That said, from the review: "open source maintainership as cosmic horror." Genuine laugh.
There is also the rough draft. I've only read the wiki and the first draft of book
Oddly I gifted the actual book away before reading it (I can buy it again, I thought)
:)
If you don't like weird fiction, odds are you'll bounce off it.
My short review would be: the book is very one-note, it’s like a horror movie that keeps doing the same jumpscare over and over again. Despite this I managed to enjoy it.
I will give the author credit on how they deal with their characters' memories and the re-development of their thoughts, and the usage of time-jumping was reasonable (some books jump around too much, as if these time-skips improve a boring plot). Also the convention for how they solve their dilemma was enjoyable.
Overall, I think the author relies too much on a vocal fandom around the SCP Foundation to glorify the book. I think there is potential for a saga of books but there needs to be more effort in the drafting and editing process to raise the quality of the books to the level the universe deserves.
It's got some provocative ideas, which Stephen foregrounds.
It's got a great hook, and like most writing incubated under circumstances like this, it leans hard into polished sharp introduction into a well-considered world with a very specific flavor.
It's also—no better way to put it—crappy as a novel.
It's not because the author can't string sentences together.
It's because that's not what makes a novel function as a novel.
Epic opening and premise establishment: 10/10
Nice "plot twist", predictable in its inevitability if not its specifics; conforms to genre: 7/10
Narrative arc: 2/10
Ability to sustain meaningful tension and interest while working through the de rigeur mechanics of filling hundreds of pages: 1/10
I get that there is a new readership with different expectations and styles of reading. (Looking at you tiktok; looking at you Dungeon Crawler Carl; looking at most successful YA fiction especially that which gets SPICEY and is released in 8-book series with a new volume every 11 months)
If you're silverback and relish long-form fiction as previously conceived: set expectations accordingly.
I read the first version and thought the first half was good and that the second half felt clunky. To the point where i don’t recommend it to anyone (not a huge negative, there’s just better books out there).
GPTZero gives it a 100% chance of being AI generated, and I've found that these tools may give false negatives from a well-prompted model, but false positives are rare.
If you are looking to tune your intuition for AI-written text, here's an interesting list of their quirks (ironically provided as a Claude skill for removing those quirks from emitted text):
https://github.com/stephenturner/skill-deslop/blob/main/refe...
FWIW, this just seems to be what’s popular now. Pretty regularly now, I’ll see social media posts and memes mocking [media franchise X] for being anything other than that very basic good vs evil plot with clean resolution, as if these people didn’t have plenty of Marvel slop to consume.
I will say this is tangential to the culture war, but seems to exist outside of it too.
I liked Ra, but I liked Fine Structures more.
I would absolutely recommend it for people in the vicinity of these two demographics. It's worth it for the originality. Both the plot and the storytelling format are very weird and very original.
The rewrite definitely improves on the ending and its delivery, but it's still largely the same plot, so it may not address all of your issues.
I read both versions and agree that the second half of the first version was very abstract and difficult to follow. While I would consider the first half of the new version more edited than rewritten, the second half got a significant overhaul which fixed almost all of my issues with it and made for (in my opinion) a much more satisfying ending. I would recommend giving the new version another chance, though those who read the first version may find the new character names distracting. (Most didn't bother me, but Marion Wheeler -> Marie Quinn never felt quite right.)
I haven't seen the short film, so cannot compare.
That is different than whether or not the reviewer was compelled by the ideas in the book. If the reviewer is a good writer, then I've learned something. Then, I know that somebody who is a good writer thought the ideas in a book were interesting, which by the transitive property, implies the author being reviewed is also a good writer. In this case, I don't think the reviewer is a very interesting writer, so I'm not convinced that they are a good judge of interesting writing.
I don't read complete plot summaries of books that I ever plan to read. That's why I look for "reviews." The only reason it's hard to write a review is because you can't give away the plot, but you have to give a sense of the appeal and the quality of the book. Otherwise, it's just a summary.
I can't know what books are available on the market through introspection. The only way I can know about them is through being informed. I don't want to read a complete plot summary of a book I have yet to read. If the only way I can find out about the existence of books is by having the plot spoiled, that's not optimal.
edit: Also, tbh, if a book's plot is good, I don't need you to tell it to me. The person who came up with the plot already carefully came up with the way they wanted to tell it to me. Not sure why you think you can do better if you think the book is good. If the book is awful to read but the plot is interesting, feel free.
> It is a good book by the way.
The reason this doesn't work as a review is because I don't know you, and I don't know what you like. If you can say this in a way in which it doesn't matter whether I know you or what you like, and give away the least plot possible to accomplish this, you've written what most people are looking for in a review.
The book spends much of its time saying the transcendent cannot even be represented, to people, to us the read -- then just represents it, and in a tawdry christian way.
