A big thank you to everyone who sent in replies to last week’s “I’m now a dad” email. Couldn’t reply to everyone but it was very nice to read the nice messages. Big thank you also to the 10 ish of you who recommended the book Fair Play by Eve Rodsky – I binged it after hearing the recommendations, absolutely fantastic read, really opened my eyes to the asymmetries of household management between husband and wife. Izzy started reading it too, and we’ve now got a Notion page setup with a digital version of the game to rebalance the household and family chores portfolio. I’ll report back and let you know how it goes.
Anyway, this week, I wanted to share something totally unproductive – namely, that I’m now officially addicted to Harry Potter Fan Fiction. This really wasn’t on my personal bingo card for 2025… and btw, this whole email is going to be about Harry Potter fan fiction, so if you’re not a HP fan, feel free to skip today’s email lol.
Okay, so a few months ago, if you’d asked me to define “fan fiction”, I’d have said something like: “It’s when (usually) teenage (usually) girls are super into a book/series/movie/band, so they write trashy romance about the characters and post it on Tumblr and Wattpad. I’d never read it myself, because it probably all sucks… I remember hearing that Fifty Shades of Grey started off as Twilight fan fiction or something…”
That would’ve been my totally ignorant view of what “fan fiction” is. Perhaps it’s yours as well.
But then… a few weeks ago, I was browsing Reddit and stumbled upon a thread recommending something called: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. This rang a bell. My friend Cliff Weitzman (founder of the app Speechify), had recommended this exact story to me like four years ago. He’d said something like “Ali, you have to read this, it’s incredible.” But at the time, I’d brushed it off. I was like, “Oh, fan fiction? Who’s got time for that?”, and added the book to my long mental list of “things I might get round to reading at some point but probably not”.
But seeing it mentioned on Reddit, years later, with glowing endorsements in the thread, made me think: “Hmm, maybe Cliff was onto something… Maybe I should actually give this a go.”
I downloaded the ePbub (it’s free, like all Harry Potter fan fiction), added it to my Kindle, and started reading it in bed at 10pm, thinking I’d give it a try for a few minutes to see what it was about before dozing off. And I was still reading at 2am that night, laughing out loud in various places, and thinking: “holy moly, I can’t believe how good this is!”
HPMOR (as it’s known in the fan fiction community) explores an alternative universe where Aunt Petunia, rather than marrying Vernon Dursley, instead marries an Oxford biochemistry professor. Harry grows up in their loving household, surrounded by books, learning about how to approach the world with scientific thinking and rational analysis. So when he gets his acceptance letter to Hogwarts aged 11, he approaches it with the air and intelligence of a mega nerd trying to understand the science of magic and exactly how to use it to make the world a better place.
The fan fiction is 600,000 words long, split across 6 books. For context, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone is 75,000 words long. The Order of the Phoenix is 257k words. The Death Hallows is just under 200k. So that’ll give you a sense of just how much content is packed into the fan fic.
It’s written by Eliezer Yudkowsky, an AI researcher, and it’s genuinely one of the best and most intellectually stimulating things I’ve read in years. It’s also laugh-out-loud hilarious in many parts, but not in a “slapstick comedy” sort of way. And don’t worry – there’s (almost) zero romance, no R-rated scenes, nothing you might normally associate with “fan fiction”.
In fact, the HPMOR fanfic is so popular that some people on the internet even got together and produced a proper audiobook for it, also totally free of charge, complete with professional voice acting, background music and sound design. Absolutely incredible.
I ended up binging it for the next several weeks. But after finishing it (and shedding many tears at the ending), I thought I was done. I was like, “Okay, well, I must be done with Harry Potter fan fiction now. There’s no way there’s anything else out there that could be as good as this.”
But then I did some research and realised that there are over a million different Harry Potter fan fictions that have been written over the last 20 years. A million! And sure, 99% of them are probably not very good. But there are entire sagas written by people who are incredibly talented writers. A lot of these are hundreds of thousands of words long, rivalling the length of a Brandon Sanderson book (if not more).
The one I’m halfway through now is called The Debt of Time by ShayaLonnie. Without getting into too many spoilers, it explores what happens when, just before the events of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Hermione discovers a way to bring Sirius (who famously died at the end of The Order of the Phoenix) back from “beyond the veil”. And everything that ensues as a result of this decision. And it sits at 700,000 words. Absolutely bananas. And it’s really really good so far.
So I’m now officially addicted to Harry Potter fan fiction, and I’ve been browsing a bunch of blog posts written by people who discovered this hobby decades before I did and have compiled “top 25” and “top 50” lists. I’m quite tempted for the only fiction reading I do for the next year to just be fan fiction… that might be a little excessive, so maybe I’ll set myself a rule of : “1 HP fan fiction, 1 non-HP-fan-fiction” book, rinse and repeat.
So, if you’re a Harry Potter fan, please take this email as a public service announcement: you gotta try Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.
Let me know what you think of it 🙂
Have a great week!
Ali xx
PS: If you do try HPMOR, this is a good disclaimer from their website: “This fic is widely considered to have really hit its stride starting at around Chapter 5. If you still don’t like it after Chapter 10, give up.”
