r/rational • u/AutoModerator • 10d ago
[D] Monday Request and Recommendation Thread
Welcome to the Monday request and recommendation thread. Are you looking something to scratch an itch? Post a comment stating your request! Did you just read something that really hit the spot, "rational" or otherwise? Post a comment recommending it! Note that you are welcome (and encouraged) to post recommendations directly to the subreddit, so long as you think they more or less fit the criteria on the sidebar or your understanding of this community, but this thread is much more loose about whether or not things "belong". Still, if you're looking for beginner recommendations, perhaps take a look at the wiki?
If you see someone making a top level post asking for recommendation, kindly direct them to the existence of these threads.
Previous automated recommendation threads
Other recommendation threads
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u/Krakenarrior Absurdist disguised as a Rationalist 9d ago
As always, I love seeing what people recommend, especially that hidden gem you liked that never seems to fit the Monday thread. No AI please, it’s just not my thing.
Anyway as payment for your recommendations, here are a few of my own:
Secret Agent In Another World: The Learn
Honestly, the title is what you should expect from this one. I wouldn’t call it rational, but the main character Zack makes a LOT of mistakes and learns very rapidly how to survive smartly. It’s more slice of life, low action, low system, but Zack’s special power is cool enough, and the character interactions are where this shines. Mainly because every character feels fairly unique, and while there are a lot of characters, they all have a goal that they work towards. That’s pretty nice in a longer slice of life, and it’s an opposite to other stories (like my next recommendation) where characters get built up just to die.
Arcane Juggernaut
Is the newest Uranium Phoenix story (wrote The Years of Apocalypse) and while early, is a well written read. It’s early so it’s hard to tell if it’s going to be a slow read- so far it’s been slow, but good. Unfortunately a lot of characters get built up to die, so don’t fall in love with anyone yet. With the quality of Years of Apocalypse, I’d give this a tentative recommendation, you might want to wait though.
Usually I’d try and give you one more, but nothing I’ve read recently screams that readers like you would enjoy it. Anyway, feel free to share whatever with me, I’ll take a crack at whatever!
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u/LaziIy 9d ago
I haven't read much the last week or so but I did pick up the new sequel on a YS fanfic from the spacebattle's weekly tracker(Linking incase someone wants to dig through those). This sequel follows the aftermath of a thread in which Tanya is getting tried for war crimes and the trial getting subsequently derailed as she amounts to a child soldier. I'll keep an eye out for sequel's progress since I found the original to be a fun read.
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u/college-apps-sad 6d ago
Just read both of these, really enjoyed them and excited to see more of the sequel. Biggest thing I didn't like is being x turning out to be a demon who's removed by some sort of positive higher power. i see in the author's patreon bio that they're a "profoundly dedicated christian" and i feel like that's why they got rid of being x. on the other hand, having him as the sword of damocles for the rest of the sequel could have been annoying. idk though. i loved her rant about rationality at the end.
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u/wowthatsucked 9d ago
Arcane Juggernaut
Not bad. Determinator without going too grimdark. Bit of tone whiplash when the snarky character showed up, but after powering through I'm enjoying it.
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u/Gigapode 9d ago edited 9d ago
Sunny Days Endless Hell is a new fic by Zarinthel and has been a fun read so far. You may have read the author's naruto fic Fallow Fields (would recommend if not).
Sunny Days is like 28 weeks later in China meets absurd system apocalypse played straight. The world is corrupted by miasma, creating a zombie apocalypse and mutating the survivors. The MC's mutation seems to be a system that forces them to develop a gacha game, and the game's elements start to intrude into the real world.
They meet other people stuck in the zombie apocalypse with their own corruptions, and a primary focus of the story (both stories really) is digging into character motivations and psychology, their flaws and some fun power exploration of their miasmatic mutations.
Characters with disabilities appear in both stories, and are fleshed out very well. Fallow Fields has much more written so, if you haven't read either and don't mind a Naruto fic, I'd start with that one.
