I jumped into the book after hearing all the buzz as it seemed like the big scifi hit of 2025. Killer premise and for the most part the fast pacing works... for the first third or so. But it you can feel the short story anthology vibe as it goes on and becomes practically a disconnected series of vignettes, and even the central idea itself loses cohesion. The Big Bad Thing has so many manifestations that it feels like monster of the week rather than a true full book that holds onto a core sharply executed identity. Less a grand thesis than a series of isolated short form thrills.
So the long and short of it is, definitely worth it for the first third and dimishing returns after that.
As for the short film, I think it's great for what it is, gets better and better as it goes and is worth the short watch. Fascinating seeing the visual depictions of the stuff the book talks about both foreground and background.
My experience with the book became a bit meta. I greatly enjoyed the first half or so of it. Though it did start to feel a little repetitive after a while. But I couldn't get past the first half because all the black line "redactions" started making my Kindle unstable. First time I've seen an ebook's formatting crash the device.
Eventually gave up because of the constant slowdowns and crashes. Which in many ways fit the book. I liked thinking the data within was so dangerous and alien that my Kindle could not handle it. I know this wasn't intentional by the author but still, it was a nice metafictional touch.
I suppose a future horror novelist could replicate this intentionally. A creepy combination of symbols guaranteed to overwhelm a limited memory ereader. Coming at the right point in the story, it could be effective. Though it would also lead to a ton of 1-star reviews.
The redactions are definitely overused. There’s some pages almost entirely redacted. It would be more effective to write a shorter sentence with some mystery than to just block out a large portion of a verbose page.
I actually liked all of it. It's slightly more cohesive than the original writing on the SCP website, which is structured as a series of short thematically linked reports. I get that style won't appeal to everyone though.
Still one of the more original bits of sci fi / horror to be published in a while, so a strong recommendation from me!
I read the book in 2024 (before it was cool!), and have the email order as evidence, but quite fittingly I have almost no memory of what was in it, or how I found out about it.
The core pitch becomes quite formulaic. It's a fun kind of formulaic, but all the SCPs are made from the same relatively small set of moving parts, painted with different colours and textures for each specific monster.
But as a concept it's still one of the freshest things to appear in SF this century, and it's a wonderful contrast to more standard action hero SF.
Right. I respect it for what it is, and there are elements that are amazing and deeply thought out. But there's an alternate universe where the whole of it is a big cohesive vision statement in the metaphysical/visionary subgenre of Scifi a la Blindsight by Peter Watts or Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer. But has that potential but where it lands is closer to monster-of-the-week in book form.
I also didn't think it was quite as good as it was hyped to be, but as someone who has long been into the web-based SCP stuff, I did appreciate how the book is introducing SCP to a wider audience.
I remember after reading the first few chapters thinking this may be one of the coolest books I've ever read. It sort of meanders and fizzles out. It starts so strong it seems impossible to finish as strong. I would still recommend the book. It's got some very cool and unique ideas and it's a fun story.
"The Big Bad Thing has so many manifestations that it feels like monster of the week rather than a true full book that holds onto a core sharply executed identity."
This is one of the structural weaknesses in the entire SCP... motif, for lack of a better word. When a core part of the premise is "you can't understand it, not even in principle, if you think you understand it you're wrong", the premise does some fairly fundamental damage to what most people would consider the basic structure of a story. Generally we think that at least in hindsight, a story should "make sense", but SCPs by their nature have to be somewhat random and lack predictability or they aren't SCPs. You can try to wrap a more conventional story around that particular motif, but you've always got this fundamental structural weakness sitting right smack in the middle of it, and you can't remove it without leaving the sub-genre. The SCP structure fundamentally starts with a negation of this aspect of stories.
It is fun seeing what some people do with this limitation, and there are after all compensating benefits or nobody would write in the universe. But it is something that is going to be there in any story set in an SCP or SCP-like universe.
