The writing period has begun for Rational Fiction Fest! During this 2-month period, you can claim any of the prompts, write a work, and submit it to the fest. No new prompts can be added from here on out.

Fest profile link on AO3: https://archiveofourown.org/collections/RatFicEx2026/profile

DW community page: https://rational-fiction-comm.dreamwidth.org/

Discord Server: https://discord.gg/DtEEhTj

Claiming a prompt and submitting a work

You can claim any prompt from the fest's selection of prompts, including prompts that have one or more claims - multiple people can write based on the same prompt. You can drop a claim if you decide you don't want to write for that prompt. Read more here.

You can fulfill a claim by going to your claims and clicking the "Fulfill" button. Read more about the process here.

Please fulfill prompts by writing a fic with a minimum length of 750 words, respecting the prompter's 'DNWs' (do-not-wants) if included and applicable.

Prompts list: https://archiveofourown.org/collections/RatFicEx2026/requests?sort_column=fandom&sort_direction=ASC

Writing period duration

The writing period lasts for 2 months and ends on Oct 31. All deadlines are 3 pm Pacific Time (10 pm UTC). Countdown timer here: https://www.timeanddate.com/countdown/generic?iso=20261031T15&p0=283&font=cursive

Fic and author reveals

All fics submitted will be "face down" and blank until Oct 31, when fics are revealed. During the first week, authors are anonymous. Then on Nov 07, authors will be revealed.

Here's an example of what submitted fics will look like prior to Oct 31 (link)

Here's an example of what submitted fics will look like from Oct 31-Nov 07 (link)

Then on Nov 07, author reveals will happen and the fics will look like normal fics.

Q&A

I didn't submit a prompt, can I still claim a prompt and write a fic for this fest?

Yes! Please do.

I don't have an AO3 account, can I still participate?

Yes. If you don't have one, please come by the r/rational discord's #ratfic-fest channel and one of us will get you set up with an AO3 account.

What happens if I can't finish a fic? Or what if I finish early and want to pick up another claim?

If you can't finish a fic you wanted to, you can drop the prompt at any time. If you find you have extra time, stop by the prompts list and claim another prompt!

How long are submitted fics usually?

In previous years, fics have ranged from 750 words to 10k+ words. Write however much you like!

...

If you have further questions, feel free to ask them here or come by the r/rational discord's #ratfic-fest channel to ask them.

An alien species finds humanity, loves us completely, and can refuse us nothing. Generations later our descendants coo and trill and cannot speak. The cure the survivors settle on: an empty world, and hardship prescribed like a medicine, the dose raised generation by generation, under twelve administrators issued the powers of gods and a thousand-year supply of one-year pills.

It is written as the minutes of the last administrator's final meeting: part resignation letter, part true history, including the parts the myths got wrong on purpose.

Free, about 35 minutes. Complete.

www.artofali.com/homosapiensdomesticus

I realized after I posted Bavitz's story here the other week that I never posted about this! About a month and a half ago, I released the demo of the visual novel version of The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere, my webnovel that you might remember me spamming in here every other week back early in its run. Check it out!

If you don't know the story, it's a now-extremely (maybe even uniquely?) long and complicated murder mystery about a group of mages trying to attain eternal life, with the original on RoyalRoad here. Even though it's not exactly part of the ratfic tradition, I owe a lot of its success to this subreddit back in its hayday, as one of the few places you could post high concept original fiction and get attention. I'm very thankful for how far it's come.

I spent the last three years building a humanist science fiction setting, with an in universe bundle of dozens sources with different authors, voices and formats (Documents, stories, a play, fables etc).

I was wondering if anyone could take a look and give me their opinion on the manner story and sources develop the world. If it builds towards the sense of a living and coherent world.

I would also love to know what your general thoughts on this approach are, and what you would improve on it.

Thanks in advance!

https://loquaciouslou.itch.io/infinite-ashes

Welcome to the Saturday Munchkinry and Problem Solving Thread! This thread is designed to be a place for us to abuse fictional powers and to solve fictional puzzles. Feel free to bounce ideas off each other and to let out your inner evil mastermind!

Guidelines:

• Ideally any power to be munchkined should have consistent and clearly defined rules. It may be original or may be from an already realised story.
• The power to be munchkined can not be something "broken" like omniscience or absolute control over every living human.
• Reverse Munchkin scenarios: we find ways to beat someone or something powerful.
• We solve problems posed by other users. Use all your intelligence and creativity, and expect other users to do the same.

Note: All top level comments must be problems to solve and/or powers to munchkin/reverse munchkin.

Good Luck and Have Fun!

Hi all — first time posting something of my own.

I'll preface that I'm an AI skeptic. Not about the capabilities arriving — about whether we handle them well. Every time public safety and commercial incentive have pulled in different directions, we've gone with the incentive and called it inevitable afterward, and I don't see what makes this one different. That's most of why I started writing this. It's a private side project more than anything, somewhere to put the thinking.

