Nice post! I’d really like to see more on how fiction might publicize an idea and influence people—specially young ones.
And that’s why I couldn’t stop thinking about Terry Pratchett while I was reading this post; and I’m often surprised that this is not a such a salient common reference in this community. When I started reading HPMOR, I thought “Yudkowsky is doing to Rowling what Pratchett did to Tolkien etc.”—and of course, Yudkowsky wrote some sort of elegy in the HPMOR blog on the day Pratchett died. You see, I can’t avoid thinking I got here because, as a teenager, I wanted to read about comic fantasy, and then… I got “empathically entangled” with some characters which became role models like Dangerous Beans, Brutha, Vimes, Granny Weatherwax, even Death (at least in Hogfather). I think this might happen for some people (find some role model infiction), but not for everyone, of course.
Nice post! I’d really like to see more on how fiction might publicize an idea and influence people—specially young ones.
And that’s why I couldn’t stop thinking about Terry Pratchett while I was reading this post; and I’m often surprised that this is not a such a salient common reference in this community. When I started reading HPMOR, I thought “Yudkowsky is doing to Rowling what Pratchett did to Tolkien etc.”—and of course, Yudkowsky wrote some sort of elegy in the HPMOR blog on the day Pratchett died.
You see, I can’t avoid thinking I got here because, as a teenager, I wanted to read about comic fantasy, and then… I got “empathically entangled” with some characters which became role models like Dangerous Beans, Brutha, Vimes, Granny Weatherwax, even Death (at least in Hogfather). I think this might happen for some people (find some role model infiction), but not for everyone, of course.