I think it was Larry Niven that observed that most stories are judged by something like character, plot, theme, etc., and that one of the distinguishing characteristics of science fiction is that you have to add the background to the list of things to look at. But only a vanishingly small set of works ever managed to have character, plot, theme, and the other characteristics firing on all cylinders as it was; asking for a work to have all that and also be 5 out of 5 on the new setting it establishes as well is way too much to ask of a work. With this sort of story, as a reader you are putting all your chips on the setting. Going in to this sort of work you should expect the conventional measures of a story to at least take a hit, and in many cases a fairly large one. And of course, if that's not what you want, then you're not going to enjoy it and I have no problem with that. This is less a "defense" than an explanation, that if you didn't particularly enjoy this, I'd suggest staying away from the entire subgenre because the entire SCP subgenre is structurally prone to these issues from the very foundation on up.
(To give another example, Greg Egan has a number of works in which he fiddles with the laws of physics, to do things like have two time dimensions and two spatial dimensions, then works out how that actually affects physics using math rather than intuition and write stories in the resulting universes. This is such an investment into the setting that I don't find it all that surprising that I don't find the characters all that compelling per se. There just isn't the room. But you can't get that setting anywhere else.)
I wonder did you read the re-release or the original release. I believe it was recently re-released with a bit of an editing pass, but I haven't read that version myself. I just recently reread Fine Structure and it definitely had a strong sense of being written sequentially, one chapter after another, and (very) lightly edited after the fact. I'd recommend Valuable Humans in Transit for a short story collection by the same author which works a bit better for me. Moved on to Exhalation by Ted Chiang which is also a very good short story collection. And just in general, I want to recommend Clarkesworld: https://clarkesworldmagazine.com
My experience of the book was similar: the first third was great. Great idea, brilliantly executed. Definitely worth it for the first third alone.
In a way, maybe it going off-piste is coherent with the idea of the first third. I'm sure this was not the author's intent, but fun from an ironic perspective.
It definitely needed an editor to help them polish it up. It's funny though, I read it a year or two ago while I was in the middle of I Am A Strange Loop by Hofstadter and I'm positive the author of TiNAD had just read IAASL when they wrote it...People essentially being memes explained through loss of a partner, Prokofiev making a conspicuous appearance, and strange loopiness in general. It was weird, like the author and I had just read the same book.
It's been a long time since a book has gripped my attention like the one this short film is based on. It has many interesting ideas and a plot with some truly unexpected twists.
The latest version of the book distances itself from the source material (a good decision imo): The SCP Foundation. It's an extremely interesting project, with some parallels to FOSS. I wonder if there are other joint literary projects of similar scale.
Maybe I am just dumb but I think I missed why this is cool. I found it incoherent and thus failed to enjoy it. I've heard the name "There Is No Antimemetics Division" before and it was always said with reverence. What did i fail to notice/understand?
EDIT: saw other comments here mentioning that I am not expected to get this without lots of prior reading.
I saw the book mentioned at random here mid way through last year and ordered it for my Kindle. To my surprise, it wouldn't be available until the end of the year. I found that puzzling because some people here seemed to be saying that they had read it.
Now reading this set of comments today it seems that I was to be buying a revised version and the text had been 'in the wild' for some time. Anyway, it duly arrived, I read it and thought it an okay read.
It wasn't until reading this page today that I became aware of the existence of a thing called SCP and any of what that entails in relation to the book.
I came back here for the comments after clicking through and my wifi was glitching, leading me to get a "can't find this site" message for a minute. Interesting experience.
I read the qntm book in Dec. TIL: there's a whole, rad backstory here.
This scene is really arresting, which is how they get you. I kind of coasted through the book on this big idea.
The rest of the book felt like this scene playing out over and over on a bigger scale, with higher stakes, with roles switched around. It's hard to move a plot with this theme.
The book did a commendable job.But I was ready for it to be over when it was over.
108 comments
So the long and short of it is, definitely worth it for the first third and dimishing returns after that.
As for the short film, I think it's great for what it is, gets better and better as it goes and is worth the short watch. Fascinating seeing the visual depictions of the stuff the book talks about both foreground and background.
