Honestly Worm is probably one of the best superhero stories I've ever read. Wildbow made a really cool world with some crazy superpowers, and then managed to put an amazing story in it. Fair warning, it's ~1.75 million words. It took me a solid month to read.
Another good scifi web fic is Ra: http://qntm.org/ra. It's about a world in which 'magic' was discovered in 1972 by an Indian physicist. The story largely revolves around the search for what 'magic' really is.
Fine Structure was fun. However, it seemed to take several weird turns without warning, but acted like they weren't weird turns, just completely normal. Like brain-uploading suddenly appearing in the middle of one chapter. It felt a lot like the author had proven to himself previously that brain-uploading was logically inevitable in the real world and so there was no need to foreshadow it at all.
Transhumanists tend to share… uncommon assumptions. I for one don't feel that mind-uploading is weird. If we don't blow up ourselves before, its eventual rise is near certain.
The lack of foreshadowing probably wouldn't have shocked me. I'd be very excited about how the author deals with the implications, though: while mind-uploading is relatively mundane, its consequences are huge.
In the context of the story, information is a substance that you can almost shovel around like snow. Brain-uploading isn't an inevitability in the real world but in Fine Structure it's a (relatively) simple application of informational plumbing.
I second Fine Structure. Sam Hughes does excellent short stories too, this one's appeared on HN before, and was how I was introduced to his writing: http://qntm.org/responsibility
A2: I hope to self publish and sell some somewhere down the road. Going to finish the story first and edit things as thoroughly as possible first.
Q2a: Can I have an ebook version for free? I’d like to read offline.
A2a: I have some, but I’d rather not distribute them. There’s unethical sorts who are taking others’ work and claiming it as their own (often with a title/name change) and I’d rather not make it easier for them. I know there’s a few fanmade ebook versions circulating, I accept that it’ll happen, but I don’t want to help the process along.
I’m hoping to get a polished version out at some point. Should you be interested, send me an email at Wildbowpig [at] gmail [dot] com with the subject line ‘WormPublishNews’. I’ll mass-email everyone on that list when the time comes, to let them know about release. (For all worm news, use the subject line ‘WormNews’.)
There's even a Go scraper github that will give you the most up to date version. I donated to wildblow and will probably nab a copy that way.
If this book is virally blowing up so much like this, then the author should get around to self-publishing on Amazon. I donated so I'm probably not a lost sale, but I can't speak for others whose preferred medium is epub.
Another good scifi web fic is Ra: http://qntm.org/ra. It's about a world in which 'magic' was discovered in 1972 by an Indian physicist. The story largely revolves around the search for what 'magic' really is.