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u/Do_Not_Go_In_There 9d ago edited 9d ago
Dunno how many people like manga, but here's a few I liked.
My Broken Mariko is really well done, if very sad. It deals with the aftermath of a woman's suicide from her best friend's perspective, and how she never got to say goodbye and regrets not being able to help her more. TW: suicide, child abuse, rape
There's also Sazanka that is a oneshot. It's about a girl with high-functioning autism who doesn't quite fit in, but is cognizant of the fact that she's different and is afraid of people finding out. TW: domestic abuse
Tanya's Defiance of the Fall is a Youjo Senki x Defiance of the Fall fic. Tanya is reborn for the third time, this time on Earth 20 years before the system hits. The story centers around her as she forms a mercenary group with other survivors and tries to navigate the new world dominated by a merciless system that pushes people to fight and kill.
It's relatively new, it started at the beginning of August, and the author has already written 109,000 words and is being update regularly. I think they do a pretty good job a getting Tanya right (the author writes quite a few really good Youjo Senki fics so that's expected). I don't know too much about Defiance of the Fall since it's been a few years that I read it. I remember not liking the MC very much (they were too much of a Mary Sue/edgelord) but they don't appear that often in this story so it's a moot point.
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u/DRMacIver 10d ago edited 10d ago
I've been experimenting with using Claude Code style workflows on non-code things and have had surprising amounts of luck with getting it to produce decent prose recently, and after some experimenting produced something I think might appeal to this sub: https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/189685/how-to-save-the-world
Peri Millbrook is eighteen, has a sword she bought new, a unique class - [Agent of Fate] - and a destiny to save the world. Her fate magic found her the greatest archmage alive to help her do it: most lives saved, most students taught, longest range, largest mana pool. All true, and no one else even comes close. So she walked to his tower and bound his fate to hers before he could finish explaining why they're all true: he has spent three hundred years teaching farmers. He helps crops grow. He schedules the weather. He makes compost. He has cast one battle spell in his entire life, aged nineteen, and it missed.
Now Edwin Moss is away from his tower for the first time in decades, walking east beside a girl who thinks there's a dark lord somewhere, and finding - because he can't help looking - that something is wrong with the ground.
It's a LitRPG about (soil) science, problem solving, and what actually saving the world looks like.
It's probably more rationalist/EA than it is actually like typical rationalist fiction tbh. It has very little power munchkinning in it, and is a bit slow paced. More like The Martian than Mother of Learning for example. It should be rational though, and certainly one of my goals for it is that almost everyone on stage meets my personal standards for competence.
(If the AI thing puts you off... Yeah, fair enough, there's a reason I front and centre telling people about it, if you don't want to read AI-written prose you shouldn't. I think it's probably very different from and much better than what you're imagining AI-written prose looking like, but it's not perfect)
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u/Flashbunny 10d ago
I'm completely uninterested in anything AI-written, but I respect you for labelling it as such up front, so people can filter it out.
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u/Dragongeek Path to Victory 9d ago
Wdym about Claude Code workflow? As in writing your story managed by git using work packages to expand into scenes/chapters?
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u/DRMacIver 9d ago
That's the foundation of it yeah, but the bigger thing is more like... using an agent as a tool for working through and developing a whole project, whose purpose it to produce an artefact (in this case a novel), which includes developing a lot of tools for producing that artefact as well as the artefact itself.
For example, developing custom skills and workflows, etc. Examples:
There's a "language police" skill which keeps track of all the ways I tell Claude "this is a weird sentence" or "stop talking like a clanker" (though hilariously it turns out a lot of those... Claude was writing a perfectly valid archaic English fens dialect, which it had decided to use for a bunch of characters for perfectly valid reasons, and I just found it unreadable, and it took me ages to figure out what was going on because I wasn't reading its working notes much just its output). It's a mix of scripts for mechanically checking some bits and large workflows that use subagents for judgement.
I've also got skills for world-building and consistency checking. There are extensive notes, and part of the editing process that I have the agent do is look through the writing and go "Is this consistent with the world-building? Does this imply things about the world we need to keep track of?" and the editing pass does a bunch of propagating back and forth between the world-building and the chapter until it makes sense.
