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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?
Lots of people familiar with the material here, but as somone with zero context, I watched the film and I don't get it. Is it something where you need to know the backstory to get the importance? The premise just seems quite thin: (Spoiler alert) the guy behind the desk had his mind erased and the guy with the gun is an impostor. Is there more to it than that?
Lots of people familiar with the material here, but as somone with zero context, I watched the film and I don't get it. Is it something where you need to know the backstory to get the importance? The premise just seems quite thin: (Spoiler alert) the guy behind the desk had his mind erased and the guy with the gun is an impostor. Is there more to it than that?
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Just read Lexicon by Max Barry (2013) - great sci-fi thriller that actually has a strong anti-memetic component. I wonder if it was an influence on qntm's book.
Lots of people familiar with the material here, but as somone with zero context, I watched the film and I don't get it. Is it something where you need to know the backstory to get the importance? The premise just seems quite thin: (Spoiler alert) the guy behind the desk had his mind erased and the guy with the gun is an impostor. Is there more to it than that?
Most of them are (as expected) crap. Some of them are really scary, and some are hilarious: https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-4703
Interesting that there are two versions that I know of! I watched this one first, and I prefer it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-IiVeGAydE . I like the actress who plays Wheeler better (no disrespect to Jasika Nicole, she does a good job too and I loved her in Fringe), and the script seems to stick closer to the original short story form from the website. Is this new short based on the book? If so, it seems the d…
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.
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 lik…
"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…
His characters do tend to be a little flat, but I think I almost always found them compelling. His books tend to be a physics or mathematics primer, wrapped in a pretty thin plot, but as soon as you poke at that plot-wrapper, most of the time some pretty good social commentary comes steaming out.
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“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.
You might be interested in this prequel to "Service Model": "Human Resources" [1] [1] https://reactormag.com/human-resources-adrian-tchaikovsky/