6 ms·

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

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.

silenced_trope 7mo ago
True, the first third had some mystery to it. The rest was kind of mediocre as far as sci-fi goes.
jhbadger 7mo ago
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.
brson 7mo ago
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.
MattPalmer1086 7mo ago
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!
Eddy_Viscosity2 7mo ago
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?
- 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 ago
    You 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 ago
      He 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 ago
  A 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 ago
    Nicely done, thanks!
- tartuffe78 7mo ago
  I 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 ago
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.
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 ago
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 https://clarkesworldmagazine.com
- presbyterian 7mo ago
  I'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 ago
    Thanks, that’s the answer I was looking for!
TheOtherHobbes 7mo ago
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.
- glenstein 7mo ago
  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.
kranner 7mo ago
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.
- glenstein 7mo ago
  It 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 ago
    That 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 ago
      Thanks! 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 ago
  What 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 ago
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.
- glenstein 7mo ago
  As 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 ago
    IAASL 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 ago
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.
- simulator5g 7mo ago
  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.

silenced_trope 7mo ago

True, the first third had some mystery to it. The rest was kind of mediocre as far as sci-fi goes.

jhbadger 7mo ago

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.

brson 7mo ago

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.

MattPalmer1086 7mo ago

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!

Eddy_Viscosity2 7mo ago

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?

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 ago
  You 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 ago
    He 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 ago
A 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 ago
  Nicely done, thanks!
tartuffe78 7mo ago
I 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 ago

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.

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 ago

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 https://clarkesworldmagazine.com

presbyterian 7mo ago
I'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 ago
  Thanks, that’s the answer I was looking for!

TheOtherHobbes 7mo ago

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.

glenstein 7mo ago
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.

kranner 7mo ago

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.

glenstein 7mo ago
It 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 ago
  That 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 ago
    Thanks! 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 ago
What 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 ago

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.

glenstein 7mo ago
As 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 ago
  IAASL 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 ago

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.

simulator5g 7mo ago
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.