History Literature / Ra

** A visit to Tanako's World is essentially this, as your mind becomes completely detached from your physical body. [[spoiler:Later in the story you can drop the "essentially", since Tanako's World turns out to be the {{Cyberspace}} interface of a super-science supercomputer.]]
** [[spoiler:The AkashicRecords accessed through Tanako's World are ''incidentally'' brain uploads; the recordings are so high-fidelity that everything in them, including the people, can be pulled back out into the real world as a perfect reconstruction.]]

* OrwellianRetcon: Hughes felt that the original ending of the story (the two chapters after "It Has To Work") was rather weak and abrupt, so he wrote a new one. The original ending is still available on the website, though it's been moved to a different section.

The story is heavily told though MagicAIsMagicA and {{Magibabble}}.

* ClapYourHandsIfYouBelieve: Explicitly not present. Though this was the case in the NaNoWriMo precursor to ''Ra'', Sam said he deliberately eliminated this element.

''Ra'' is a science fiction story that was completed on December 13, 2014, written by Sam Hughes, creator of ''Literature/FineStructure'' and the other works at Website/ThingsOfInterest. It is a distinct reworked story from Sam's excursions during the 2010 NaNoWriMo.

* AscendToAHigherPlaneOfExistence: [[spoiler: Tanako/Ra did this by accident by being killed inside the AkashicRecords; unlike other mages he's essentially immortal and can (possibly) use geological mana. In later chapters, this conclusion is called into question by Ra's ability to inhabit an arbitrary number of bodies simultaneously; it's unclear whether Kazuya Tanako won the SuperpowerLottery by being killed in the records, or if some [[EldritchAbomination greater entity]] assimilated him and is wearing him like a mask]].

* EarnYourHappyEnding: [[spoiler: Sam has admitted that this is a common theme between Literature/FineStructure and Ra. We don't know how this is going to work out here, of course, but the fact remains that it is present.]]
* EldritchAbomination: Possibly.

* HumansAreSpecial: Defied, or attempted at least. There are natural sources of mana, but they are very rare, and Natalie is searching for mana emissions from supernovae and coming up empty. The only source of usable mana are humans, who produce it from seemingly nowhere, violating the known laws of conservation.
* HyperlinkStory: The only connection some of the characters share so far is that they study magic.

* IKnowYourTrueName: Mages all have true names, which are necessary to cast spells. They choose their own, and can swap between them if they like.

* InvisibilityCloak: Discussed in the [[http://qntm.org/invisibility supplementary materials]]. It may never be used within the story, but it's possible within the rules of the {{verse}}.

* ProperlyParanoid: After the first chapter, Laura thinks that people are trying to kidnap or kill her, and goes to the trouble of inventing a personal DeflectorShield for herself and her sister Natalie. Natalie thinks Laura is being crazy. [[spoiler: It is revealed in [[http://qntm.org/darkness From Darkness, Lead me to Light]] that the Wheel Group was attempting to murder Natalie, not Laura, because they thought she had been able to detect their presence. They killed one of Natalie's professors for the same reason.]]

* TitleDrop: Ra is [[spoiler: initially declared to be Tanako's True Name but it turns out that whatever was pretending to be him at the time was lying. Ra is actually the name of the solar-system-wide, mind-reading, desire-granting, all-powerful machine that draws energy from the sun itself and uses [[AppliedPhlebotinum non-locality]] technology to distribute it.]]
* UnreliableNarrator: Much of the first-person segment of Deeper Magic seems plausible enough, given the events of The Jesus Machine, Abstract Weapon, Death Surrounds This Machine, and Zero Day, but there's obviously more to his story than [[spoiler: "I am Kazuya Tanako. My True Name was ra."]] This is all but explicitly confirmed in Protagonism.

* MohsScaleOfScienceFictionHardness: 4, "One Big Lie" - based entirely around a fictious field of physics, namely [[spoiler:nonlocality technology -- the ability to instantly transport matter and energy from any location to any other -- which allows the eponymous AI to display near-godlike powers, including simulating the existence of an entire fake field of physics, i.e. magic.]]

''Ra'' is a science fiction story in progress, written by Sam Hughes, creator of ''Literature/FineStructure'' and the other works at Website/ThingsOfInterest. It is a distinct reworked story from Sam's excursions during the 2010 NaNoWriMo.

