7 ms·
Sci-Fi Short Film “There Is No Antimemetics Division” [video]
- glenstein 7mo agoI 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.
- silenced_trope 7mo agoTrue, the first third had some mystery to it. The rest was kind of mediocre as far as sci-fi goes.
- jhbadger 7mo agoI 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.
- brson 7mo agoI 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.
- MattPalmer1086 7mo agoI 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!
- Eddy_Viscosity2 7mo agoI 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?
- mugwumprk 7mo ago“Service Model” is a recent one and I had an absolute blast with it. If you don’t have much of a humanities background, you’d benefit from skimming the Wikipedia article. There’s a lot of references to old novels you might miss if you don’t have the context.
- sohkamyung 7mo agoYou might be interested in this prequel to "Service Model": "Human Resources" [1] [1] https://reactormag.com/human-resources-adrian-tchaikovsky/ https://reactormag.com/human-resources-adrian-tchaikovsky/
- LogicFailsMe 7mo agoHe needs to do more in this universe and maybe connect it to one of his others. He really specializes in all the variants of collapse and I love every page of it.
- alexpotato 7mo agoA write up review of books I've read and there are a couple scifi books (and a bunch of other recommendations) here: https://alexpotato.com/books/ https://alexpotato.com/books/
- Eddy_Viscosity2 7mo agoNicely done, thanks!
- tartuffe78 7mo agoI just came across Hardwired from 1986, it's a cyberpunk dystopian future with lots of action. I loved it, some of it is very prescient, but with lots of 80s influence to an imagined future.
- thinkingtoilet 7mo agoI 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.
- jerf 7mo ago"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.)
- redfloatplane 7mo agoI 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 https://clarkesworldmagazine.com
- presbyterian 7mo agoI've read both, and the "editing pass" was minimal. Names changed and some scenes reworked a tiny bit, but it's the same thing. If you've read the original, I'd say don't bother with the new one.
- redfloatplane 7mo agoThanks, that’s the answer I was looking for!
- TheOtherHobbes 7mo agoThe 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.
- glenstein 7mo agoRight. 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.
- kranner 7mo agoMy 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.
- glenstein 7mo agoIt certainly invites that level of meta-commentary on its own structure, though I agree it's inadvertent. And I know at some point someone is going invoke that point in full sincerity as if its an answer, and whatever that is, the satisfied meta-commentary that makes too much of irony as if its a sincere insight, I feel like is just looming as a possible and frustratingly shallow justification of the book. There's an interesting question there of the scales of abstraction at which anti-memes could function, and that's fascinating but as you noted in this instance not necessarily intentional. It makes me think of the movie Doubt, where I remember being sincerely confused as to the central accusation at the center of the movie (though retrospectively its obvious and I knew it was at least one possibility but I wasn't sure if there was perhaps a different interpretation), and was told that not being sure was the point and by expecting an answer I was missing the point since the whole movie is about "doubt". I felt this explanation was, frankly, just stupid. Just because you're going meta doesn't mean any point coherently registered in the form of meta-analysis is insightful. But anyway, I'm off the rails a bit now going after imaginary adversaries, but agree with everything you've said.
- kranner 7mo agoThat was very well articulated. I'm going to hold on to your point about trivial meta-analyses masquerading as serious ones, sadly a very common type of gotcha in tech-aligned circles.
- glenstein 7mo agoThanks! I was mostly building off of your point I think. You have to imagine there's a short term or phrase for this. The overestimation of the value of going meta, or treating the move of going meta like it's a skeleton key when it's actually frivolous.
- jodrellblank 7mo ago> 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=po8Jc7sLbP8
- argomo 7mo agoWhat a coincidence. I also read the book and can't recall what it was about. Umm, what were we talking about again?
- jrussino 7mo ago> 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/qntm-s-author-page https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/antimemetics-division-hub https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/antimemetics-division-hub
- helterskelter 7mo agoIt 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.
