Thanksgiving Week Reviews 1

Last weekend was the Canadian thanksgiving festival, and to celebrate, I'll be posting reviews of books, websites and other media that I am truly thankful exist.
My first item is Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.

Yes, it's fan fiction.
Yes, it's fan fiction for a children's book.
So what? As the old saw says, don't judge a book by its cover. It might be fan fiction, but this is one of the most original and entertaining stories I have read, period. Now, I have to admit, I'm not normally a fan of the fantasy genre--HP:MOR supplanted Larry Niven's "The Magic Goes Away" as my favourite work of fantasy, and one thing they have in common that most works in the genre do not is a burning desire to make sense. Nuts-and-bolts fantasy. Fantasy-as-sci-fi. Not to riff too hard on fantasy, but in most stories "A wizard did it" is speckle troweled hastily over plot holes. In Methods of Rationality, "A wizard did it" is only the beginning; the next logical question "Okay, how?" and a science-nerd version of Harry Potter's attempts to answer it form a good part of the plot.
I'm not going to be the first one to call this "Ender Wiggin Goes to Hogwarts"-- but that's a pithy label that doesn't really do the fic justice. Because while HP:MOR contains everything awesome that implies, it has none of the downsides, and in spite of the borrowed/reworked setting (like anybody has ever done that before) this is an original work. The characters borrow from cannon originals, but only as archtypes--those that get screen time are deep and fully fleshed, probably more than Rowling's versions simply because this work is not for children.
I have to admit, I never actually read the original novels. Like the Harry of this reboot*, I was too busy reading science and classic sci-fi to "stoop" to a novel aimed at my actual age group when the first Harry Potter hit the shelves. Even then, I was probably too old to enjoy them. Now, I can, in deliciously rationalist flavour.
Rationalist? Yes. The author,  Eliezer S. Yudkowsky, is a student of rational thinking, and is using this work to advance his ideas. The fic is not only entertaining, it is educational! No, this is not a thinly disguised treatise on how to think. It is a very rich work in which you might also pick up some pointers on how to control your brain and its natural tendencies to err. There are declamations, there are lectures, and there are lessons about human rationality in this work, yes, but they don't detract from it. Yudkowsky handles his sermons at least as well (and often better) than Heinlein ever did--and these sermons are useful lessons in science, not inconsistent politicking. 
So thank you, Universe, for producing Eliezer Yudkowsky and putting enough raw imagination in his rationalist brain to produce the stellar Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.


*Except for Harry being way smarter than me, I identify with this character better than anyone in any fiction I've read in years.