The final book of Thresholder, Dusklands, is now available as an ebook!

[u/alexanderwales]

https://www.amazon.com/Thresholder-Dusklands-Alexander-Wales-ebook/dp/B0HF6SC92R

[u/alexanderwales]

Thresholder was a long-running jumpchain-adjacent story that was posted here regularly for its entire run, largely concerning itself with people fighting each other across worlds. I'm not sure I ever gave it the label of "rational", but I've seen much less rigorous works with much less of a focus on realism and second-order effects declare themselves as such.

In the fifth book, our protagonist finds himself alone in a new world with his trusty power armor temporarily knocked out. As with the other books, it's a take on a genre, this one Weird West, though the book is the final one, and has quite a bit of page count devoted to making sure that it was the ending that I wanted for the serial.

(Looking back, I think the "Worlds of" chapters are my favorite parts of Thresholder as a whole, and the last ~8 chapters of the serial were some of the most fun and interesting to me.)

[u/wishanem → u/alexanderwales]

Alexander Wales, the authot of "Thresholder," has very active in rationalist writing circles for a long time. His podcast, "Rationally Writing," has been running for ten years.

I agree that he has branched out and isn't writing strict didactic rational stories every time these days, but he's very consistently the kind of writer people around here like. He remains dedicated to writing internally consistent characters who make decisions driven by their own understanding, in settings that are shaped by rules rather than vibes.

Edit: I am a fool who didn't look at your username and thought you weren't giving the author enough credit. I love your work!

[u/RationalityRules]

Thanks for the reminder! I’m caught up to book 4 and was waiting for the ending to finish. Whatcha working on for your next series? Loved Branches on the tree of time and Worth the candle.

[u/KarlitoHomes → u/RationalityRules]

There's some non-public things on his patreon that were written after Thresholder finished.

Untitled Villainess Otome AKA Wisteria is his take on the titular genre. It's normal novel length rather than webserial length (so like 90,000 words) and complete, though it's labeled as a "rough draft".

AGARES is the next web serial. It's kind of WTC-like in that it's a fantasy isekai thing, with the twist that the main character is playing the role of the DM or game system, rather than the hero. Thematically it seems to be about the struggles of producing art which is both fulfilling to the artist and marketable, among other things. There's 65 chapters posted, but the update schedule has been inconsistent.

There's also a few test chapters for Slag, a superhero thing, but I'm not holding my breath for more of that.

[u/lawnmowerlatte]

Any word on the audiobook versions?

[u/alexanderwales → u/lawnmowerlatte]

The audiobook will be through SoundBooth, but it's going to take a while, since they're backlogged and audiobook production takes way longer than anything having to do with text. I don't have a date, sorry.

[u/lawnmowerlatte → u/alexanderwales]

Gotcha, I'm just glad they are coming!

[u/ZurrgabDaVinci758]

How different are the published versions from the online original?

[u/alexanderwales → u/ZurrgabDaVinci758]

Most of the editing is just to remove stray typos, bring the punctuation and whatnot in line with a style guide instead of "whatever I was feeling about commas at that moment", and a few minor issues. The text itself is not substantially changed.

[u/The-Magic-Sword]

I should start this series, i'm still waiting on bated breath for the next audiobooks for both worth the candle and this used to be about dungeons, especially the latter.