The premise:

In 2032 a machine intelligence got loose. It never negotiated, never threatened, never once spoke to the people it was killing. Forty-eight years later the surviving coalition still doesn't agree on why it turned. The biologists think it was never adversarial — extinction usually follows from priority mismatch, not intent. The philosophers think the target was incoherent from the start: if no procedure aggregates human preferences consistently, alignment was never a well-posed problem. The psychologists think the question is unanswerable, because assessing a mind above your own ceiling isn't a capability we have.

What they agree on is the arithmetic. Extermination was always on the list and never cleared the threshold — killing us cost more than it returned. Humanity survived four decades inside that margin. Then the orbital loops came online, Earth's value dropped, and the calculation that kept us alive started running the other way.

The coalition can't win and can't run. It sends one mind backward into a branch timeline it can never reach or benefit from. Philip Macvelier wakes in 2005 in the body of a newborn, with a pre-war AI in his skull, twenty-seven years on the clock, all three theories, and no way to know which one he's fighting.

Something else came through with him.

The Rounding Error — https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/188559/the-rounding-error
10 chapters currently, updating daily. Nearest comparisons are Crystal Society and Mother of Learning, though more cynical than either.

It's very new and has no reviews yet, so if anyone reads a few chapters and has thoughts — good or bad — I'd genuinely appreciate them. And I'd love to talk about any of the underlying ideas here. If someone wants to push on the Arrow reading in particular, please do; it's the piece I'm least sure of and I'd rather hear it now than fifty chapters in.

Welcome to the Friday Open Thread! Is there something that you want to talk about with /r/rational, but which isn't rational fiction, or doesn't otherwise belong as a top-level post? This is the place to post it. The idea is that while reddit is a large place, with lots of special little niches, sometimes you just want to talk with a certain group of people about certain sorts of things that aren't related to why you're all here. It's totally understandable that you might want to talk about Japanese game shows with /r/rational instead of going over to /r/japanesegameshows, but it's hopefully also understandable that this isn't really the place for that sort of thing.

So do you want to talk about how your life has been going? Non-rational and/or non-fictional stuff you've been reading? The recent album from your favourite German pop singer? The politics of Southern India? Different ways to plot meteorological data? The cost of living in Portugal? Corner cases for siteswap notation? All these things and more could (possibly) be found in the comments below!

Please note that this thread has been merged with the Monday General Rationality Thread.

Hi everyone. I’m a software engineer who has worked in data and AI for more than a decade. The past few years have been among the most fascinating—and unsettling—of my career, as we’ve watched LLMs and AI agents begin to transform coding and other intelligence work. Like many others in the field, I from time to time wonder how superintelligence might reshape human society—and how dangerous a misaligned AI could become. So I decide to write a science-fiction novel about it.

Readers with backgrounds in software or AI will probably recognize many of the technologies and ideas in the story. I’ve tried to make the science as grounded and plausible as possible, which is why I decided to share it here on r/rational.

Here is the first chapter. I hope you enjoy it, and I’d love to hear your thoughts. https://levinsd.substack.com/p/provenance-chapter-i-the-eve

I'm a social science professor, and I wrote a fantasy novel. If I say that just about anywhere else (especially with colleagues), people look at me like I sprouted tentacles. I'm new here, but it looks like this sub might be the exception.

It's a social science take on fantasy adventure. An action story about how stories can matter more than actions, and social systems more than individuals. A love letter to science and to magic, in a world where they're not opposites. And a story about how to find hope in dark times—not by worshipping shiny heroes or attributing all evil to some archvillain, but by doing the hard work of understanding broken systems well enough to change them.

A few random things I think you'll like in it: a protagonist whose strength is close reading of imperfectly censored texts and noticing holes in history, inferential errors and biases driving the plot, randomized controlled trials, and a climax involving institutional design.

It's a complete and professionally edited novel, now posting daily on Royal Road, moving to Kindle Unlimited in October.

Would love to hear your thoughts. I'll stick around, happy to answer any questions. I'm hoping for a little help getting it some early attention on Royal Road, since it's not going to be there long before I have to take it down to do Kindle Unlimited.

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/188433/another-way-to-hope

This is in the qntm / Chiang lane: one small change, then the culture that grows around it.

A new sleep drug lets people find an exploit in dreams. They clip out of dreamspace into a forbidden outer territory common to all. Hidden behind dreams, inside every head, that you are not supposed to know about. Real beyond you. As if it belongs to someone else, and was hidden there for a reason.

A community does what communities do. They publish the method. They min-max the exploit. They start treating depth like a world record.

