Frameshift

Self-Published

Community Rating

Description

Magic. Math. Not a whole lot of context.

Two months ago, I was a wormhole navigator, ripping open a hole in the universe to save a ship of people who only vaguely tolerated me. Two weeks ago, long story short, I threaded an impossible path through the void between dimensions to crash-land into a dungeon. You know the kind: monsters to defeat, corridors full of traps to avoid, and magical powers to earn.

I'm not ashamed to admit that it's been two weeks of loneliness, fear, adrenaline, and constant injury. But I'll make it out of here by myself if I have to, or my name isn't Adam Leviathan James.

... too bad the Levi doesn't stand for Leviathan, huh.

AN: Expectations should includein medias res, violence, smut, friendship, and powers/progression systems with absolutely an insufficiency of context and (at least at first) no definitions or explanations, and magic-as-programming/engineering (with something of an emphasis on "what if magical runework were an analogue to circuit diagrams").

This story used to be called "Yet Another Godsforsaken Isekai". Discord server link used to be here, but that turns out to be against the rules, so check the first or last chapter's ANs.

Cover by the amazing Daedalus of The Way Ahead.

Information

Status: Completed
Year: 2021
Author: Aaron Sofaer (aka Pastafarian)

Royal Road Stats

Rating: 3.9/ 5.0
Followers: 1,081
Views: 888,467

Chapters(154 total)

Reviews

No reviews yet. Be the first to share your thoughts!

Community Reviews(10)

