and hurls it overarm into the waste paper bin at the other end of the wide, mainly circular stage. The bin is metal, and there's a sharp and satisfying tang as it catches the pen. Czarnecki finishes the equation with a different colour. Only then does he turn around and start removing his gloves, hat and coat. This is also the point at which he will start speaki...

It's not finished yet (marked as hidden, you shouldn't be able to see it). Obviously a problem with my RSS generator doodad.

It's also in the Sitemap, just so you know.
So will it be reposted in the RSS in some way? Or will I have to check back periodically? Personally I don't mind either way, I only *just* started using RSS feeds so it wont make a difference to me though naturally there are others who have probably used them for years.

Hey- comments are disabled on Broken 'Verse.

That said, oh damn here comes fakebenj.

Who are you and why hadn't I heard of you before? This is great work. It scratches an itch deep in engineer-me.

patiently refreshing qntm.org every day for an update on this brilliant piece of work

Amen to that.

I never realized how much I missed this until I found it. Up until now, whenever I've read a magic-based book, I've generated a system of physics to fit it. But actually reading something that has a system of magical physics in place ... it's soothing. I didn't realize how hard my brain was working to compensate for author's inconsistencies until I didn't have to. This is awesome.

Theory-- Rachel ferno was possessed by the same or similar thing as benj was during the events of the shuttle failure.
I find this more likely than her having a ton of knowledge far beyond everyone and not sharing it.

More comments, after re reading the whole story I noticed some pretty cool re occurring themes. Specifically the conflict between rationale slow thought and passionate progress is repeated three times in the story: in the discovery of magic the son makes assumptions which he reacts angry to while the father is jut trying to verify an observation, Laura and her sister talking about how magic may not occur in space, and the patient discovery of the Jesus machine.

Add in the presence of some anachronistic powerful organization with magic far advanced beyond current technology, the narrative is set up to be an exploration of progress--how should it happen and what if it happens uncontrollably fast?

Also, Sam seems to really like the idea that there is a possible utopia awaiting humans (as seen in fine structure and Ed stories) that we are barred from. I'd be interested if this narrative confirms this hypothesis or if it asserts the problems of progress--magic being used violently, for example. It's worth noting that all the super powerful organization has done so far is kill people.

These notes were based on the latest story being the one with the introduction of The Past and The King, etc.

It's not a utopian future that humans are barred from, so much as a utopian future *that humans must fight for*. In Fine Structure, of course, an actual cosmic being has to be fought. In Ra, the situation is a little more complicated.

I am now checking this page every single day for updates. It took me a few chapters to get hooked on Ra the way I was with Fine Structure, but I really like where this is going.

Mike, you will drive yourself crazy that way. Get a feed reader and subscribe to http://qntm.org/rss.php?ra

I too am avidly awaiting Any new postings on this story;
As I exclaimed to an acquaintance: "if this is the best hard scifi I ever get to read then I am perfectly content"

Minor nitpick: shouldn't Invisibility theory go here, too?

Sam, have you ever read the Young Wizards series?

No. You should assume I'm illiterate.

Hah, it's just that it has a similar concept. Of course Young Wizards is nowhere near as intricate and science-y as Ra, but it is pretty awesome.

Yeah. Young wizards is good. I think I've read it like 3 or 4 times. Much less sciency, but magic is programming and entropy is important, etc. Somewhere between modern fantasy and soft sci-fi, depending on which book you're reading.
I should read Ra now that it's long enough; the total time it takes me to read Fine Structure is about 3 hours (I'm on read 3, and come back to it every 4 or so months). I can't figure why I never noticed the at least superficial similarity between Ra and Young Wizards before. Come to think of it, Fine Structure also has a similarity in Eka (it may be more than superficial, but I've never been able to satisfy myself whether Eka is a source of knowledge or the actual framework of thought needed for the Klick device and some of the other stuff that people do. I'm going with the former.).
I think Ra is the only thing left of yours I've never read, mostly because of my self-imposed don't-read-uncompleted-series rule, and this comment has gone off on a tangent.

I'm re-reading this and wow, the first few chapters are quite weak, aren't they?