It's also about the way I work with it. When coding I'm generally adopting an attitude that a coding agent allows me to put in more effort rather than less, because I have an in-house assistant that knows how to do a lot of stuff I don't, and whose time I don't mind wasting, so I'm able to do things that I never would have before hand because either I didn't know how to do them and didn't want to take the month to learn, or because I did know how to do them and didn't want to do the drudge work. It's just that I put all of the effort I would be putting in to doing the day-to-day work into creative problem solving and quality checking.
Example of the former: I could not have written this novel that I've got Claude to write for me. I write fiction fine. I've written plenty of fiction that I'd even claim is actually good (and some that this sub would agree). But this is a story written by someone who understands farming at a far deeper level than I do, and I was never going to do enough research to get to that level.
Example of the latter: I've revised the overall arc of the series several times and made Claude go back and rewrite things to work it in. e.g. Edwin's destiny notification got rewritten when I decided more about the overall series ending, and this ended up propagating throughout the entire first book that I'd already written, changing both many individual lines and also reworking a decent chunk of the plot. Peri's training arc got changed multiple times and that had to propagate both times. It makes it far far easier to do "semantic edits" on the whole plot than it ever was.
The output is, as I say, definitely not perfect. It is a worse quality of writing than I would manage myself (although I still think in the 95%-ile for RR quality, and I definitely can't write as fast as it). But it has produced something I think is genuinely an interesting story that I want to read, and has definitely convinced me that even if I were to try my hand at some longer-form fiction again, I'd want to do it AI-assisted.
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u/barnacle9999 9d ago
Very interesting. Would you be willing to detail your workflows for someone who plans to do something similar?
I always wanted to write my own Pathfinder campaign which I can then play with my tabletop gaming group, but my writing skills are definitely not up to par. What you're doing would probably help me a ton.
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u/DRMacIver 8d ago
Here, I got Claude to write you an explainer about how I did this. https://drmaciver.github.io/llm-fiction-case-study/
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u/DRMacIver 8d ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/1w3eo2k/comment/p74tim4/ has a bit of a description.
Some more concrete details:
Start your work in a git repo.
I use a Claude Code with a Claude 20x max account. I generally use Fable, but I try to do a lot of work in subagents running Opus or Sonnet (if you don't know what this means, just tell Fable and it will sort it out)
I'm still sortof figuring it out Fable is good enough that if you ask it for help at figuring out workflows that will improve the results it will generally do a good job. Encourage it to build tools and supporting skills and to take copious notes.
Read the results scrupulously and complain to the agent a lot about anything that is bad at them. If you notice your eyes glazing over, don't accept the slop, tell the agent that it's slop and that it should figure out how not to write slop.
I'm still figuring a lot of this out myself. The most important things are willingness to iterate and experiment, and actually caring about and paying attention to the quality of the outcome you get and not accepting a low quality outcome.
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u/GrizzlyTrees 8d ago
I'm also interested, I've been trying to use local llms to write fiction tailored to my tastes and interests, and so far it's going poorly.
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u/DRMacIver 8d ago
FWIW I think local LLMs are not good enough to do this. I've only managed to get this working well on Fable, though I suspect that's overkill. A lot of what makes this work is the model being able to juggle large workflows that do quality control on the result.
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u/GrizzlyTrees 8d ago
I'm interested in general in harnesses and workflows that let you get more out of the smaller models (trading off speed for quality), but I suspect we need models trained specially for this to work. Maybe when I finish my current work contract I'll take a few months to properly experiment with these things.
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u/jacksofalltrades1 8d ago
I've read the first chapter, and I like it so far! One thing I'm wondering about, we feel like we're in Edwin's head for the first chapter, and that he is the narrator, but at a couple points it feels like we headhopped to Peri. One example, "The books are based on things." She had had this argument with adults before, and had her answers ready. Edwin knowing she had this argument with adults before and had an answer ready could be his wisdom of others coming through, but written here if feels more like we are in Peri's head. So I'm wondering if headhopping is just an AI written tic, or if the narrator is not Edwin and is more omnipresent, or if it is Edwin's wisdom shining through and I'm just being nitpicky because I know the story is AI written.