- glenstein 7mo agoAs a fellow reader of IAASL I see what you mean. I think IAASL lost me at the end because it was repurposing terms like "soul" and "self" in ways that were no longer really philosophically robust, but I understood and appreciated it as effectively memorializing a lost partner, and gave clear expression to what it means to treat the things a person leaves behind, and the desire to preserve them, as a way of keeping your connection to them. And it doesn't diminish how fantastic the rest of the book us up to that point. In the age of almost-AGI and renewed debates on consciousness we need the likes of Hofstadter more than ever.
- helterskelter 7mo agoIAASL wasn't my favorite but I think I had certain expectations going into it, having just read GEB. I appreciated the book more when I began thinking of it as Hofstadter really trying to lay down in the plainest terms he could what he's been getting at his whole career as it relates to people/consciousness, but perhaps hasn't put into single piece of work.
- wishfish 7mo agoMy 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.
- simulator5g 7mo agoThe 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.
- Kim_Bruning 7mo agoOh wow, They filmed it! Twice even! hn discussion about the written versions * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41224225 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41224225 A different version by different director/actors: * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-IiVeGAydE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-IiVeGAydE
- jojobas 7mo agoI bet they filmed it way more than twice.
- ricksunny 7mo agoI never thought much of Adrian Gage as a director anyway
- actionfromafar 7mo agotwice... in the last 15 minutes.
- TheOtherHobbes 7mo agoI bet everyone's seen it way more than twice.
- Cthulhu_ 7mo agoWhat do you mean? There is no antimemetics film.
- tantalor 7mo agoDid they forget it was already filmed once?
- lowbloodsugar 7mo agoJasika will always be Astrid from Fringe. In my head, Helen Hunt plays wheeler.
- loganberriess 7mo agoYou mean Astro?
- dspillett 7mo agoNo, Asterix.
- timschmidt 7mo agoAstral.
- loganberriess 7mo agoAspirin
- jmcgough 7mo agoRead this as "antiemetics" (anti-nausea meds like Zofran) and was very confused for a moment.
- coldtea 7mo agoDid anybody else find the original story mediocre stuff? Interesting premise, but neither novel nor that deep. PKD has done 100x with much less.
- Nition 7mo agoI 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.
- johnke 7mo agoThere were also some examples of sloppy editing in the updated edition, like multiple uses of the word "perimetre" which the author acknowledges was an 'incautious find-and-replace from the US English "meter" to UK English "metre"' https://qntm.org/antimemetics#komment6913d2eb6c240 https://qntm.org/antimemetics#komment6913d2eb6c240
- ethmarks 7mo agoWhich is especially odd because the author (Sam Hughes) lives in the UK and wrote the original in UK English, but apparently wrote the rewrite in US English. For example, a chapter in the original was titled "Case Colourless Green", but in the US edition of the rewrite that chapter is "Case Colorless Green" (without the 'u'). So Hughes, a native UK English speaker, wrote the rewrite in a non-native (to him) dialect, then had it (lazily) translated into his native dialect.
- SideburnsOfDoom 7mo agoWas this authorised by QNTM?
- GCUMstlyHarmls 7mo agoI think all SCP content is creative commons share alike (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/), so I don't think he actually needs to -- assuming this is based on SCP and not the book. I know the book had some revisions done to make it legally distinct from the SCP stories for copyright purposes.
- v9v 7mo agoIn one of the youtube comments the director says that they contacted the author and got permission.
- rtkwe 7mo agoDoesn't need to be, the default license for SCP Wiki is Creative Commons BY-SA so you only have to attribute the source and distribute under the same license. I don't see that mentioned so it might technically violate the license unless they negotiated directly with qntm under a different agreement. That's the tricky thing with licenses, you never know if they have so unless the original creator is raising a stink you can't know and legally you have no grounds to object even if they are violating the license.
- decimalenough 7mo agoThe originals: https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/antimemetics-division-hub https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/antimemetics-division-hub https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_Is_No_Antimemetics_Division https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_Is_No_Antimemetics_Divis...
- world2vec 7mo agoI just finished the book and it did not live up to all its hype. Quite boring, actually.
- manfromchina1 7mo agoReminds 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.
- aidenn0 7mo agoI'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.
- bschne 7mo agoI 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.
- the_af 7mo agoInteresting 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 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?
