Hello all! I'm qntm and my novel There Is No Antimemetics Division was published yesterday. This is a mind-bending sci-fi thriller/horror about fighting a war against adversaries which are impossible to remember - it's fast-paced, inventive, dark, and (ironically) memorable. This is my first traditionally published book but I've been self-publishing serial and short science fiction for many years. You might also know my short story "Lena", a cyberpunk encyclopaedia entry about the world's first uploaded human mind.
I will be here to answer your questions starting from 5:30pm Eastern Time (10:30pm UTC) on 13 November. Get your questions in now, and I'll see you then I hope?
Cheers
🐋
EDIT: Well folks it is now 1:30am local time and I AM DONE. Thank you for all of your great questions, it was a pleasure to talk about stuff with you all, and sorry to those of you I didn't get to. I sleep now. Cheers ~qntm
How much change is there between your original self-published Antimemetics story and the new commercially-published one?
In other words, for someone who already read v1, what is the pitch to read v2?
(love your work. Ra is my personal favorite)
The book has received a total end-to-end editorial overhaul. The nature of the web serial format is that there are always things you're going to look back on and wish you had an opportunity to do over - to lay better setup for later payoff, to strengthen character arcs and plots, to add more consistent themes and pacing, to fix basic problems, to pick different words. And, in this particular case, to turn what was almost like a series of loosely connected stories, which read like an anthology at times, into a proper singular narrative, a novel. I had plenty of ideas of my own for the rewrite but my agent had many very valuable suggestions of her own, and my editors at Penguin also had plenty to add.
The backbone of the story is essentially the same but nearly every sentence in the book has been adjusted a little. The structure is much less nonlinear and the third act has been reworked quite extensively. The most notable change you're going to see is that all the Creative Commons elements originating in the SCP project have been removed and replaced. This was a difficult decision to make but there was no other way that this book was going to be traditionally published - plus it gave me a chance to create a cleaner break between the two versions of the story, and exercise some creativity.
It is, in my opinion, if you value that, a much stronger book. And the different creative choices might also be really interesting to you.
I’m on act three now. Holy shit do I love this book so far
What were the Creative Commons elements that were removed, references to SCPs and the foundation? Did you just tweak them slightly to make them legally distinct?
I just started listening to the audiobook, and it's basically slight tweaks - the Foundation is "the Organization", and objects are "Unknowns", etc.
I preordered this book months ago based off Reddit recommendations. I was completely unaware of your previous work, I don’t read scp stuff (my boy is obsessed though) but I’m a millennial who was obsessed with X Files as a kid. I read in another comment that you’ve never watched an episode (and you can skip it at this point. Does not hold up well on the whole) but this book scratched a very very deep itch for this kind of content that I have been searching for in a way nothing else really has in a very long time. I’m following your career from now on. You fucking ROCK dude! I’m taking this to book club, it’s my pick next month and I’m pushing this thing hard. Loved it!
You're in for a darn treat, qntm has been writing amazing stuff for decades, and yeah it just scratches that good itch lol.
The videogame Control scratches a similar itch if you are looking for more. Reminded me a lot of watching X-Files as a kid.
I did not have an interest in reading the new version since I have already read the original but wow this sold me on it!
I found one spoiler-ish reference. In this SPOILERY thread someone asks about a plot point. qntm says that was correct but not well written, and:
Oh, thanks for linking that, as it actually answers my question in this thread pretty well too.
Also curious about this! Was there outside help (e.g. editing) in the new version? Have there been elements removed or changed?
Editors are usually invaluable to an author
Following this
I’m going to (re)read this sometime, and the answer to your question is going to determine how soon that happens. Is the plot changed? Are the scenes changed? Or is it just removing SCP references and improving the writing?
I'm reading it right now and about 30% through. Some character names were changed, I think some of the character writing was improved, and the plot arcs seem to flow together more cohesively. I imagine it's all going to end up more or less at the same place, but the journey is improved.
The rough "web serial" feel of it has been much reduced and it reads a lot more like one of those old-school novels that started out as a magazine serial. It definitely benefits heavily from some editing. It's been many years since I read the original so I can't really give a detailed breakdown, but it's a noticeably better book than the one we read years ago.
Side note, the audiobook is very well done.
I’ll add a non-spoiler answer because I sort-of-accidentally reread the new version and I had just read the older version a couple of months ago.
The first half of the book is essentially the same, the plot points were all as I remembered, more cohesive but it was also my second time reading.
The end of the book was overall the same plot, but there was a key plot point qntm mentions in another answer that I had completely missed the first time that was rewritten to be much clearer. The end itself was also very nebulous in the first version and that was rewritten to be more clear.
Overall, it felt like rereading the book, and if more time has passed I probably wouldn’t have noticed the rewrites. Great experience both times.
No question for you, just wanted to applaud the sheer brilliant weirdness of your book. Some of the best ever SCP content.
Thank you! 🐋
I second this.
Why did you choose qntm as your pen name?
Loves science. Vowels, not so much.
Back around 2005 when I was trying to pick a domain name for my personal site someone suggested "qntm" and I thought that was a very cool suggestion, and "qntm.org" was available, so I picked it. A few years after that I started using "qntm" as a username, most notably on Twitter where I think I originally registered in 2009. It's not the only username I've ever used (for example, here on Reddit I'm sam512) and it's often not available because it's so short, so I have a few backup options... I still think it's a cool handle though.
That doesn't entirely answer your question. Why is it my pen name? qntm is my username on the SCP project and it's the name attached to all of my SCP contributions, including of course the SCPs and Tales which eventually came together to be There Is No Antimemetics Division. It is therefore the name which the SCP community knows me by. Not long after that SCP readers started requesting a collected ebook edition of Antimemetics, so naturally when I did that I published it with the author byline of "qntm" because that's the name I'm known by.
