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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.

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!

> 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

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.

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 read it based on a reddit search for 'good sci fi books' and that's it. Going in with no hype or expectations and I thought it was great.

PS. HNers, any good sci-fi book recommendations?

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 felt similar about the book. The premise was thrilling, but as it went on it seemed to succumb to typical genre tropes, ending didn't deliver.
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.
True, the first third had some mystery to it. The rest was kind of mediocre as far as sci-fi goes.
Oh wow, They filmed it! Twice even!

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

What do you mean? There is no antimemetics film.
I bet they filmed it way more than twice.
Did they forget it was already filmed once?
Interesting that there are two versions that I know of!

I watched this one first, and I prefer it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-IiVeGAydE. I like the actress who plays Wheeler better (no disrespect to Jasika Nicole, she does a good job too and I loved her in Fringe), and the script seems to stick closer to the original short story form from the website. Is this new short based on the book? If so, it seems the dialogues in the book are... weaker maybe?

Things I liked in this short: the use of B&W, and I thought the actor who plays O5-8 is stronger in this version.

I wonder if this story could become a "standard" for indie directors to riff off?

IMHO The writing and acting are much better in this new one. The way the fake agent was revealed is far superior, and so was how the pills were introduced and handed over. The original is fine, but it has a lot of "and now for this!" moments that just don't flow into each other.

This new one spends time building trust between the two characters, the resolution feels earned and not just handed out for the sake of the plot moving forward.

Very nice. This is up there with my favorite DUST short film, "Final Offer". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rv8kOzRZK8g
That's a great find. My personal favourite so far from Dust is "Laboratory Conditions": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1N25e4Ss34Q
Reminds me of "Total Rickall"(Rick and Morty: Season 2, Episode 4) which itself is probably a retelling of a retelling of a retelling of a retelling.
I'm guessing from the title that it took some inspiration either from the film Total Recall or the short-story the film was based upon We Can Remember It for You Wholesale.
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.

Jasika will always be Astrid from Fringe. In my head, Helen Hunt plays wheeler.
You mean Astro?
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 personally felt the book deal version was dumbed down. The OG which is still free on the scp wiki is amazing.

The free version has the character drink "apocalyptically strong coffee" to cope with the orientation process.

In the print version, it's just strong coffee. The original literary vibe was incredible.

All of it is free here: https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/antimemetics-division-hub

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.

Did anybody else find the original story mediocre stuff? Interesting premise, but neither novel nor that deep. PKD has done 100x with much less.
I really liked it and all the little interesting ideas within it, like the antimimetic worms that live everywhere. I actually found it very creative and clever. However, I didn't think the recent rewrite was as much of an improvement as others seem to. The later parts were improved but I thought some of the padding out of earlier parts arguably came out worse.

---

Edit:

To give an actual example, Marion's description in the original, from the scene in the video:

She is turning fifty this year and slowly greying, well on her way out of "petite" towards "little old lady".

In the updated edition:

She turns fifty this year. She is diminutive and flint-eyed, very dark-haired but rapidly greying. Today, her hair is strictly pulled back and up into a silver clasp. She wore her good suit for this, one button, very dark grey, with a solid blue blouse underneath. Ankle boots with stout heels, two silver stud earrings in each lobe. Contact lenses, not the usual glasses. On a lanyard around her neck she wears a security pass with a bright orange and red diagonal stripe.

Two uses of 'very dark' right after each other? And I actually liked how snappy the original was but that might be just me.

Another line in this first chapter that I love from the original:

"What…" O5-8 asks carefully, "would happen if we did know?"

becomes in the new edition:

"What…" Mahlo asks carefully, "would happen if we did know what happened to him?"

Why pad that out? It sounds less natural now.

I did find the introductory short story (this one) brilliant, as it's short, shows a clever and surprising inversion of roles midway, but especially because the premise- antimemetics- is actually extremely interesting. I even wonder if it has been developed seriously- I mean the study of antimemes as a communication/ propaganda technique.

It's true that the whole novel, despite a few good moments, seems mostly interested in plot and entertainment. Having read quite a bit of qntm's stuff online, I'd say he excels in the short story format where he can quickly present a clever or surprising idea and there isn't the need to sustain a plot or work on character development etc.

Anyway, comparing a random author to one of the best and most influential sci-fi authors ever is a bit pointless, don't you think?

I loved the ideas! The premise was novel to me, and I also don't think I've encountered the same idea since (except for in reference to the original story). I'm not a fan of the writing style though. It's very stiff and heavy-handed, as if the writer's only goal is to setup the next twist. But I can't complain that much, it reminds me a lot of my own writing.
My standard for website fiction is lower. When you're unknown, there's less pressure to go through a long editing cycle. Pale and SEEK have been good though.

Would not consider myself well-read, if I read enough PKD stories I could probably find some mediocre ones; really liked the popular ones I did read.

Indeed, it works fine as an introduction to a longer series, but on its own feels pretty unfulfilling.

I think the story where she detains her own husband would work much better in a stand-alone adaptation.

Quite pleasantly surprised to see Jasika Nicole in this short. Really quite an actress in FRINGE; she was excellent here, too.
Lots of people familiar with the material here, but as somone with zero context, I watched the film and I don't get it.

Is it something where you need to know the backstory to get the importance? The premise just seems quite thin: (Spoiler alert) the guy behind the desk had his mind erased and the guy with the gun is an impostor.

Is there more to it than that?

Read this as "antiemetics" (anti-nausea meds like Zofran) and was very confused for a moment.
It's been popping up on my feed constantly, guess this is a sign to finally give it a watch! Always enjoy SCP-esque content.
I just finished the book and it did not live up to all its hype. Quite boring, actually.
Was this authorised by QNTM?
This book was so good. Can't wait to watch this after work :)
Astrid! Or more accurately, Jasika Nicole.
Fnord!
"There is no cabal."