Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

Plot

In this fan fiction's alternate Harry Potter series universe, Lily Potter magically made her sister Petunia Evans more beautiful, allowing her to marry Oxford professor Michael Verres. When their nephew Harry James Potter is orphaned, they adopt him as Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres and homeschool him in science and rationality. When Harry turns 11, Petunia and Professor McGonagall reveal the wizarding world and Harry's defeat of Lord Voldemort to him and Michael. Harry becomes irritated over the wizarding society's inconsistencies and backwardness. When traveling to Hogwarts, Harry becomes distanced from Ron Weasley and befriends Draco Malfoy and Hermione Granger.

At Hogwarts, the Sorting Hat sends Harry and Hermione to Ravenclaw and Draco to Slytherin. As school begins, Harry comes into conflict with the faculty, befriends Professor Quirrell over their shared dispositions, and analyzes magic through the scientific method with Draco and Hermione. His efforts get Draco to question his discriminatory ideology towards Muggle-borns and allow Harry to invent partial Transfiguration, which transmutes parts of wholes by applying timeless physics. Quirrell starts a school program involving student armies, embroiling Harry, Hermione, and Draco in further conflict.

After winter break, Quirrell procures a Dementor to teach students the Patronus charm. Though Hermione and Harry initially fail, Harry recognizes Dementors as shadows of death and invents the True Patronus charm, destroying the Dementor. After Harry teaches him to cast a regular Patronus, Draco discovers Harry can speak Parseltongue and alleges to him that Dumbledore murdered his mother. Quirrell reveals himself as a snake Animagus to Harry and convinces him to help spirit a supposedly manipulated Bellatrix Black from Azkaban, leaving her in hiding and causing Headmaster Dumbledore to believe that Voldemort had returned.

Later, after several bullying incidents, Hermione establishes the student organization S.P.H.E.W. to protest misogyny in heroism and fight bullies, causing widespread chaos. Suddenly, she gets accused of attempting to murder Draco, and Harry pays Lucius Malfoy, Draco's father, to save her from Azkaban, who withdraws Draco from Hogwarts. Harry and several of Dumbledore's Order of the Phoenix theorize that Quirrell is David Monroe, a long-missing opponent of Voldemort. Not long after, a mountain troll enters Hogwarts and kills Hermione before Harry manages to slay it. Grieving, Harry vows to resurrect Hermione and negotiates with Lucius, absolving the Malfoys of guilt in Hermione's murder in exchange for Lucius returning his money, acknowledging Hermione's innocence, and returning Draco to Hogwarts.

Near the end of the year, Harry discovers Quirrell drinking unicorn blood, supposedly to delay death from a health condition. A month later, Quirrell tricks and captures Harry, revealing himself as Voldemort's spirit possessing Quirrell and how he framed and murdered Hermione. He coerces Harry into helping him steal the Philosopher's Stone, which can make otherwise temporary transmutations permanent, from a magical mirror in Hogwarts, by promising to resurrect Hermione in exchange. After they succeed, Dumbledore appears and tries to seal Voldemort outside time; Voldemort endangers Harry, forcing Dumbledore to seal himself instead.

Voldemort's spirit abandons Quirrell and uses the Stone to incarnate himself; he and Harry resurrect Hermione, whose body Harry had stolen and preserved, using the Stone and Harry's True Patronus. Voldemort murders Quirrell as a human sacrifice for a ritual to give Hermione a Horcrux and the magic of a mountain troll and unicorn, rendering her near-immortal. Knowing that prophecy foretells that Harry will destroy the world, Voldemort summons Lucius and his other Death Eaters, forces Harry into a magical oath to never risk destroying the world, and orders his murder. Harry quickly improvises an attack using partial Transfiguration that kills every Death Eater and incapacitates Voldemort, whom he memory-wipes and transfigures into his ring's jewel. He claims the Stone and stages a scene to make people believe that "David Monroe" died defeating Voldemort and resurrected Hermione.

After the battle, McGonagall gives Dumbledore's letters to Harry, from which he learns that prophecies had convinced Dumbledore to gamble the future of the world's peoples on him and bequeath his positions and assets to him. Harry helps a grieving Draco find his mother, Narcissa, and plans with the resurrected Hermione to overhaul wizarding society by destroying Azkaban with the True Patronus and using the Philosopher's Stone to grant everyone immortality.

History

Yudkowsky wrote Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality as a medium to promote the rationalist community and skills he advocates on his community blog, LessWrong. According to him, "I'd been reading a lot of Harry Potter fan fiction at the time the plot of HPMOR spontaneously burped itself into existence inside my mind, so it came out as a Harry Potter story, [...] If I had to rationalize it afterward, I'd say the Potterverse is a very rich environment for a curious thinker, and there's a large number of potential readers who would enter at least moderately familiar with the Harry Potter universe."