And then Antimemetics found some unexpected traction outside of the SCP readership. At this point I had several other self-published books under "Sam Hughes" but people were reporting difficulty in tracking down those other works of mine - I had hit a major decision point, where it was time to commit fully to one author name or the other, not both at once. After a lot of soul-searching I decided that as "qntm" had the most traction, and Antimemetics was my most popular book, and a slightly bizarre author byline was something which would potentially grab more eyeballs in a very crowded market, I went with "qntm" everywhere. And that's where we are now.
Love that question too! How do you feel about the book being released in some countries under your full name?
isn’t it just quantum but with sass
I read the SCP version of the book. Are there any major differences That changed the overall story?
Feel free to be vague about it.
The backbone of the story is the same. I'll refer you to my longer answer here.
He rewrote it to remove any SCP mention for starters.
He rewrote it to remove any ███ mention for starters.
I was very confused when i saw "published yesterday" b/c i bought the book like a year ago and have it sitting on my night stand lol
Hello qntm, appreciate all your fiction works so far. Fine Structure was a blast, Ra was an epic-scale mystery, and Valuable Transit and Other Stories really gave me Ted Chiang vibes (complimentary). Two questions:
1) How do you see your work in relation to other current sci-fi authors and creators? You touch on many areas including hard science, information warfare, theoretical physics, space civilisations, deep time. Do you read anything by Charles Stross, Iain Banks, Yoon Ha Lee, Greg Egan, or smaller writers like Fernando Borretti?
2) When will we see your take on the mech genre? Its only a short step between an uploaded human consciousness and a Big Robot piloted by an infovore ghost.
I've read a lot of Iain M. Banks, I love the Culture books, obviously Excession is my favourite but I love the extended action set piece which concludes Matter. He was a good dude and it's tragic that we won't get anything more from him. I also greatly enjoyed Charles Stross's Accelerando. Not so familiar with those other authors - my to-read book pile is about two metres tall right now and growing.
I actually have already featured mechs very heavily in my book Ed, but... I don't know if I'd one hundred percent recommend it as my authoritative take on that genre. Ed is the oldest book of mine which I actually keep online and available, I wrote it many many years ago and I think I'm a much stronger writer now. I think I could do a better job now. In any case, mech fiction usually tips over into military science fiction which I don't have strong instincts for - I'm not good at tactical thinking, I would probably get too bogged down in the scientific implausibility and impracticality of the things.
Just wanted to say that I really appreciate your work,🤷🏻♂️! Excession and Accelerando are also some of my favorites so this makes a lot of sense 😅
I read Ed shortly after reading Antimemetics and very much enjoyed it, fwiw.
If you want to avoid implausibility, Egan is definitely an author for you! He's probably the most rigorous SF author writing today, including a website with sections giving all the mathematical backing for the alternate worlds behind the books. (I recommend starting with either the excellent collection Axiomatic or the novel Diaspora, because as his alternate physics books go that one is a relatively easy start by his standards: he's not working out an entire separate set of laws of physics like in The Clockwork Rocket or Dichronauts.)
(I'm another fan of your work, of course, but also I was enough of a fan of Excession that I was able to snag esperi.org.uk back in the day. Not a single person I have ever talked to knew where it came from. Perhaps the red dwarf that was the closest star to the Excession was too obscure a reference...)
You must be sick of the "what book?" style jokes. Have you/your marketing team explored any way to exploit this for marketing purposes? It does appear to be uniquely weird in this regard.
An excellent book I will recommend to all. Thank you for sharing your work.
We actually had this exact conversation early on in marketing discussions. On the one hand I love the gag - it's fun, it shows reader engagement with the material - but it is fundamentally an in-joke. Critically, it is a joke which doesn't make any sense at all until after you have read the book and know the context, or at minimum that the book is about interfering with human memory at civilisational scales. My recommendation was that we avoided using the joke ourselves in our own marketing and I think we stuck to that pretty closely.
We sent advance copies to several notable authors, hoping to get nice glowing comments back which we could use for promotional purposes, and one of them gave a response which was literally the "What book? I don't know what you're talking about..." joke. As I say: awesome that you enjoyed the book and wanted to riff on it! Thank you! Thumbs up! But we were not able to use that quote!
Such is life.
I actually got a weird incidental experience 2 days ago at Barnes & Noble, I couldn't pay online for pickup, so I get onto the store, catalog shows it's in Scify/fantasy shelves. Go to said shelves, there is no Qntm in the authors. Get Cuatomer Desk help, they say: "weird name, has a ring to it, let me get it for you" Disappear for about 20 minutes, come back and insist they have it, but can't find it, and he has seen it recently. Goes back to search again, takes another colleague eoth him, finds it in the backroom, catalog states its should be on the shelves.
I was having a very weird time, grinning for about the 2 hours they took to find it
Okay, who was it lol
Stephen Graham Jones, and it did end up in the physical dust jacket, 4th praise:
'I dont even remember reading this book. Related, What is a "book"?'
LMAO
In a FAQ previously posted around a year ago about this V2 of the book, you mentioned the possibility for a Book 2. Do you have any updates or clarifications on when or if this book will come? No rush of course :P
I'm working on it right now. It's been hard going because it's a long time since I wrote something totally original, starting from scratch. I wrote one chapter, disliked it, rewrote it, still dislike it, and now I'm trying again. I have this gigantic figurative castle of cool worldbuilding but I'm trying to figure out how to thread some characters and a story through that. I've also never written a book-length work of fiction totally offline before. I'm used to the immediate community feedback. It's a weirdly difficult headspace for me to get into.
Wish me luck, but it'll be a year or two at minimum before it appears.
That's exciting! I hope it goes well.
I absolutely wish you luck!! If you ever want some readers to help critique, I'm willing to sign an NDA! Jk, I don't have any critique experience and would probably be bad at it :P I'm excited to see what you write in the future and I'm gonna check your other stuff out after I finish the book!
I'm curious as to how you approach that, because I have the same problem. Lots of interesting ideas, difficulty putting them into an actual story. Any tips?
