This is a story about information.

March 22, 2010 12:03 PM

Fine Structure: Ching raises one hand ahead of him and delivers a series of complex commands to the fabric of reality.

Fine Structure is an online work of sci-fi written by Sam Hughes. Sam recently finished writing the story, and has also included several pages of additional notes about the story and his writing process.

posted by niles (9 comments total)

<editorializing>
Don't let the somewhat slow beginning scare you away. If you want to get an idea of where things will be going, check out The Story So Far.
</editorializing>
posted by niles at 12:05 PM on March 22, 2010

Good stuff! Thank you.
posted by P.o.B. at 12:14 PM on March 22, 2010

It looks interesting! Starting on it now. Thanks!
posted by Drexen at 12:24 PM on March 22, 2010

It's been fascinating towatch Fine Structure develop over the years — I think the earliest chapters were published in 2006, but it feels like it's been around a lot longer. A lot of them, like "Unbelievable scenes", started out as unrelated works and were later retconned into the larger narrative. (Speaking of which, there are some other great short stories under the "Fiction" category, particularly Asteroid McAlmont and Valuable Humans In Transit.)

Are there many other good SF authors out there using this kind of serialized format? The only one I'm aware of is localroger's Passages in the Void series.
posted by teraflop at 2:46 PM on March 22, 2010

Yeah, I've been following it for a long time. I don't even remember where I first found out about Fine Structure, but I thought it was here on Metafilter.

Another author I follow is (formerly MeFi's own) CheeseburgerBrown. His website has archives of old stories, and his blog has current chapters. Be warned: he writes in a huge universe (called the "Burgerverse"), so you'll be enjoying his stories for a while.
posted by niles at 2:58 PM on March 22, 2010

I'm really enjoying this so far- not sure where he's going with it, but they are intriguing!
posted by hincandenza at 5:37 PM on March 22, 2010

Has anyone Kindle-ized this already? If not, I'll do it...
posted by dmd at 7:08 PM on March 22, 2010

Whoa. Not one full day ago did I post this AskMeFi, and here you come...

Thanks for a great story. I'm reading the first right now.
posted by d. z. wang at 9:18 PM on March 22, 2010

Fine Structure was really excellent, reminded me a bit of Olaf Stapleton.
posted by RichardP at 9:11 PM on March 23, 2010