101–110 of 110 posts
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.
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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.
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…
Reminds 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.
I 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,…
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
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…
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?
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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…
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 yo…
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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…
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.