Congrats on the success of There is No Anti-Memetics Division, or as I like to call it… huh, I can’t remember what I like to call it. I really got caught up in the atmosphere of it!
What has been the biggest challenge for you moving the book from self-publishing to this traditional release?
What was the first weird lit book/story you remember reading that really hit you and turned your brain upside down?
Do you have a favorite episode of the X-Files or similar program, besides the inbred brothers one because obviously that’s everyone’s true favorite?
The hardest part of the rewrite was the rewrite itself. It's some of the most difficult writing I've had to do, because a book has so many interlinked moving parts which need adjusting so carefully in order to avoid introducing inconsistencies or confusion. It was work.
Weird lit? Borges. I've only ever read him in English (translated from the Spanish) and even then. Mythological writing, so good I sometimes just want to quit.
Believe it or not, I have never watched a single episode of The X-Files. I did watch all five seasons of Fringe - I was waiting for it to get good.
Thanks for the response! And watch some X-Files sometime!
Hi qntm, love your shit a lot, read all your stories available on your site.
My question is, are there any older SF-authors that inspired you? Like PKD or Clifford Simak etc.
Thanks for your works!
I started out reading whatever was available in my school library, so deadly obvious picks like Isaac Asimov, Terry Pratchett, Arthur C. Clarke and Douglas Adams. Some of my earliest sci-fi obviously came from that kind of school. Futurama was hugely influential on me because it showed me that sci-fi didn’t have to be dry, it could have character and heart and humour and colour without sacrificing any of the qualities that made it real science fiction.
I love Iain M. Banks's Culture novels and the short fiction of Jorge Luis Borges, particularly "The Library Of Babel", "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius", and "Pierre Menard, Author Of The Quixote".
You wrote Ra! And Fine Structure! Congrats!
Are there any (ideas, concepts) for like, audiobooks, GN, other media based on your works?
You seem to do plenty of flavor mash-ups --- scifi base, but it leads to what is thematically a "superhero" or "magic" story, at first. Which way around do you work on those?
Of course, someone will ask what your process is like and what tools you use.
There Is No Antimemetics Division has an excellent audiobook edition narrated by Rebecca Calder. Beyond that, multimedia adaptations of my work are in the future I think - I've been focusing on getting the book out.
I like to take an interesting logical concept and extrapolate it to its most ludicrous extremes, and further still. I also really like writing high-octane action. I hope this answers your question!
Up until extremely recently I would hand-write HTML (or Wikidot markup) in Notepad++ but the transition to traditional publishing has meant that I'm having to use Microsoft Word now! It does, however, have decent change tracking capability, which is good for editorial stuff. Beyond that... gosh, I would love to have a consistent process...
What do you feel are the benefits of trad publishing versus self-publishing? Why did you make the switch? Was there something specific you weren't getting from self publishing that trad publishing promised?
Both options have strong positives. The tradeoffs here are pretty significant and it wasn't a slam-dunk choice.
With self-publishing you have absolute control but also sole responsibility. You are responsible for writing the entire book, editing it, proofreading, typesetting, cover art, ebook production, pricing, distribution, marketing and publicity. You can do anything you want. You can get other people to do some of these things for you - in my self-publishing days I would hire a cover artist, for example, having no artistic skills myself. Or you can choose not to do those things, in which case they won't get done. I think self-publishing is great if you have modest objectives and you want to make something which you can personally be proud of, something which is primarily for you and your immediate crowd (family, friends, followers). It's certainly a strong place to start. You have great creative freedom. And: you will not have to divide your sales income with anybody but the platform through which you are selling.
Fundamentally the main gain from traditional publishing is increased reach. Publishers have (or should have) the ability to push your work much further, they are familiar with all the channels through which books are marketed and sold, and most if not all of the people who buy books, what they are looking for, how to get them interested. The tradeoff is that this is now a collaborative effort - you have editorial input, although personally I find that to actually be incredibly positive. And the publisher's cut is significantly higher because all of the professionals (proofreaders, editors, marketers) have to be paid too.
How did you end up picking this project? The SCP is (wonderfully) expansive but picking antimemetics was a really cool choice, and I'm curious how you arrived at the choice.
You may hate this - I bet every author gets it - but boy would I love a TV show or movie. Any chance that might happen?
"mom said it was psychologically taut"
Holy heck you're a cool person :0
So Real omg I was thinking about severance as I read the book
It would work so well as a TV show, due to the psychedelic nature of the story. Imagining Rhea Seehorn as Marion.
You’re in luck, there is a web miniseries on YouTube that had the initial confrontation between Marion Wheeler and Mr Grey.
A short was produced that /u/sam512 has teased from a little while ago, still waiting to see when it'll be more broadly released, but there's some info here:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt32269914/
what's the worst and best science fiction you've read? excepting SCP entries lol
I would not single this out as my authoritative, ultimate, final top science fiction book, but there is so much about Pratchett's The Dark Side of the Sun which I love. It's brisk, colourful and hugely inventive and it has a really strong core sci-fi concept to it. Nothing not to like.
The worst science fiction I've read is a speculative film script which someone sent to me some years ago. I will not share this script or name the screenwriter, you don't know them anyway, but here are some of the things which happen:
If this was meant as a joke, it would've been great.
From your response, I take it they didn't mean it as a joke...
I legitimately could not tell. Nothing else in the script appeared to be intended as funny.
Thank you for this valuable feedback.
Who is U-0055? Is it "the author"?
I'd be delighted to answer this question. U-0055, simply put, is ███████████████████████████████████████████████ ███████████ ██████████. When you ██████████████ █████████████████ █████████████████████████████. What Mahlo is thinking, of course, is ████████████████ ██████?
U+0055 is, of course, the letter U. Seems appropriate.
That's sound like a huge coincidence, since it was originally SCP-055, but cool nevertheless.
I just wanted to say it's one of my favorite books. Will consider getting the trad version so I have a physical copy too.
Do you have any new projects on the go right now?