Lithrandil2Royal Road
★★★★★ 5.0
TLDR:
Good story, but not for everyone.
STYLE:
It uses a rather interesting style, heavily inspired by heady Sci-Fi and Graydon Saunders. It is also noticeable that his job is in the technical field.
In Media Res and a slightly elliptical and complex style can make it hard to understand if not paying attention, but doing so is highly rewarding.
This part is personal but I always enjoy inclusions of CS and mathematical concepts as slight inside jokes. Knowing about those topics is far from necessary, you will still be able to understand the story, it's always a fun occasion seeing and understanding these nods.
STORY:
The story is the weakest point of the story, but only because the other things are so good. It is an exploration of the world, or at least what we see of it, and a fun little escape from a dungeon in which our dear Isekai MC found himself after an unlucky, but rather unique event in his 'former' life.
I will tell not much more of it as a big draw of it is the In Media Res elements and seeing how it all slowly unravels. While those reveals come slowly and are often not repeated or dwelt upon long, seeing it and coming to an understanding is highly rewarding.
On this note also be warned by the previous paragraph. If you need everything explained immediately or can't stand a mystery about the immediate circumstances of the MC, this might not be the story for you, as some circumstances mentioned in the first chapter might only be explored at a way later point in the story. There is no shame in not liking a stylistic element of a story, especially when it is so heavily used in it, but please do not confuse personal dislike of those elements with objective flaws in a story.
GRAMMAR:
I rarely noticed any problems with this and most seem to be caught by preview readers, though I am not a native speaker so my grasp of grammar is not perfect, and I generally tend to not notice them even if present as long as they aren't to serious.
CHARACTERS:
Now we come to the s
theEternalNewbRoyal Road
★★★★★ 5.0
This is an excellent story for anyone who loves puzzles. The tale is beautifully plotted, and it is a delight to see the way the clues weave together into the final, inevitable conclusion. The main character's obsession with puzzles is itself a beautiful clue about what's going on, and the fact that one of his major problems was caused by being more intelligent than one of the people responsible for judging his solutions and another was caused by someone not understanding the math behind the Monty Hall problem was a wonderful touch. I strongly recommend this story, and just as strongly recommend that anyone who partakes in it goes in understanding what they're looking at. There's a story here that can be enjoyed by those not up for logic problems, but it is a lesser story without an eye on the moving parts.
VebyastRoyal Road
★★★★★ 5.0
TL;DR some hiccups, but more than enough other wins to make up for them. I'm excited to see where this goes.
This story has style coming out its ears, even if that style may not be for everyone. The word choice, setting, and framing remind me of the better parts of Greg Egan; there are ideas and questions here that are worth thinking about and are exciting to read about. And calling the story's technobabble "babble" is doing it a disservice; the magic and tech here are just :chefskiss:, all those math-words are being used right and in clear service to a "magic is for solving problems" system per Sanderson's Laws.
The grammar is pristine. As I mentioned above, this goes well beyond the basic English - even the mathematics are right. It's astounding.
The story is... highly opinionated, I might say. It starts off with a hardcore in media res and then prefers to move forward aggressively rather than spending time on exposition. For example, we're 17 chapters in and I think but still can't confirm that the MC was isekai'd one foot inside the entrance to a dungeon and has been in the world for approximately two days; things that aren't immediately relevant just don't get explained. That said, while this leaves the reader flailing for things to hold on to and (as I'll get into later) introduces some characterization problems, in some ways it greatly heightens the worldbuilding and the impact of the story's style. I found myself reading every sentence trying to tease out hints of the setting and the backstory. If the story ended here or continued in this vein indefinitely (see Lost) I'd probably give it a 3/5, but it's already tailing off so I'm giving it at least a 4 and not letting the sub-score affect my overall rating - I think that I wouldn't have even have registered this as a problem if I'd picked the work up as a thick paperback instead of a web serial.
Characterization is great. Characters have extremely distinct and consistent diction, knowledge, style, and values
VrplValRoyal Road
★★★★★ 5.0
So the beginning is a little rough, and I think Pasta would agree, but the payoff and the character dynamics are worth it. Also, the nsfw chapters are red hot.
It feels authentic from a queer and polyamorous perspective that I rarely find and I was legitimately rooting for everyone to just be comfy and happy.
Loaka Of The WindRoyal Road
★★★★★ 5.0
Frameshift is a story about a man thrown out of his genre. Adam is a hard sci-fi protagonist suddenly thrust into a high fantasy LitRPG ... though don't expect blue boxes and number-go-up.
Adam approaches magic like its halfway between a fascinating puzzle and an adversarial hacker, and has some delighting ideas that don't turn out so great.
He meets some phenomenal characters, falls in love with basically everyone and genuinely hates violence in a rather visceral way that I find really fascinating in the genre.
The writing is phenomenal and really artfully done. Everything feels alive, the characters are believable and interesting, and the language used is descriptive without being obtuse.
An awesome work that I absolutely adore reading. Takes a bit of chewing but goes down smooth and rich.
Winged WolfRoyal Road
★★★★★ 5.0
When the author said 'in media res,' they meant it. It's like they took the spawned-in-overleveled-dungeon trope, made it isekai, then skipped the first twenty chapters.