* ProperlyParanoid: After the first chapter, Laura thinks that people are trying to kidnap or kill her, and goes to the trouble of inventing a personal DeflectorShield for herself and her sister Natalie. Natalie thinks Laura is being crazy. [[spoiler: It is revealed in [[http://qntm.org/darkness From Darkness, Lead me to Light]] that the Wheel Group was attempting to murder Natalie, not Laura, due to her accidental creation of a spell that can cloak the user from the Akashic Records]]

* ProperlyParanoid: After the first chapter, Laura thinks that people are trying to kidnap or kill her, and goes to the trouble of inventing a personal DeflectorShield for herself and her sister Natalie. Natalie thinks Laura is being crazy.

* TitleDrop: Ra is [[spoiler: Tanako's True Name]].

->''Magic is real.''

->''Discovered in the 1970s, magic has matured into ''bona fide'' field of engineering. There's magic in the factories, magic in your television. It's what's next after the information revolution.''

->''Student mage Laura Ferno has designs on the future: her mother died trying to reach space using magic, and Laura wants to succeed where she failed. But first, she has to work out what went wrong. And who her mother really was.''

->''And whether, indeed, she's dead at all...''

* AscendToAHigherPlaneOfExistence: [[spoiler: Tanako/Ra did this by accident by being killed inside the AkashicRecords; unlike other mages he's essentially immortal and can (possibly) use geological mana]].

!!This Web Original novel examples of:

* AscendToAHigherPlaneOfExistence: [[spoiler: Tanako/Ra did this by accident by being killed inside the AkashicRecords; unlike other mages he's essentially immortal and can (possibly) use ambient mana]].
* AkashicRecords: Alluded to once as a piece of magical terminology. The fact that someone was able to corrupt them illustrates their high power level.

* AlternateHistory: Magic is a new field of science and engineering in the past half century from the modern day. This leads to obvious changes in technological development, but also more subtle things: For example, in ''Ra'', Space Shuttle Atlantis, not Challenger, was lost with all hands. [[spoiler:There's more to it than a simple point of divergence when magic is discovered, though.]]

* ClarkesThirdLaw: Alluded to in the title of Sufficiently Advanced Technology.

* IKnowYourTrueName: Mages all have true names, which are necessary to cast spells. It's unclear how they're discovered.

* Unreliable Narrator: Much of the first-person segment of Deeper Magic seems plausible enough, given the events of The Jesus Machine, Abstract Weapon, Death Surrounds This Machine, and Zero Day, but there's obviously more to his story than [[spoiler: "I am Kazuya Tanako. My True Name was ra."]] This is all but explicitly confirmed in Protagonism.

* DreamLand: Tanako's World is a dream/nightmare shared by all mages. If there's enough ambient magic in the air, it becomes extremely dangerous.

* InsistentTerminology: Magic is ''not'' magic. It's just a very poorly named branch of physics. This doesn't stop magic from being fundamentally inexplicable.

* FormulaicMagic: Magic is physics; the hard kind of physics.

* RegeneratingMana: Mages regenerate mana. Mana can also be stored in special containers for future use, increasing the amount of mana to hand.

** Despite having supernatural powers, the vast majority of mages are in the same category as Muggles. At the start of the story, Natalie Ferno doesn't carry any special equipment, works on pure theory, and mentions once that she doesn't know how to cast ''uum''. It's explained that magic is difficult and impossible to improvise; any given spell will only do one thing and takes hours to weeks to write.
** Laura [[MuggingTheMonster fights off muggers in her first scene]], [[TeenGenius makes several breakthroughs in magical research]], and survives [[spoiler: a volcanic eruption]] among other things. As the story's protagonist, she gets {{Badass}} privileges.

* EarnYourHappyEnding: [[spoiler: Sam has admitted that this is a common theme between Literature/FineStructure and Ra. We don't know how this is going to work out here, of course.]]

* FormulaicMagic: Magic is physics. The hard kind of physics.

* MagicAIsMagicA: Yes. Magic obeys very strict and carefully designed rules. This does not prevent characters from doing [[ClarkesThirdLaw apparently impossible feats]] every so often.