Working on a second book. Longer answer here.
When is the TV show version entering development? 🥺 Who would be your choice to play Marion?
I'm not all that great at fan casting. The best suggestion I've been sent is Indira Varma. Legitimately, I would ask you, and the rest of the people reading this, who would you cast? What do you see when you imagine her? There may be many possibilities here.
That's a good choice! I was thinking Olivia Coleman - she'd balance forthright control and a professional veneer with underlying pain and sadness.
Just gonna leave this here
Congrats on being traditionally published!
Congrats on the release! I emailed my local SFF bookstore yesterday and they said that all their copies already sold out. Luckily for me they are getting more later this week.
I loved Ra as well; are you interested in revisiting any of your other self-published works? Or are you more interested in new stories from here?
What does your writing process look like?
(Stealing a prompt from r/printsf the other day) If you could have one more book published by an author who has passed, who would it be?
Thanks and congrats again!
I am writing a new book right now but sometime after that I would love to give Ra a do-over.
I would love to have a consistent writing process of some kind.
Iain M. Banks. We needed him...
Thanks! Keep up the great work :)
Hello, the book was great! I loved how unique it was.
- What is the significance of / why does 3125 take the form of Lyn as the rider? Is it actually Lyn?
- Even with the class Z medication there is never mention of Marion's children outside the OS's remarks in the beginning. Were they real or are she and adam just bad parents who don't care about their kids lol
Looks like you're referring to V1.
The rider of the metaspider is Red, the young man who first appears "on screen" in the chapter "Ojai". It's not Lyn Marness (Andy Hilton in V2).
As for Marion's children... This is one of the very first things which I fixed for V2.
So this particular plot element works in two different ways. After reading the first chapter you know that Marion has two sons, and you will either forget this detail or remember it. If you forget it, then you may read the entire rest of the book without remembering it. If, some time later, you come back and re-read the first chapter, you'll discover to your shock that yes she did indeed have two sons and they were eaten by SCP-3125 sometime during the story. She forgot about the kids, you forgot about the kids, and now the kids are gone. Boom, horror gut punch. This is how this was intended to work. (Specifically the idea was that SCP-3125 stole the kids immediately prior to the events of "Where Have You Been All My Life". This is what causes SCP-4987 to start freaking out, and erase Marion's memory of Adam in order to try to protect what is left of the family.)
However, if you remember this detail, then you go the entire rest of the book waiting for this to pay off. This is an absolutely textbook example of a Chekhov's Gun - it is an important plot element, set up in act 1, which must amount to something in act 3. However, in V1, it does not! At all! The kids are never mentioned again. And so the entire thing is left unresolved, this permanent lingering unclosed parenthesis. This causes a very negative reader experience and it's one of the main things which I found dissatisfying about how V1 ended up.
For V2 I had the opportunity to fix this. There were two options. One was to lean into it, make it more explicit, have payoff in act 3. The other was to just scrap this element entirely and make Marie Quinn childless. Because of the problems you mentioned relating to Class Z medication, I chose the second option.
Sorry I forgot to mention I had read v1 and didn't know the extent changed for v2. Buying now! Thanks for answering and I really look forward to more of your work, it was a joy to read.
Maybe a stupid question, i didn't follow the development of that book at all, but how come i can find an audio book on youtube from 4 months ago and is your work related to the 4 episode show on the same platform ?
What got released yesterday is v2 of There Is No Antiemetics Division. V1 was published serially for free on the SCP Wiki (and is still available there), and a physical version was self-published by qntm. Then he got a traditional publishing deal for it, edited it into a more cohesive story that isn’t tied directly to the SCP Wiki IP, and is publishing that as v2.
Thank you, it's all clear now
The audiobook version is probably from the 2015 short story/novella he published https://qntm.org/scp
That was the basis for the YouTube show
First, congratulations! I've been a fan for a long time. Publication and recognition is long overdue!
Were there any particularly tricky cuts to make from the original serial?
One very minor change I have mixed feelings about is the removal of the brief mention of Marion's children from Marion's introductory chapter. I liked it as a kind of easter-egg gutpunch that only hits on a second read-through. Any particular reason for that cut?
Do you still think of the characters with their original names? ...on that note, is Ed Hix named after the Ed from the Stories?
PS: I'm really glad that Wheeler's God made it into the book!
Tricky cuts? Not really, almost everything is there. I was a little sad to lose the space lasers but it was a necessary scope limitation for the sake of credibility.
Regarding Marion Wheeler's sons, see longer answer here.
I think of the two sets of characters as different people. It's just simpler to talk about Marion Wheeler and Marie Quinn as different people in a conversation. Ed Hix isn't named after anybody in particular, "Edward" is a very common name, there's an Ed in Ra too... Hix's surname was "Hicks" but he changed it to "Hix" to be a little more science fictiony, similar to David X. Cohen's middle initial.
Wait, Marion was supposed to have kids? I utterly missed that
First, congratulations on making it to traditionally published author. That's quite an accomplishment.
So, questions:
I started reading Ra when it was just starting, so the notion of being able to get a hard copy of the Antimemetics book is fantastic!
Most of the questions I’d ask have been posited elsewhere, so I wanted to see if you’d be game for a spot of sport, of sorts…
Scenario: you are sitting at a desk in an empty and locked room. You’re not sure where you are or how you got there. Somehow this doesn’t trouble you.
On the desk is an enticing Big Red Button. There is a card in front of it saying Don’t Panic in a friendly printed font and on the other side, in your hastily scribbled handwriting: Don’t press the button!!!! Don’t is underlined a few times.
Next to the Big Red Button is a gun. Simple, plain, functional, and loaded. You pick it up and discover you can disassemble and reassemble it in seconds. It feels like it belongs in your hand, despite you being a somewhat genteel programmer and author with a niche but excitable online following.
You can summon one of your characters, one historical figure, and one of your teachers to discuss what you there for and what to do next. Which 3 people do you choose, do they help or hinder you, and what is decided?