Yudkowsky has used HPMOR to solicit donations for the Center for Applied Rationality, which teaches courses based on his work.

Yudkowsky refused a suggestion from David Whelan to sell HPMOR as an original story after rewriting it to remove the Harry Potter setting's elements from it to avoid copyright infringement, as E. L. James did with Fifty Shades, which was originally a Twilight fan fiction, saying, "That's not possible in this case. HPMOR is fundamentally linked to, and can only be understood against the background of, the original Harry Potter novels. Numerous scenes are meant to be understood in the light of other scenes in the original HP."

After HPMOR concluded in 2015, Yudkowsky's readers celebrated by holding worldwide wrap parties.

Reception

Critical response

Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality is highly popular on FanFiction.Net, though it has also caused significant polarization among readers. In 2011, Daniel D. Snyder of The Atlantic recorded how HPMOR "caused uproar in the fan fiction community, drawing both condemnations and praise" on online message boards "for its blasphemous—or brilliant—treatment of the canon." In 2015, David Whelan of Vice described HPMOR as "the most popular Harry Potter book you've never heard of" and claimed, "Most people agree that it's brilliantly written, challenging, and—curiously—mind altering."

HPMOR has received positive mainstream reception. Hugo Award-winning science fiction author David Brin positively reviewed HPMOR for The Atlantic in 2010, saying, "It's a terrific series, subtle and dramatic and stimulating… I wish all Potter fans would go here, and try on a bigger, bolder and more challenging tale." In 2014, American politician Ben Wikler lauded HPMOR on The Guardian as "the #1 fan fiction series of all time," saying it was "told with enormous gusto, and with emotional insight into that kind of mind," and comparing Harry to his friend Aaron Swartz's skeptical attitude. Writing for The Washington Post, legal scholar William Baude praised HPMOR as "the best Harry Potter book ever written, though it is not written by J.K. Rowling" in 2014 and "one of my favorite books written this millennium" in 2015. In 2015, Vakasha Sachdev of Hindustan Times described HPMOR as "a thinking person's story about magic and heroism" and discussed how "the conflict between good and evil is represented as a battle between knowledge and ignorance," eliciting his praise. In 2017, Carol Pinchefsky of Syfy lauded HPMOR as "something brilliant" and "a platform on which the writer bounces off complex ideas in a way that's accessible and downright fun." In a 2019 interview for The Sydney Morning Herald, young adult writer Lili Wilkinson said that she adores HPMOR; according to her, "It not only explains basically all scientific theory, from economics to astrophysics, but it also includes the greatest scene where Malfoy learns about DNA and has to confront his pureblood bigotry." Rhys McKay hailed HPMOR in a 2019 article for Who as "one of the best fanfics ever written" and "a familiar yet all-new take on the Wizarding world."

In his 2012 book Singularity Rising, James D. Miller, an economics professor at Smith College and one of Yudkowsky's acquaintances, described HPMOR as an "excellent marketing strategy" for Yudkowsky's "pseudoscientific-sounding" views due to its carefully crafted lessons about rationality. Even though he criticized Yudkowsky as "profoundly arrogant" for believing that making people more rational would make them more agreeable to his ideas, he nonetheless agreed that such an effort would gain him more followers.

Accolades

The fan audiobook for HPMOR was a finalist in the Parsec Awards in 2012 and 2015.

Translations

Russian

On July 17, 2018, Mikhail Samin, a former head of the Russian Pastafarian Church who had previously published The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster in Russian, launched a non-commercial crowdfunding campaign hosted on Planeta.ru alongside about 200 helpers to print a three-volume edition of the Russian translation of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. Lin Lobaryov, the former lead editor of Mir Fantastiki, compiled the books. Samin's campaign reached its 1.086 million ₽ (approximately US$17 000) goal within 30 hours; it ended on September 30 with 11.4 million ₽ collected (approximately US$175 000), having involved 7,278 people, and became the biggest Russian crowdfunding project for a day before a fundraiser hosted on CrowdRepublic for the Russian translation for Gloomhaven surpassed it.

Though Samin originally planned to print 1000 copies of HPMOR, his campaign's unprecedented success led him to print twenty-one times more copies than that. Yudkowsky supported Samin's efforts and wrote an exclusive introduction for HPMOR's Russian printing, though the campaign's popularity surprised him. Samin's HPMOR publication project is the largest-scale effort on record, surpassing many previous low-circulation fan printings, and he sent some Russian copies of HPMOR to libraries and others to schools as prizes for Olympiad winners. J.K. Rowling and her agents refused Russian publishing house Eksmo's request for commercial publication of HPMOR.

Other

HPMOR has Chinese, Czech, French, German, Hebrew, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Spanish, Swedish, and Ukrainian translations.

References

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