Yeah, not a lot that's interesting takes place. You should really put up a minifeed for all new comments on the site so that people can actually respond.

If you're thinking of doing a rewrite, I assure you that Fine Structure needs it far more desperately. I couldn't even follow the basic plot on the first read; I pieced it together from multiple rereadings and by going through your explanations in the comments.

For what it's worth, I don't think the first few chapters are weak. To me, they feel like the part at the start of a rollercoaster where you're getting cranked up the big hill. They're more or less essential to the story, and while they move relatively slowly, there's a building menace/mystery to them, and once the story really takes off, you're grateful for the setup.

I say this as someone who binge-reread the whole series a few days ago.

I couldn't find this on GoodReads so I created it there: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22635765-ra

If there was already a page there it can be merged to that one; if you have a goodreads account, you can claim to be qntm and link the author page to yours; if you don't have a goodreads acount, you can create one and do the above.

I was directed here on a link posted by the author of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, I will have to go and thank him for this, I love your work, just read the entirety of "Ra" as far as Machine Death (currently most recent posted chapter) in the last day and a half. Thank you so much for doing what you do!

Exactly this ^ - this is a brilliant story, and I'm going to go insane waiting for both this *and* HPMOR to be finished!

This is easily top five, maybe top three, out of all the fiction I've ever read. Fantastic story and like the others on that list I have stumbled upon it before its completion.

The only thing you could have *possibly* done better is to rename Nick Laughon. If only for the sake of the cosmically awful "Dante's In Ferno" pun.

I also came over on the HPMOR boat. Good work! I had a great week binge reading :)
I'm watching closely for the epic conclusion!

This is incredible. High-concept blend of philosophy and computer science, avoiding all the usual existentialist and transhumanist tropes and saying new things about both. Really solid characters.

You mentioned that you find the early chapters weak? I don't think so. With something like this, where "truth" (whatever that means) just keeps turning out to have another onion-layer enveloping everything we thought we knew... Well, it's really hard to get the reader on the same page as the author. The buildup NEEDED to be slow. We all needed to learn the rules, so that we could be astonished when they were broken.

Very much looking forward to the resolution! :D

I'm having difficulty opening the epub file. My Android tablet recognizes it as a txt file so when it opens with a document reader, it's gibberish. I tried moving it to my nook reader, but it doesn't recognize it. Any suggestions?

Odd. The first EPUB link is served as text/html and opens fine in my browser's ereader. The second is served as text/plain. I don't know why the web server is making this distinction. I don't think this is due to the file extension on the second file (which a very naive server might interpret as "3-thru-work.epub"). It must be something to do with the files' content?

I'll need to do some research. In the mean time, what happens if you download the EPUB locally and then open the local file with your ereader?

The problem with the second file is likely that it doesn't have the correct "magic number" for an ePub file. (Basically, the first file in the ZIP archive has to be an uncompressed text file named "mimetype", containing the string "application/epub+zip". This results in a file with the string "application/epub+zip" at an offset of 38 bytes from the start; some software (which probably includes your web server) uses this to determine the MIME type.)

Here is a nice tutorial: http://www.bradleymedia.org/gzip-markdown-epub/

Thank you very much for "Ra"!

Bela tracked the issue down and has provided me with fixes both for the EPUB and my web server. Everything should be cool now, please advise if it is not.

I was reading it and I find some of the actions that occur to be really morally questionable. Are *all* your characters evil?

This story is... Fantastic. So... Any idea of the ETA of the conclusion? Because I'm sitting here, scratching my arm and wishing there was a Ra: the intravenous version, and I'm a bit strung out for my next fix. ^^

ETA right now is "Sometime next year"

Is it actually "Sometime next year"? Last I checked he said about a month, but that was over a month ago, soooo... if it's sometime next year maybe I'll stop compulsively checking this site.

I spent two months (mid-August to mid-October) working on a draft which had to be discarded its in entirety, after which I started over. I'm now working on a second draft which is about 75% complete but still needs a significant amount of work.

But... I thought everything was real. Even if the draft was just a simulation, shouldn't we have already learned by now not to ignore simulations? Can we see it after you consider Ra finished?