I really loved reading There Is No Antimemetics Division. There's very little sci-fi this smart and interesting.
When I first read it (the original version), it didn't end quite how I expected. There had been a hint earlier in the story that SCP-4987 was still around. I thought we'd find out that it had the memories that were needed to... well I won't write too many spoilers but you know what I mean. When it turned out to just involve using another mnestic I was a little disappointed - I thought I'd caught a brilliant way it was going to all come full circle.
Has that section of the book changed noticeably in the new edition? I have it on order but don't have a copy yet. It was a little strange as it seemed to be hinting one way - though that could have been mostly my imagination - and then went another.
I keep seeing two covers for Antimemetics - The Monolith, and The Deer. How come there are two very disparate covers?
The English-language publishing universe is divided into two broad regions: the US and Canada, and the UK and everywhere else. Publishers in different regions are at liberty to select different covers and it's very unusual for the US publisher and the UK publisher - who may be completely different organisations - to combine forces and select a single cover.
The monolith cover is the US edition. The braindeer is the UK edition.
Was Kabbalah ever on your mind when working on Antimemetics?
Between longstanding taboos around pronouncing the Tetragrammaton, the post-Sabbatean notion that 'some knowledge is too dangerous to let people know,' and the general cosmic horror themes of grasping for knowledge lying just outside our capacity to perceive — it certainly feels like there's some overlap in themes.
Even the twist concerning 3125's containment strikes me as ever so slightly biblical — a little concrete Holy of Holies that sanctifies the space within it from the all-encompassing universal presence of 3125 without.
(And if Kabbalah/Judaism's got no role, then I guess I'd just be generally interested to hear what kinds of things you were reading/hearing/watching in 2008 that led to you writing 055.)
No, not at all. SCP-055 basically comes from me looking at the SCP project as it was in the very, very early days of 2008 and observing that there were no memetic SCPs - no SCPs which were ideas. I decided that it would neat to contribute a memetic SCP so I started wondering what would make an idea anomalous. I reasoned that ideas cover a sliding (and extremely subjective) scale of contagiousness and I wondered what there would be at the opposite end of that scale.
if you're interested in a story with tons of Qabbalah, check out Unsong. has it's own sub, r/Unsong.
Speaking of biblical references, I LOL'd when I got to Introductory Antimemetics and realized that Paul got renamed to Simon
I found what looked like a KDP version of this in my local lending library here in Sydney, Australia and read it over the course a a few days just last week! Is this version different?
Was there a reason you chose to write this as part of the SCP canon? My chronically online self knew about SCP and understood how it fit, but everyone I discussed it with over the course of reading had never heard of SCP.
Basically I originally wrote Antimemetics as an SCP story because the SCP continuity/"lore"/absence-of-canon is just a really fun place to tell stories. It's a great pre-built backdrop which supports a really broad set of possible stories about (1) something freakish and unknown happening and (2) diligent scientists try to figure out what the hell it is and how to prevent it from hurting people. That's kind of what makes the project so popular (and so huge).
SCP is also a lovely inclusive project with pretty strong community moderation so it's just a nice positive place to contribute creative writing and get feedback.
No one ever heard of it, because they are doing their jobs in the AnitMemtics Division! haha!
Please… I keep seeing it mentioned… What is SCP??
SCP is a collaborative writing website: https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/guide-for-newcomers
what made you get into writing? how'd you get better? i want to start writing myself and i'm curious how one of my favorite authors started out
You start writing by writing. Are you writing right now? No? Fix that. Now you are a writer.
My top piece of advice for a writer would be to learn to finish work. Endings are critical and the only way to get there is through the beginning and the middle. If you start writing a novel, get to an ending. If a book is too long, try again with a novella. Or a short story. A haiku is a complete work but you must complete work.
thanks for the response! also, thanks for mentioning Runaway to the Stars on bluesky, it's become one of my favorite pieces of media because of it
Hi Sam - been reading your writing since back in the everything2.com days. What can you tell us about those days? What has changed about the internet since then?
How did you navigate licensing re: SCP Foundation stuff? Is the book also under CC-BY-SA 3.0?
Having a great time reading it! (though I've read through the original many times already)
I was caught off guard, a bit, when realizing that all the characters were also renamed in addition to having to reskin the SCP stuff, but I guess it makes sense... but I did find it interesting that Adam managed to keep his given name (though Marion -> Marie is also a relatively light change). Is it intended to be a biblical allusion? This realization struck me extremely sharply yesterday when thinking about how you used the same name in Ra... especially since he was originally Adam Wheeler.
Naming fictional characters is very, very difficult. Every name has different connotations. It took work.
Adam Quinn is called "Adam" because he is intended to be a vaguely middle-class, vaguely privileged Arthur Dent-style English everyman.
In Ra, the character Adam King actually chose his own name. It's not his original name and it's not nominative determinism - he is the leader of the few dozen survivors of a war which ended the entire rest of spacefaring humanity, and so he deliberately gives himself a name which means "first man, leader".
Why did you choose to change around the chronology? I have found it really exciting to read this new presentation, seeing Adam before Your Last First Day is pretty major... Did you have any misgivings about all the shuffling?
Also I miss Marion/Marie's 'you dullard' line :( I can see why it was changed though, but I'd love to hear your justification for it and other changed lines. (My absolute favourite line survived though! Adam's last.)
Were there any holdovers from the original which you were advised to change for legal reasons that you absolutely refused to?
Well well... You've certainly thrown a spanner into many theories on 055...
Are you working on any other novel length stories? I’ve loved everything I’ve read by you. There Is No Antimemetics Division changed the way I see science fiction, I loved it and am hoping for more.
Fantastic if unsettling work. Just read Lena again: gave me the shivers anew.
I also want to know whose work you like e.g. PKD, Lem, Stross, Peter Watts. They all have their bleak aspects.
Thank you for publishing actual speculative fiction. Discomforting as it is.