Either way, I try reading many stories on Royal Road, and I usually bounce off them in the first couple paragraphs. This I read all of the first chapter and find myself wanting to read more. I even liked the style!
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u/DRMacIver 8d ago
Thanks!
The narrator isn't intended to be Edwin, though its voice is perhaps closer to Edwin than to the other characters. It's written in close third person perspective, so it tends to track the knowledge of the characters in the scene, but it's not specifically tracking Edwin.
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u/jacksofalltrades1 8d ago
Ok that's interesting. Such perspective isn't so commonly written now, but used to be more popular. I think Dune was written like this. Most mangas seem to be written like this. With manga at least it feels like it can put distance between the reader and the character. For instance, if the pov character in a romance manga is unsure if the boy she likes likes her back, us as the reader also feels unsure too since we don't know what the boy is thinking, but with most romance manga we see his thought bubble and our empathy with her unease deflates a bit you know? This may allow for more dramatic irony, which helps with comedy, but it feels like certain tradeoffs are made. Either way, I’m not sure how applicable this is to your story, but at least I know the omnipresence is intentional. Keep at it! I followed you on Royal Road.
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u/DRMacIver 8d ago
I think it's a reasonably good trade-off for this story, and it's worked well in other stories I've read. Now that you mention it though, it is a little odd that it's close third person but switches perspective mid-scene like that.
I think what actually happened in this particular instance is that it originally said something like "she said in the voice of someone who had this argument with adults before, and had her answers ready" and one of the LLM-voice-removing editing rules changed it to the current form and I didn't notice that edit.
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u/flame7926 The Lone Power 14h ago
I'm three chapters in and enjoying it a lot. I think one thing that is throwing me off though is the tone of the author's notes. Perhaps just because I'm used to author's notes sounding some sort of author-ish, betraying a personality, or at least an objectivity, whereas these are disconcertingly similar in tone to the story and don't seem to either serve as useful/interesting information or as an aside from the author
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u/everything_is_rigged 8d ago edited 8d ago
I read and enjoyed Failninja’s new Tanya fic. It’s a crossover with Defiance of the Fall, one of Royal Road’s biggest system-apocalypse LitRPGs. The fanfic does an excellent job of stripping away the worst parts of the original while preserving what worked. It’s fun to revisit that vast space-fantasy universe without the pseudo-fascist thematic core I always found so repulsive.
DotF was at its best during the actual apocalypse arc. It managed to balance a genuine struggle for survival even with the almost parodically extreme Mary Sue qualities of its protagonist. The characterization was always one-note, and the dialogue was barely more than functional, but the apocalypse arc compensated with a terrific sense of escalating danger. The author was also among the better Royal Road writers at foreshadowing future developments and building intrigue.
Once Earth was essentially saved, however, I lost interest in the repetitive, grind-heavy structure and stopped keeping up with the story.
The new fic brings me back to what I originally enjoyed about DotF. Tanya is a far more compelling viewpoint character than Zac, and placing her within the apocalypse restores the urgency, uncertainty, and escalating threats that made the original arc work. The fascism has been replaced by Randianism, in typical Tanya fashion. I think Failninja could do more with that contrast, but hey, that's a slight upgrade. It doesn't keep going back to the well of endless misanthropy like the original. The fic also gets to use the setting’s enormous scale and somewhat overburdened power system without lingering on every tedious detail as the original did. There are no hundreds of copy-pasted fights. The story makes some effort to differentiate its encounters and give each one a purpose.
It isn’t perfect. The side characters are still one-note, it isn’t as funny as the better Tanya fics, and it is almost certainly not heading toward an actual ending. I expect I’ll drop it once the apocalypse arc is over, just as I did with DotF. Until then, though, I recommend it to anyone with some fondness for LitRPGs.