A Deadly Education

I love Naomi Novik. She may be my favorite author, though among my top four or five favorites I enjoy them for such different reasons that it’s hard to tease apart. I will read everything she writes, probably including some day running through all of her erotic fanfiction for fandoms I’m not even a part of.

That said, this book is exactly what I don’t want to do with Somewhere Else.

The protagonist is a loner, in a unique situation, with a deep knowledge of the setting and a clear mechanism for reshaping the world how she wants. That’s not spoilers, that’s just from the summary on the back. We already know what makes this character interesting, what makes them relevant to the world around them.

And I like this book! It’s doing some new things with the magic school genre, and I like the characters and the writing and the way it explores how this individual person decides what to do with the power she has.

But one of the things that I have seen over and over again is stories where the main character is the Chosen One with the ability to Change the World.

That’s all well and good, but it doesn’t really speak to me. I’ve never been chosen. I am smart, and that was recognized growing up, and maybe when I was in a tiny fourteen-person elementary school class I could say that I was specially chosen for something. Even when I was at a public high school, I could stake out my place in the social order and the academic order and be satisfied with my status. But somewhere around grad school, I realized that there are tons of gifted kids. And of those, many of them go on to impressive academic achievements. And of those, many of them go on to impressive careers. But of those, without some other advantage like rich parents, very few went on to true greatness. Maybe Jonas Salk?

That means if I want to achieve something with my life, I need to make specific choices to get there, and I need to pull those possibilities out of my ass because they aren’t going to present themselves to me.

I will never accidentally become widely known. I will never have an influential family member propel me to fame. I will not be able to start my own company with family money and family knowledge. Even if I had maximum social energy all the time, my gender non-conformance and atheism would prevent me from achieving a high political office. And I ended up studying mathematics, which is pretty hard to turn toward serious change in the world. My default path through life would make me just another gifted kid, and I’d be counting myself fortunate not to be just another burnt out gifted kid.

But I was introduced to LessWrong when I was in college, and over several years I got more invested in the idea that technology has reshaped our society several times and will do so again, and that whether our society is shaped for the better or worse is about specific choices that individuals can make. So I donate a bunch of money to GiveWell, and I look for ways to touch the really important things that happen in the world. Sometimes that means trying to write more, sometimes it means trying to figure out what it means to really be connected to people online, and sometimes it means propagating reliable, up-to-date Covid news. In the near future, maybe it will mean participating in RaDVaC.

And this struggle of searching through the massive landscape of possible actions for something that will actually be Important to the world is something that I never really get to see in fiction. People in books often have greatness thrust upon them, and those who do seize it often use informed greatness or convenient opportunities to find it.

I want to see people struggling with the question of not only what is worth doing, but what is MOST worth doing, in fiction.

This is one of the reasons I like Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality so much. Not because it is a flawless work of fiction, but because it genuinely tries to ask the question of what is really important, and what does it look like to choose things that are really important, even when those choices make you look weird or out of place.

But MoR!Harry still has a ton of social capital, and discovers magic, and has the ear of at least the two most powerful wizards in the world, if not the full top ten, before he even knows what story he’s supposed to be part of.

So that’s one of the most important things to me to be a part of Somewhere Else. I want the characters to only have opportunities that would be available to anyone, and I want them to succeed only because they are willing to choose opportunities that are important, and I want those choices to have a price in terms of their ability to fit in to the world around them. That is not just a price in terms of social capital, or ability to execute, but especially a price in psychological unease. I think there’s a pretty plausible story that this is the core problem that the EA/LW community needs to solve.

So I’m trying to write about it.

And I’ll still enjoy the power fantasies that other people write about, and the convoluted historical circumstances that they write to make those power fantasies happen, because the idea of understanding and achieving things in the dangerously complicated modern world is valuable too.