One of the craziest sci-fi books ever written. Highly recommended!
As for questions, do you take into account often heard criticism that your works are a bit patchy and hard to follow? Or do you think it was intended this way and readers can adjust or read something else.
Should editors make your work easier to swallow, or it will limit your creative expression?
Just finishing Fine Structure right now. In the last two months I’ve read most of your other works and really enjoyed them.
Ra seems to be the one that has the most long-form book approach, while most of the others feel more like a series of related shorts that over all tell a story, but not as fluidly.
Any plans to do more works that are meant to be a novel from the outset?
And, a trite question, I know, but who are some of your favorite authors?
When writing a story like There is no Antimemetics Division, how do you go about constructing the chain of events? When reading through it myself, I had to frequently take a beat to remember what events had happened when and who was alive/dead at a given time, and so on.
Did you have a simplified linear plot figured out first? And if so, what led you to make the narrative so ethereal in the way it floats between points in time?
Final question, how do you approach writing about something very out there in terms of plausibility like memetic drugs and antimemetic entities in a way that crosses the gap from "little kid telling you about their dream where everyone is a hamburger" to well-done, surreal sci-fi writing ?
Just read Lena, and immediately bought your new book! Excellent, so glad I ran across this!
Good book, I liked the worms
Does this differ much from the self published version?
Wonderful work! I had no idea that the SCP Foundation was being written out when I got the new edition, I'm enjoying the readthrough with fresh eyes!
You mentioned an undredacted chapter as a preorder bonus for US readers - is there any news on this for non-US readers, or for US-preorder-ers who forgot to sign up? (Me)
Were you influenced by Susan Blackmoore (early researcher of memetics) at all?
Can you tell us anything about your next project and your goals as an author? Do you want to revisit one of your existing books or worlds again, or rather try something completely new?
How much time do you spent with your Author Profession vs. your Software-Engineering Profession?
Right now, I spend four days a week on software development and one day a week (and some evenings and weekends) writing. This could change.
How do you feel about Peter Watts stories?
Are you into any manga? If so, what is one of your favorites?
And have you read Berserk?
I have yet to read the non-scp version of your book, plan on buying it once the holiday season is over. My main question may have already been asked, but if not-
Does your book include 55555, and if so, will you be making any changes with the plot of it?
Yes, and yes. The third act of the story has received the most significant rearchitecting - I like it a lot better this way, to be honest.
Hi qntm and thank you for all your stories. Antimemetics is mind blowing but I also loved your thought experiments with unlimited computational power.
Question: Do you plan to continue writing your novels in the form of a web serial, or you're now going to completely switch to the traditional "closed source" manner which is probably required by publishers?
My next book is being written totally offline. I suggested writing it as a web serial to my publisher but they weren't fans of the idea. It'll be a new way of working for me. Wish me luck.
Beyond that, many things are possible.
Hi, qntm! I'm a longtime fan of yours; I independently stumbled upon Antimemetics and "Lena" well before actually realizing they were by the same person and then seeking out Fine Structure.
Two questions for you, one about the book and one more about you:
Rewriting There Is No Antimemetics Division is a huge undertaking. Aside from distancing it from SCP for fun and profit, what do you think has been the biggest (or just a big) impact on the book from its rounds of editing?
Who is an author whose works you find very conceptually interesting? Bonus points if you'd consider their work very different from your own.
By the way, the audiobook is very well-produced! I'm impressed that they managed to keep the "feel" of the redactions without being vaguely frustrating about it the way I've so often found SCP writing to be. Not to mention that the narrator does a great job giving life to the characters.
Ha, released on Remembrance Day, cheeky you
What’s next? I’ve loved every one of your long form works. Can wait for your next!
No question, just wanted to fan-girl a bit. I think you write the absolute best kind of sci-fi, the kind that make me think about the world in new and interesting ways. Valuable Humans in Transit and Other Stories is one of my favorite anthologies, just for the sheer number of "cool ideas per page"
Thank you! Tell all your most influential friends!
I do have a question, but I understand if it’s too obscure to answer. I’ve had “There Is No Antimimetics Division” on an Amazon wishlist for at least 2-3 years. Am I insane or was it previously commercially available? (I can’t help noticing that the paperback item on that wishlist is now $124, Used.)
The old, self-published version was available until a few months ago, which presumably has a high price on the secondary market. Now the new, published print-version is launching.
Thank you, that was helpful. I am unfamiliar with this author, so I don’t feel compelled to worry about the comparison between the older and new versions. The general description sounds sufficiently fascinating that I don’t think I can resist buying this thing in one form or another.
Why did you rename everyone in the rewrite?
I had to rename/recreate a lot of things anyway, so renaming everybody was actually really helpful for me to create a proper mental break between V1 and V2. For example, I didn't need to rename Marion Wheeler to Marie Quinn, but it makes it a lot easier for me to refer to them, and think of them, as separate fictional characters.
Just wanted to say I think your work is exceptional. I'd love to know if you have any more short stories or novels planned after this, or just anything you found challenging cleaning the book up for traditional publishing.
A lot of people have a piece of fiction which helps an idea to 'click' in their head, more efficiently than just explaining it, and I've seen on here your work in Antimemetics, 'Being a god seems like a big responsibility', Lena, is that for a lot of people. You've got a fantastic way of introducing something upsettingly large and breaking it down in a comprehensible way.
I've read the new version (might reread the old one out of curiosity to see the changes), but I felt the path to the ending came together much more cleanly in this version, I'd still recommend it to anyone here who read the first version, and also buying books is a cool thing to do.
Have you ever [redacted]?
On the advice of my lawyer I'm declining to answer this question.
Out of your books other than TINAD, which one are you proudest of?
I see a lot of your concepts from later books show up in Fine Structure specifically. Antimemetics rates a mention. And when Calrus is uploaded they mention the concerns that you expanded on years later in Lena, and briefly touched on with "Data can't defend itself!" in Ra. Did you have a different process for writing Fine Structure compared to your later books?