Eventually gave up because of the constant slowdowns and crashes. Which in many ways fit the book. I liked thinking the data within was so dangerous and alien that my Kindle could not handle it. I know this wasn't intentional by the author but still, it was a nice metafictional touch.
I suppose a future horror novelist could replicate this intentionally. A creepy combination of symbols guaranteed to overwhelm a limited memory ereader. Coming at the right point in the story, it could be effective. Though it would also lead to a ton of 1-star reviews.
Still one of the more original bits of sci fi / horror to be published in a while, so a strong recommendation from me!
> the big scifi hit of 2025
I read the book in 2024 (before it was cool!), and have the email order as evidence, but quite fittingly I have almost no memory of what was in it, or how I found out about it.
Bit like the bad guys The Silence from Dr Who: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=po8Jc7sLbP8
> 2024 (before it was cool!)
The original draft of the first part "We Need To Talk About Fifty-Five" was posted to scp-wiki in 2015, and the SCP-055 entry dates back to 2008!
https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/qntm-s-author-page
https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/antimemetics-division-hub
But as a concept it's still one of the freshest things to appear in SF this century, and it's a wonderful contrast to more standard action hero SF.
PS. HNers, any good sci-fi book recommendations?
This is one of the structural weaknesses in the entire SCP... motif, for lack of a better word. When a core part of the premise is "you can't understand it, not even in principle, if you think you understand it you're wrong", the premise does some fairly fundamental damage to what most people would consider the basic structure of a story. Generally we think that at least in hindsight, a story should "make sense", but SCPs by their nature have to be somewhat random and lack predictability or they aren't SCPs. You can try to wrap a more conventional story around that particular motif, but you've always got this fundamental structural weakness sitting right smack in the middle of it, and you can't remove it without leaving the sub-genre. The SCP structure fundamentally starts with a negation of this aspect of stories.
It is fun seeing what some people do with this limitation, and there are after all compensating benefits or nobody would write in the universe. But it is something that is going to be there in any story set in an SCP or SCP-like universe.
I think it was Larry Niven that observed that most stories are judged by something like character, plot, theme, etc., and that one of the distinguishing characteristics of science fiction is that you have to add the background to the list of things to look at. But only a vanishingly small set of works ever managed to have character, plot, theme, and the other characteristics firing on all cylinders as it was; asking for a work to have all that and also be 5 out of 5 on the new setting it establishes as well is way too much to ask of a work. With this sort of story, as a reader you are putting all your chips on the setting. Going in to this sort of work you should expect the conventional measures of a story to at least take a hit, and in many cases a fairly large one. And of course, if that's not what you want, then you're not going to enjoy it and I have no problem with that. This is less a "defense" than an explanation, that if you didn't particularly enjoy this, I'd suggest staying away from the entire subgenre because the entire SCP subgenre is structurally prone to these issues from the very foundation on up.
(To give another example, Greg Egan has a number of works in which he fiddles with the laws of physics, to do things like have two time dimensions and two spatial dimensions, then works out how that actually affects physics using math rather than intuition and write stories in the resulting universes. This is such an investment into the setting that I don't find it all that surprising that I don't find the characters all that compelling per se. There just isn't the room. But you can't get that setting anywhere else.)
In a way, maybe it going off-piste is coherent with the idea of the first third. I'm sure this was not the author's intent, but fun from an ironic perspective.
https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/antimemetics-division-hub
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_Is_No_Antimemetics_Divis...
hn discussion about the written versions
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41224225
A different version by different director/actors:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-IiVeGAydE
The latest version of the book distances itself from the source material (a good decision imo): The SCP Foundation. It's an extremely interesting project, with some parallels to FOSS. I wonder if there are other joint literary projects of similar scale.
EDIT: saw other comments here mentioning that I am not expected to get this without lots of prior reading.
This scene is really arresting, which is how they get you. I kind of coasted through the book on this big idea.
The rest of the book felt like this scene playing out over and over on a bigger scale, with higher stakes, with roles switched around. It's hard to move a plot with this theme.
The book did a commendable job.But I was ready for it to be over when it was over.