I think the violation of that norm, as well as the ending being played straight -- with literally a long paragraph explaining with ideaspace is... that's a fourth-wall break into christianity imv
Which makes the whole book read as, "the issue with humans is our physical bodies in a fallen world which are limited. just die, go to heaven, then you can know/represent/understand everything. Yay! Death!"
OK. Just kinda naff.
It reads as a religious person who accidentally wrote a good sci-fi book then hurridly, at the end, reminds us all that its really a parable with a Noble Message that in Death all things are trascended.
"And at the top of the food chain sits SCP-3125 (renamed in the published edition, but the designation is so perfect I am using it anyway) ..."
> The second half was garbage, but the first half was so good
so you had the same reaction?
Support your local library!
Later I read the first version of the book and it was okay, but the vibes were a bit lost.
The new version of the book I didn't even finish.
> but the first half was so good and original I'd recommend it just for that
Attension span so short you couldn't even make it to the second half of the sentence before dismissing it
I have a Kobo that I use to read the non-DRM ebooks I'm able to acquire. One such source is downloads from the Kobo store, when publishers make the non-DRM file available.
> “She steps back from him. She flexes what could be wings.”
> “In ideatic space everything is possible and everything is real and every metaphor is apt. She sees a galaxy of shining points: people, all the people who have ever existed, packed almost densely enough to form a continuum, living and dead, real and fictional and borderline. Similar people, who think in similar ways and who stand for similar things, are closer together. Significant people, the famous and iconic, are brighter. There are stars for inanimate entities, too, and events and abstracts: countries, homes, works of art, births and first steps and words, shocks and dramas, archetypes, numbers and equations, long arcs of stories, grand mythologies, philosophies, politics, tropes. Every truth and lie is here. Ideatic space itself—the human conception of it, at least—is here too, a fixed point embedded inside itself. The idea of the Unknown Organization is here. The idea of Adam Quinn is here. Marie, rising, waking, is here. And occupying the same space as the first brilliant spiral is a second, its counterpart, a galaxy whose points are relationships between the points of the first: what each person means to each other person. Loves, mutual and unrequited; admirations, aspirations, intimidations, fears, and revulsions. Conceptions and misconceptions. There is Adam’s shining link with Marie, and Marie’s link back to Adam. And Marie’s link to the Organization. And at the core of the whole dazzling ecosystem is an ultimate singular point, to which every other point is connected: humanity.
> And the whole thing, the entirety of human ideatic space, is being torn apart. U-3125 hangs above it, a monumental, blinding new presence, a singular entity more massive and luminous than both spirals combined. Its malevolent gravity drags humanity and all human ideas into its orbit, warping them beyond recognition. Beneath it, within its context, everything becomes corrupted into the worst version of itself. It takes joy and turns it into vindictive glee; it takes self-reliance and turns it into solipsistic psychosis; it turns love into smothering assault, pride into humiliation, families into traps, safety into paranoia, peace into discontent. It turns people into people who do not see people as people. And civilizations, ultimately, into abominations.
> U-3125 is titanic in its structure, brain-breaking in its topology. It comes from another part of ideatic space, a place where ideas exist on a scale entirely beyond those of humans. Its wrongness and[…]”
> “She sets a course. Outbound, to the deepest limit of ideatic space.”
Etc. The references to U3125 incarnating, and it being The Adversary. And the explicit ascention narrative with Mary getting wings, flying thru clouds of Ideas -- which are actually animate and incarnated in this world, ie., they are souls. I mean, it's terribly misjudged ending
To anyone confused (like me), the commenters above had opposite recommendations despite having similar opinions of the book.
> At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Not sure how universal that is, but I've seen similar language on several other books.
Wait, OMW book 7? Wtf? Thank you even more! That'll be up next after my Hyperion re-read (RIP Dan)
There is a particular flavor of horror that only people who work with formal systems for a living can fully appreciate. It is the horror of data loss, of silent corruption, of the thing that fails without logging an error. It is the backup that was never tested. The monitoring system that monitors everything except its own health. The silent failure that propagates through a distributed system for weeks before anyone notices, and by the time you do notice, the state of the world has drifted so far from what you believed it to be that the gap itself has become invisible. If Kafka wrote incident reports, they would read like this novel. If this specific dread resonates with you on a spiritual level, then Sam Hughes (writing as qntm) has written your nightmare scenario, scaled up from a database to the entire ontological fabric of reality, and turned it into one of the most inventive science fiction novels of the past decade.
The premise is this: a meme is an idea that wants to be known. It spreads, replicates, and lodges itself in your mind. An antimeme is the opposite. It is an idea, or an entity, or a phenomenon that actively resists being perceived or remembered. The moment you stop looking at it, it vanishes from your mind, and so does the fact that you were ever looking. You cannot fight it because you cannot remember it exists. You cannot organize a defense because the knowledge that a defense is needed is the first thing it destroys. The monster hides in the structure of cognition itself. The darkness is a feature.