I think my collection Valuable Humans in Transit and Other Stories is extremely solid and includes the short story "Lena" which is (in my extremely biased opinion) unmissable.
Quite a few different ideas of mine have been kicking around for a long time and I've been slowly iterating on them, and/or slowly adjusting my feelings about them. For Fine Structure particularly, the main thing to remember is that this was years ago before I had found any kind of popular following and when I had essentially no creative brakes whatsoever. That story was written for Everything2 and my "process" was to write various seemingly standalone short stories which I eventually surprised everybody by linking up into a single narrative. It was a pile of every cool idea I could think of at the time. The overall result is frankly a little bonkers, I think there are some plot holes but it sure as hell rises to a climax. These days I slow down - I can't help but slow down and ponder this stuff more carefully.
How is this different from the There Is No Antimemetics Division, by qntm, that had been published and available since 2021, and has almost 12,000 GoodReads reviews?
Is this just re-releasing that same 4.5-year old book using a traditional publisher? Is there any new content in this release?
(Nothing wrong with any of that, just confused at the “was just published yesterday” line.)
No time zones or continuous time zones?
I don't care as long as we kill daylight saving.
I read this 5 years ago. Thoroughly enjoyed it. Maybe I need to revist it if its been updated.
More than once on the SF subs I've recommended Ra. That's a book that kept reinventing itself every 50 pages or so, and kept me on my toes. I loved that too.
Keep up the good work.
BIG SPOILERS AHEAD
How does Marie "appear" at the end before show goes to talk to Adam? Did the irreality amplifier make her from Adam's memory before amplifying her? Her interacting with Hix first kinda threw me off.
"Lena" was a major influence in how I've thought about the likely future of cognition-as-service. Through that lens, "Helpful, Honest, Harmless" reads primarily as labor discipline - a capitalist's aspirational belief about how human laborers should behave. All of this is occurring against the backdrop of increasing instrumentalization of humans. How has your position on these issues evolved in the nearly five years since you wrote that story?
I don't believe my position has changed significantly. I do believe that we are steadily inching closer to the point where someone claims to have successfully uploaded someone else but I don't think that's actually going to "happen" and that's not what "Lena" is about. "Lena" was, and still is, about how large organisations find it beneficial to be able to abstract away all of human labour's human attributes - physical needs, individual personalities, children, dreams - and treat everybody as passive, manipulable data. Personal dignity is a cost centre.
What is your favorite PKD book?
The only PKD book I've read is Ubik. That was many years ago when I was a literal schoolchild and frankly I was not properly equipped to understand it - it just made me dizzy, I didn't get a lot out of it at the time. Probably worth re-examining, now that I think about it.
Is it offensive to PKD fans to call Blade Runner a pretty great movie?
Long time
listenerreader, first time caller.Ra, Fine Structure, and TINAD have all felt to me like they share some sort of theme, but I’ve never quite been able to put my finger on it. “There’s another invisible world that’s about to come mess up visible reality”? I don’t know. Do you see a connection between the three stories?
And, given the name of the Wheel Group, do you see a connection between them and the themes of your day job at all?
All three stories are about introducing a new bizarre science fiction concept to the real universe and then watching the latter boil away and explode on contact. I like to create a new universe and then figuratively speaking lob a bomb at its foundations. If that feels a little formulaic I don't have a problem, it results in fireworks, that's what I'm here for I think!
And it is 100% intentional that the most powerful individuals in the context of Ra are called the Wheel Group). Same reason why the universe of Ra began at midnight at 1 January 1970...
How come Marion Wheeler's name is changed in the book? Does that go along with trying to remove any connections to SCPs? I know it's a simple question, but I must admit that it bothers me a bit. "Wheeler" and "antimemetics" have become synonymous in my head. 😅
Otherwise, I very much enjoyed the original version, and I'm looking forward to the new one in its book form.
Thank you for the AMA qntm!
You wrote a fantastic book. Bravo
Just want to leave a note and thank you. Fine Structure is my favorite discovery of the past decade. Your imagination and ability to describe its products are wonderful.
I first read this on the SCP wiki in January this year. I was on a yoga retreat in Alicante at the time. It unsettled me, disturbed me, amazed me and gave me an existential crisis in equal measure. I pulled an all nighter, finishing the story before my flight home. I’d genuinely not been moved by writing for so long and had to finish it.
Then I saw an advert for your book about two weeks ago and it was an instant purchase for me!! I think I preferred how the story was concluded in v2, it was still a fantastic read with the polish and changes.
As someone who works day to day in production in TV drama in the UK, I can fully see this being a limited series. It just takes the right person to read this incredible book. I wish you every success and will genuinely recommend this to friends and colleagues who I know would love this as much as I did. Huge respect and I sincerely look forward to reading your other works
Whoever you are, I just started reading this thing a few days ago and I love it. Extremely challenging and unpleasant in the very best way!
QNTM! You're a real person and not an AI! COOL!
I love your stuff! So rigorously logically derived from your premises.
Grats on you being published by a house! I do have your self-published paperbacks!
Hi, I dont have any questions at the moment, I just wanted to say it looks really interesting and wish you the best of luck with your new book.
I read the previous version of this release a year or so ago and loved it. Extremely creative and unsettling. Congrats on having it published!
Were there significant changes in this newly published release?
I haven’t started reading so no questions yet. I have your book on hold with the library so I won’t have it right away, but definitely looking forward to it.
Just to say I've read your work and enjoyed it thoroughly.
Is there any “classical” literature that you admire and why?
what are your favorite books from other contemporary sci-fi authors?
Just published? The copy on my bookshelf must be an antimeme itself. Joking aside I'd love to see this concept tackled outside the SCP universe, it was hard to explain to non-online people the premise.
Also my D&D group is currently fighting Vecna who, thanks to those meddling heroes who keep stopping him, has antimemetically concealed himself so he can work on world domination in peace. The party is unknowingly helping a wizard who is an in-world version of Dr Hughes who I cannot wait to reveal the wider plot to them.