And that sounds weird, but it actually makes for a pretty intriguing read.
Story: Exactly because we're thrown in the middle of nowhere plot-wise, we see a lot of world-building through character interactions, which is the best way to see world-building. I also feel there is an interesting plot going on, though again, I currently have no idea what that is. I'm still looking forward to those skipped chapters!
Characters: Not much to say here, the characters so far all have unique voices. The MC's companion does seem a bit off at times, but I suspect there's good reason for that.
Style: The author makes full use of first-person writing to pepper the text with interesting MC thoughts. The story is serious but the humor sharp and prominent. I enjoy this a lot, especially how the author seems to always know just the right word to use, like when the orcs had interesting dentistry.
The overall flow did feel a bit too fast though, just a bit.
Grammar: Excellent -- but long dashes rule!
All in all, a great start and I'm looking forward to reading more!
John Doe 123Royal Road
★★★ 3.0
Written at chapter 25
I consider this story to be a romance science fiction. To me, science fiction is, at its core, about one or both of two things: philosophy and interesting technology.
So far, I consider the philosophy part to have been done well. Themes like existence, free will, and how to raise children have been brought up.
The technology part matches what I, who hasn’t seen Star Trek, imagine Star Trek to be like: Cool things explained with endless imaginary nonsense words. Some of the cool things are cool, but mostly it is just annoying that you have to reread a sentence 3-5 times before you have to accept that it was never meant to make sense.
To the technology part I will also add the famous quote: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. In other words: I do not consider this story to have any magic! What it does have, however, is technology which mimics what we sometimes consider to be magic. This ‘magic’ is, as the other technology in the story, explained with endless imaginary nonsense words. If you decide to read this story, do yourself a favor and consider any and all explanations about the ‘magic’ to be words you shouldn’t waste time reading. Just skip them. Whether or not you understand them hasn’t made a difference so far and I doubt it will going forwards.
The romance in the story so far is about how the mc and the other character(s) have sex and then get to know each other and understand each other afterwards. Not how a romance story typically works I suppose, but then again I see many other reviews call this ‘smut’, which I guess can be considered a subcategory to romance? Either way, their relationships are very physical and I think it is just meant as a way for the reader to endure and destress a little after all the endless imaginary nonsense words.
If you are interested in reading about how Jean-Luc Picard bangs hot chicks between philosophical discussions and trying to survive and figure out how this ‘magic
Examples From HistoryRoyal Road
★★ 1.5
I'm not willing to put in the necessary effort needed to fill in all the purposeful gaps. A narrative story shouldn't be constructed as a blind puzzle, and that's what this seems like. I understand infodumps are boring to write, and too many will turn a story into a dry historical document, but we have a protagonist from an unknown culture, that might or might not have Mana, transported to another unknown culture/reality. That's two large branches of information we need to infer with very little basic information. Plus the MC has unknown lifetimes of experience that seems to exclusively leave him with hangups. That's three very large pillars that are outright missing. Leaving the reader too busy trying to figure out what has happened, why it happened, and where it's happened to pay any attention to what's currently going on.
There are other, less severe issues that are only less problematic due to the overall failure of story telling but to address them would take away from the main issue.
Rajdeep DasRoyal Road
★ 1.0
Harem isekai
MC having panic attacks on every other arc
Media res and english I don't know how to comprehend.
Everything is made in such a way that it goes way above your head until explained so many chapters later.
Sometimes I don't know what's going on only to understand it chapters later.
Kuddos to those who were able to stick with it but I am bailing out. It's sad, cause the plot itself is not that bad.
HalfStarFiveStarRoyal Road
★ 0.5
The complexity of the text I found fascinating. Its moral complexity... lacking.
My complaints are specific to details of the first few chapters, but I have sufficient cause to believe that the issues therein ought repeat past the point I stopped reading.
Content Warnings: Spoilers for the first 8 chapters; discussion of rape
I found the in media res beginning fascinating. I enjoyed the puzzling out of detail off of aside comments. I felt confident that the author was writing with full knowledge of what they were creating, to be able to hint at things so effectively. So, when the NSFW chapter featured what is at best, adjacent to statutory rape, I was a little bit excited. This is not my usual reaction to reading about rape in detail, mind. But I had grown a certain level of trust for the author by this point. How are the characters going to address this? I thought.
Nothing.
No fallout, no discusssion, no trauma, no regrets, no concern whatsoever for the magnitude of the act just taken.
Until Doyle Wept. And he sure has. A chapter that appears to be dedicated to addressing concerns of morality by... the author puppeteering the 0/18 year old into convincing the old man who just fucked her that she really enjoyed it actually and it would be morally wrong of him to deny her of that. Weakwilled, our protagonist can't possibly think of a reason to disagree.
In the next chapter, it seems clear that the conversation is over. Solved. Not to be brought up again.
I recognize that that this is ultimately a matter of personal preference. Plenty of stories are successful regardless of how cognizant they are of the moral implications of their contents.
Just look at 50 Shades of Grey.