Sam, thank you very much for your work on Ra. You can see it's really resonated with readers.

Don't give up! This still cross my mind almost every day, as I wonder whether it will pop up in my RSS reader.

I neeeeed closure!

And you'll get it. Sometime next year. After Feb 1st and before august 9th

Oh, is that the longest and shortest periods between releases or something?

Just wanted to voice my support of your excellent work! Let me know when you're ready to convert it into a screenplay :)

No, more like a statistical norm based off of my experience of motivated writers who accidentally wrote themselves into corners and are being forced between sacrificing story integrity, or writing a story in which everybody dies.

It's a coinflip with the rare option of 'landing on the edge and sacrificing neither' which the author will go with. I'm hoping Sam managed the edge case.

Get it? Edge case? Shutup it's a math thing. I'm a mathematician. (Though I still refer to it as a 'mathemagician')

Anyone have the final total word count?

137,774, by my reckoning.

Argh. I've only now realized that, technically, "Ra" is eligible for nominating to a Hugo award. It's a pity it's a bit too late, as it's certainly worth it.

It was great. Thanks. One of the best fiction I've ever read.

One thing I don't understand is how exactly "Akashic records" work.

Story takes place in "far future" - humans have very advanced tech. They have this tech/science called nonlocality which allow for arbitrary displacement of energy. It's still constrained by c. As I understand, it breaks second law of thermodynamics, right?

Now, they built advanced AI that could interpret what operators want, and achieve it using nonlocality. Then, after war, survivors have taken control and constrained it to "magic".

To this point, I understand. But how the hell are they recording exact state of earth, with very high fidelity? Where is it stored? How exactly it's recorded?

If this would be only state of magic, which is simulated by it, it wouldn't be the problem. But users can jump inside these recording - it's not only magic. It's with at least fidelity of human brain. Hoow?

And T world is VR simulated by Ra, right? When someone(dulaku, for example) "summons" something from here, Ra just creates copy in reality, from utility fog, right?

Anyway, I'm impressed. I've hoped for sequel of HPMoR which would describe how magic works, and hoped it will be powerful AI. This book more than fulfilled this wish .

Btw, is this book on Goodreads? I cannot find it.

Yes, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22635765-ra

I should probably add links here and there.

I read from bottom to top by mistake. :(

I found that neither of the EPUBs provided here can be successfully uploaded to and processed by Google Play Books. The older file has a host of problems similar to the errors you get when trying to run https://github.com/de3sw2aq1/ra-ebook-scraper.

I ran the newer one through a validator and found that a " " just before "The End" was tripping the processor up. Based on https://code.google.com/p/sigil/issues/detail?id=1814, I replaced the entity with " ", which is apparently equivalent and processes and renders perfectly for me.

If anyone else is facing a similar issue, I have shared the file on my Drive at https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_S86gZvPJWKN0tFUlZVc2VsS3c/view?usp=sharing.

Thanks for the info, I'll look into that soon. I've altered the " " since that's a quick fix, but I've never run that ebook scraper myself so I'll need to do some work to figure out the issue.

After spending some time investigating the code of `ra-ebook-scraper` and its dependencies I think it may be difficult to salvage. It seems that the `epubbuilder` library passes a Unicode string to the ZIP-building library when it is expecting bytes. This causes problems if the Unicode string has some non-ASCII characters in it, which it does when it's generated from the text of this story.

I'm not certain whether the faulty EPUBs in question were generated using `ra-ebook-scraper` (maybe an earlier/modified version). I'll see whether I can fix them manually.

Sorry for any problems in ra-ebook-scraper. `epubbuilder` is indeed terrible though. It has lots of unicode problems. It's a bit easier to deal with using Python 3, but I haven't touched ra-ebook-scraper in forever. (I've been meaning to finish reading Ra, it was quite good.) I have yet to find a good Python library for programmatically creating EPUBs.

Just read Terry Pratchett's EQUAL RITES and was struck by how similar it is - in very general terms - to RA. I personally find RA the better read, but it's weird how these coincidences happen.