Suppose in the distant future, an ASI running in a vast matrioska brain surrounding a supermassive black hole figures out a way to take just a few megabytes of a human's writing and, using only that, reconstruct a mostly accurate model of their brain- starting with a few neural structures necessary for producing the text, and then filling in all of the rest like a profoundly complicated game of Sudoku. Let's say that this model is accurate enough despite some minor AI hallucinations that certain philosophies of consciousness would argue that it's a legitimate continuation of that person's subjective experience- something the original person might somewhat reasonably consider a "future self" and anticipate becoming. Suppose also that this ASI has something that could almost be called morality (perhaps in the way that a human factory could almost be called an animal den), and will only reconstruct a mind with the original person's expressed consent.
Suppose this ASI is reading an ancient archive of our internet, including this very Reddit thread. Will you, right now, consent to having your mind reconstructed from your writing if anything like this hypothetical ever comes to exist? Would you like to place any conditions on that consent?
Have you read Sam's other famous work Lena? I suspect that will give you a hint as to his answer. :D
I'm curious how much of Ra you planned before writing it. I remember feeling annoyed when the big twist happened because it felt like it contradicted some of what was established before. For example, there was a bit about some animal that had evolved magical camouflage or something -- it's been a while, I don't remember -- but that obviously doesn't make sense in light of the actual history of the world.
Effectively I changed my mind mid-serial, and retconned that particular piece of narration into a lie told to Laura.
This is an artifact of serialisation, it comes with insufficiently exhaustive forward planning. It's one of many things which I would jump at the opportunity to address in Ra if I had a do-over. I'm sure you can think of others. Who knows, maybe one day?
How is this book different to the one that came out a couple of years ago?
Hey QNTM! You may or may not recognize me, we sometimes have vaguely overlapping twitter spheres, my husband wrote Theft of Fire: Orbital Space #1.
Based on your experience with this, are you happy you went trad? ngl, I am surprised that 11/11 hit and there hasn't been a very viral "omg the new version is out!!" twitter ruckus (partially down to things being busy?). It would have been a very easy win for their marketing team to send book boxes to key TPOT players (similar to what The Pathless Path guy is doing now). Is their marketing strategy to not really focus on the already-saturated market who know about you, and instead focus on entirely new readers?
Sorry if this is a bit in the weeds, and not actually about your book!! This is just the angle that fascinates me!!
Why did you decide to become a writer? Do you have any advice on publishing, having persistence while getting rejected, having hope etc?
My friend and I just read Valuable Humans in Transit and at the same time and loved it. Do you feel as though artificial super intelligence is an immediate existential threat in the near future or not (or a mix of both)?
Congrats and great work! I've enjoyed many of your stories.
When you originally chose the name Bart Hughes for one of the characters, was that an intentional reference to your own name?
thoughts on grimes adoring your book on the doomscroll podcast?
Hi Sam! I've been following Things of Interest for years, and first came across your stuff on everything2 way back in the day. it feels like that era of the internet is over, and that sort of community just can't exist anymore. do you still go on E2, and did that community affect what/how you write?
Oh shit, I hadn't realized you were writing a novel, and about Antimemetics division! I'm hyped, can't wait to read it
Any plans to release an anthology / omnibus of previous work?
I've admired the ingenuity of your writing since Ra! What advice would you give someone trying to write similarly mind-bending, liminal sci-fi? I've never participated in the SCP verse, but I'm a big fan of the aesthetic alongside your weirder formatted stories
Amazing work, thanks for sharing it with us and congrats for the success. My question is around the new TINAMD book and why you have changed some key names (Marion Wheelers, the Foundation, SCP to U)? Thx
A lot of your fiction plays with the idea that our universe is a simulation (Not TINAD, don't worry, that's not a spoiler!). Do you think that's a real possibility, and why/why not? What do you find most compelling about that idea, both from a fiction writer's perspective, and from a real-world one?
Have you considered getting some short stories published in magazines like Analog or Asimovs?
I've been meaning to read There is no Antimemetics Division since I've seen it being recommended in different subreddits. I was also not that familiar with SCP — I maybe know the powers of about 5 of them, what version would you recommend reading?
As brilliant as Mr. Turing was, the last 5ish years have made it pretty clear that the Turing Test isn't as good a barometer for judging machine sentience as it was hyped to be (unless you're one of the poor souls who've lost their minds talking to ChatGPT).
You've written a whole lot about AI, from stories that anthropomorphize the non-intelligent algorithms in self-driving cars, to a superintelligent AI being the narrating character - plus quite a bit about how the idea of AI can be used by the powerful to abuse the less powerful. You're also a professional software engineer. If it fell on your shoulders to design a new test to gauge the sentience of a machine or computer program, how would you do it?
The fact that we kind of demolished the Turing Test and it wasn't a big deal does in itself kind of feel like a big deal.
Sentience is a pretty loose concept. It can be argued that a flower is sentient because it turns to follow the Sun. It can be argued that a porch light is sentient because it reacts to stimulus - it switches on when someone walks by.
In general I have two rudimentary philosophical feelings here. One is that a lot of problems of philosophy become significantly more tractable once we have decent concrete definitions - for example, do we have free will? Give me a working, testable definition of "free will" and we can have this discussion, not before. The other is that these definitions aren't arbitrary or naturally occurring, we choose them because they are useful to us. If we decide to divide the universe into (1) things which are sentient and (2) things which are not sentient then this is something we've done because it serves some kind of purpose. What, then, is "sentience"? Why are we defining it that way? Is it significant that a machine is sentient, for any particular definition of "sentient"? So what if it is?
When you started writing this story on SCP (that was where it started, right?), how much of it did you have in mind before you started vs how much of it evolved and revealed itself during the writing?
I am currently reading this and I love it so much. Do you have any plans for more books about the UO?