The book originated as a series of entries on the SCP Foundation wiki, a collaborative fiction project where contributors write clinical, bureaucratic documentation for fictional anomalous objects and entities. If you have never encountered SCP, imagine the filing cabinets of a secret agency that catalogs impossible things with the same dry procedural language you would use to document a network outage. The SCP Foundation is, in essence, what would happen if the IETF wrote horror fiction, and the result is exactly as wonderful as that sounds. It is one of the genuinely great creative experiments of the internet age, and Hughes's Antimemetics Division entries are widely regarded as the best thing to come out of it. The novel collects and revises these into a coherent narrative, and it works beautifully as a standalone book.
The protagonist, Marion Wheeler, runs the Antimemetics Division. Her job is to remember things that the universe is trying to make her forget. She and her staff take mnestic drugs (the opposite of amnestics: chemicals that force you to retain memories your brain is actively discarding) to perceive and fight threats that are, by their nature, invisible to everyone else. The drugs have brutal side effects. The work has worse ones. You are fighting a war that nobody knows is happening, that nobody will remember you fought, and that erases its own history as it proceeds. Every victory is immediately forgotten. Every sacrifice is invisible. It is, in other words, open source maintainership as cosmic horror. This is heroism that is structurally incapable of being recognized, which is either the noblest possible form of service or the most absurd possible form of futility, and Hughes has the good sense not to tell you which.
The novel's cosmology is built on a hierarchy where information is more real than matter. Beneath ordinary three-dimensional spacetime lies the noosphere: the space of all human-conceivable ideas, memes, and concepts, a vast ecology that transcends the physical world and can retroactively edit memory, identity, and even the historical record. The noosphere is not a metaphor. It is, within the novel's logic, the true substrate of reality, and the physical world is a shadow cast by it. This idea-space has its own fauna, including antimemetic spiders and various lesser predators that rip through the membrane between concept and matter. And at the top of the food chain sits SCP-3125 (renamed in the published edition, but the designation is so perfect I am using it anyway): a five-dimensional informational apex predator shaped, in the rare moments anyone perceives it, like a starfish. It is so vast and so hostile that anyone who successfully conceptualizes it is detected and killed. Knowing about it is lethal. Understanding it is lethal. The act of comprehension is the attack surface. This is Lovecraftian horror translated into information theory with perfect fidelity. Lovecraft's cosmos was terrifying because it was indifferent and vast. Hughes's cosmos is terrifying because it is hostile and memetic. The monster lurks in the act of thinking about it.
What elevates the book from clever premise to genuine art is what it does with memory and identity. Marion's strategy for fighting SCP-3125 involves systematically erasing her own memories to deny the entity information it could use as a vector. She forgets her husband. She forgets her colleagues. She works from notes and recordings because her own mind has become unreliable. The protagonist of the novel is a woman who is voluntarily dismantling her own identity in order to save a world that will never know she existed. Every convention of the heroic arc is inverted. The hero loses knowledge and power over the course of the story. Deliberately. The sacrifice goes beyond death (though that comes too). The real sacrifice is self-erasure: the voluntary destruction of everything that makes you you.
And then, in the second half, something extraordinary happens. Marion's husband, Adam, senses her absence. He cannot remember her. He has no evidence she existed. But there is a hole in his life that has her shape, and the shape will not go away. Love, the novel argues, leaves traces that even antimemetic erasure cannot fully remove. This is the most emotionally devastating science fiction idea I have encountered in years, and Hughes handles it with the restraint and precision it deserves. In a lesser book it would be sentimental. Here it is earned, because the entire preceding narrative has been a rigorous demonstration of exactly how much can be lost, which makes the thing that persists feel miraculous.
The novel's form mirrors its content in a way that is both structurally elegant and deeply unsettling. Chapters begin mid-scene because the context has been erased. Characters appear without introduction because the reader, like the characters, has been dropped into a situation whose history is missing. You read the way the Antimemetics Division works: assembling fragments, inferring what is missing from the outline of what remains, never certain your reconstruction is correct. It is the only honest way to tell a story about forgetting.
If you work with systems, if you think about information, if you have ever been kept up at night by the fragility of the things we build and the ease with which they can fail silently, this book will get under your skin and stay there. It is Lovecraft for people who think in terms of information theory. It is a horror novel where the monster is an idea and the weapon is your own capacity to understand it. It is brilliant, it is original, and it is the best argument I have seen for why the SCP Foundation is one of the most important literary projects of the twenty-first century. That a novel this good started life as collaborative wiki fiction is itself an antimemetic phenomenon: a masterpiece hiding in plain sight in a format that literary culture is constitutionally incapable of taking seriously. Read it, and then try to remember that you did.