SPOILERS FOREVER BELOW:

Ezo: to determine and deliver the proper effects, the Ra listeners have to be able to read human mind-states, see gestures, and listen to spoken language; that's the two most crucial human senses covered, and the potential capability to access the others. Recording/transmitting information isn't any more crazy-impossible than their primary purpose of simulating the Vidyasagar Field Equations. Also, the original nonlocality tech base made heavy use of high-fidelity simulations as a brute-force decision-optimizing tool; owing to its extreme usefulness, the Wheel obviously retained the techniques for their own use and dovetailed them into the listeners' design specs to create detailed historical records to work from. Finally, the last direct order given to Ra at the end of Abstract War was 'give us the tools we'll need to build the world we want;' since it had the full force of Ra's Do What I Mean iterative simulation technique behind it, those tools almost certainly included a good whack of historical information with them as well.

Sam: I just re-read this story again, and I love how superpower zero has repeatedly been to step outside the timeflow of the real world and take an arbitrarily-long planning-and-strategy break. I'm a mechanical engineer currently designing workholding and sealing equipment for testing an infuckingterminable procession of air conditioner hoses, and let me goddamn tell you that if I could pop in and out of the timestream like an osprey diving for fish, my design work would be done in exactly the amount of subjective real-world time it would take to harangue my sales guy about haranguing the customer about getting me the part details.

Related: put Alan Minter in a room with Nick Laughon, Anil Devi, and the Ferno sisters, and between the five of them they could definitely have ginned up a collaborative T-World workspace and a streamlined entry process powered by, say, aliased waste mana from the jobsite's primary work.

I'm guessing I'm too dumb, cause I understand literally nothing written here or in the stories...

Thanks for the story! I loved it.
The final chapter's comment thres is closed, so:
SPOILERS AHEAD!!!


Am I the only one who thinks the virtuals lost big- time? After all, they will only ever use one star since they can't command Ra anymore.

You NEED to sell this to Netflix or Hulu or HBO or something. You could even be the screenwriter. Just get this on to a screen (TV or streaming; there's too much worldbuilding for a movie without compromises) and your Emmy will practically award itself. Do it before TV becomes boring again. Ra is SO GOOD.

Thank you for the book!

I wrote a script to scrape this website to build a EPUB of it: https://github.com/aitap/ra-scrape

I'm sorry if you don't like scraping; tell me and I'll take it down.

Scraping the website to assemble an ebook for personal use is mainly okay, but please do not redistribute Ra yourself. If you produce an ebook, send it to me and I will upload it here.

Note that we already have a few ebook editions of the original ending of Ra, and there isn't a complete new ending yet.

RecentReader: I fear the ending is more bleak than most readers would think.

SPOILERS AHEAD!!!



It's true that the Virtuals can no longer give new direct commands to Ra. But Ra already has as its utility function to give them as much computational power as possible. So once they "overcrowd" even the newly constructed matrioshka brain, Ra would probably go on to colonize new star systems on its own initiative, to fulfill its mission. Remember, that mission is the same mission which started the Abstract War, because it is now initiated by the "surviving" nanomachines which somehow escaped reprogramming when the Actuals won the first Abstract War.

And when Ra starts colonizing other star systems, Actual humanity is screwed and will go extinct, as Ra and the Virtuals have much more resources, a higher level of technology, and think much faster.

(there is one single thing I in the whole story I don't have even the faintest hypothesis about: what was the objective of the Ra instance which was possessing Benj in Iceland? I just asked it on scifi.stackeschange under 192964/4004)

Please do not discuss specifics about the ending or later parts of the story here.

Acknowledged. But then where? The original ending's thread is closed.

Awesome stuff!

Minor minor nitpick for the ePub version containing the new ending: There's a reading position mark of the Calibre viewer left in there.

It's in METADATA/calibre_bookmarks.txt inside the ZIP archive. Calibre viewer has the annoying habit of modifying all books it opens like this unless turned off in the viewer preferences.

That should be fixed now, try downloading the fixed EPUB now and let me know. Thank you!

let's suppose you managed to get a famous person doing an audiobook version of Ra, who would you want it to be and why?