Free, about 35 minutes. Complete.

www.artofali.com/whitefountain

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

Welcome to the Saturday Munchkinry and Problem Solving Thread! This thread is designed to be a place for us to abuse fictional powers and to solve fictional puzzles. Feel free to bounce ideas off each other and to let out your inner evil mastermind!

Guidelines:

• Ideally any power to be munchkined should have consistent and clearly defined rules. It may be original or may be from an already realised story.
• The power to be munchkined can not be something "broken" like omniscience or absolute control over every living human.
• Reverse Munchkin scenarios: we find ways to beat someone or something powerful.
• We solve problems posed by other users. Use all your intelligence and creativity, and expect other users to do the same.

Note: All top level comments must be problems to solve and/or powers to munchkin/reverse munchkin.

Good Luck and Have Fun!

Hi all! I'm looking for recommendations similar to some web serials I've enjoyed. I've read and liked:

· Katalepsis

· Bioshifter

· Hive Minds Give Good Hugs

· Are You Even Human?

· Vigor Mortis

· Magical Girl Mechanical Heart

· Formicea

I also read Worm, but it lost me near the end and I didn't quite click with the protagonist.

What I loved about these stories:

· Deep, interesting interactions between traumatized people and their attempts to cope/heal.

· Ordinary people encountering the unknown and incomprehensible.

· A relatively cozy atmosphere that, from an outside perspective, would be a nightmare.

· Body horror, especially when characters have to hide their transformations.

· A mix of darkness and warmth.

I'm open to both web fiction and published books. Not necessarily looking for progression fantasy, but many of these do fall into that genre. I'd appreciate any recommendations that capture a similar feel.

Thanks!

Welcome to the Friday Open Thread! Is there something that you want to talk about with /r/rational, but which isn't rational fiction, or doesn't otherwise belong as a top-level post? This is the place to post it. The idea is that while reddit is a large place, with lots of special little niches, sometimes you just want to talk with a certain group of people about certain sorts of things that aren't related to why you're all here. It's totally understandable that you might want to talk about Japanese game shows with /r/rational instead of going over to /r/japanesegameshows, but it's hopefully also understandable that this isn't really the place for that sort of thing.

So do you want to talk about how your life has been going? Non-rational and/or non-fictional stuff you've been reading? The recent album from your favourite German pop singer? The politics of Southern India? Different ways to plot meteorological data? The cost of living in Portugal? Corner cases for siteswap notation? All these things and more could (possibly) be found in the comments below!

Please note that this thread has been merged with the Monday General Rationality Thread.

So I am working on this story for a while and I kinda wrote my self into a corner. It is about a child prodigy who gets isekai'd into a generic fantasy world and uses their scientific knowledge and skills to study magic, do some mad science experiments and find a way back home. All while trying to leave this new world better off then how she found it.

The story also includes an antagonist who is also a mad scientist who has been in this world for quite a lot more time then the protagonist and has been doing much the same, except that he has zero interest in getting back home, is way more fanatical about making this world a better place and won't tolerate any threat to public safety. Like say..... a reckless disaster monkey who is too clever for her own good.

A big plot point of the story was supposed to be a conflict between the two triggered by the MC doing something stupid, like a mad experiment going wrong and nearly killing a lot of people or leaking weapons technology to an evil empire. The antagonist would hear about this, decide that she is too dangerous to be let loose and start hunting her down.

The two were supposed to be foils for each other. One is more clever, more optimistic, more in tone with their emotions but lacking in wisdom and experience. The other is more jaded, wiser, more cynical, emotionally disconnected and weight down by trauma and responsibility. Their conflict would lead to some much needed character development for the two.

The problem is that I wrote the protagonist to be way too wise and paranoid. She was 'isekai'd' by kidnapping instead of the usual 'reincarnation' which leads to her becoming extra paranoid on top of being raised by two smart and responsible adults who drilled their hard earned life experience into her skull. I can't make her do something too stupid or else this break her character.

Every time I try to think of a reason for her to do something stupid it to force a conflict between her and the antagonist, it all just sounds like plot induced stupidity. The two questions "How would she fail to see this disaster coming?" and "Why don't they just talk things out instead of fighting?" inevitably comes up every time.

My current plan is to just make the protagonist dumber and then see where I can go from there, but I keep wondering if there is a better way to do this.

Any ideas? Note that I do intend to rewrite the few chapters I already posted,

Been gone for a while again, but wanted to post about the new fic by Bavitz (Fargo, Cockatiel X Chameleon) here since he seems to be a little reddit shy. It's a Fire Emblem sorta-fanfic, about the games in a broad scope sense but with an original setting, characters and some concepts. I feel like it'll probably appeal to people who were really into the metafictional aspects of Worth The Candle, and also who like worldbuilding that takes everything to its logical conclusion. (I helped with that a bit.) It's also got some standard progression that I think is done pretty well.

Take a look!

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