- com2kid 7mo agoIMHO 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.
- the_af 7mo agoOh, don't get me wrong, I liked this one. I would definitely watch the rest of the stories with this cast and director! Maybe it's just a case of having watched the other version first.
- languagehacker 7mo agoThis book was so good. Can't wait to watch this after work :)
- afandian 7mo agoLots 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?
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- pavel_lishin 7mo agoI think the story is written in a much better way than this video presents it: https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/we-need-to-talk-about-fifty-five https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/we-need-to-talk-about-fifty-fiv... I know it's not polite to armchair-critique a thing I could never have created myself, but I don't think this is a particularly good adaptation of this story. One change, I think, completely robs it of some of its impact, and I would have handled something else differently as well - but oh well.
- the_af 7mo ago> One change, I think, completely robs it of some of its impact Which one? One thing I didn't like from this adaptation is that the thought-devouring idea doesn't live inside Wheeler's mind, like in the story. They made it into a CGI blob. But I suppose the story is confusing enough, so making it invisible would have been too much.
- pavel_lishin 7mo agoI didn't want to post any extra spoilers, so I'll ROT13 my reply: Gur PTV oybo jnf gur ovttrfg bssraqre, V guvax. Znevba'f crg fubhyq arire unir orra ivfvoyr ba pnzren, vg ybfrf arneyl nyy bs vgf zlfgvdhr, NAQ vg fubhyqa'g or "phgr". Fur unf vg ba n yrnfu, ohg vg'f fgvyy n irel qnatrebhf FPC! Vg fubhyqa'g or ebyyvat nebhaq yvxr n phgr yvggyr OO8 rdhvinyrag. V guvax gur glcr bs ivrjre jub vf jngpuvat na nqncgngvba bs guvf fgbel jbhyq unir qrnyg jvgu vg svar. Frpbaqnevyl, V xabj gung Pynl "zvffrq" uvf qbfr, ohg ur jnf fgvyy tncvat ng ure crg yvxr ur'q arire frra na FPC orsber va uvf yvsr, yvxr ur jnf gur arjovr orvat vagebqhprq gb guvatf. Juvpu qbrf znxr fbzr frafr va guvf pbagrkg, ohg ur'f fgvyy njner gung ur'f n irel fravbe bssvpvny ng gur FPC sbhaqngvba. Vg whfg qbrfa'g zngpu uvf punenpgrevmngvba ng nyy. Guveqyl - naq guvf vf zl zbfg crggl pbzcynvag - vs V jrer gur jevgre/qverpgbe bs guvf, V jbhyqa'g unir unq uvf "nffvfgnag" chg njnl uvf tha orsber fur fgbyr vg. V jbhyq unir phg sebz n fprar bs uvz nvzvat gur tha ng ure, onpx gb gur erfg bs gur fprar sbe n ovg, naq gura onpx gb uvz jvgubhg gur tha. Vg'f zber vzcerffvir gb fgrny n tha bhg bs fbzrbar'f unaqf guna vg vf bhg bs n ubyfgre.
- ldb 7mo agoVery nice. This is up there with my favorite DUST short film, "Final Offer". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rv8kOzRZK8g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rv8kOzRZK8g
- viscousviolin 7mo agoThat's a great find. My personal favourite so far from Dust is "Laboratory Conditions": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1N25e4Ss34Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1N25e4Ss34Q
- Animats 7mo agoFnord!
- morgango 7mo agoAstrid! Or more accurately, Jasika Nicole.
- giladd 7mo agoIt'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.
- dmitrygr 7mo agoMaybe 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.
- qingcharles 7mo ago"There is no cabal."
- SayThatSh 7mo agoIt's been popping up on my feed constantly, guess this is a sign to finally give it a watch! Always enjoy SCP-esque content.
- thcipriani 7mo agoI 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.
- MollyRealized 7mo agoQuite pleasantly surprised to see Jasika Nicole in this short. Really quite an actress in FRINGE; she was excellent here, too.
- mjcarden 7mo agoI 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.
- PostOnce 7mo agoI 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 https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/antimemetics-division-hub