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.

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

Still one of the more original bits of sci fi / horror to be published in a while, so a strong recommendation from me!

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.

PS. HNers, any good sci-fi book recommendations?

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.)

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.

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.

Most of them are (as expected) crap. Some of them are really scary, and some are hilarious: https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-4703

Yes, there is. I can see how someone not already familiar with the material would feel lost.

First, it's based on SCP, as other people have mentioned. Second, it's very dialogue/monologue driven, there's lots of exposition about a shared universe, vaguely hinted at, secret government agencies, conspiracies, etc.

The author chose a very topic which by definition is hard to understand: ideas (or memes) that do NOT want to be remembered. So a lot of what happens is discussing "dangerous" ideas that do not want to be remembered or discussed. There's a larger overarching plot, split across several related stories.

The guy with the gun was one such idea embodied in the physical shape of a man. It was confusing the boss on purpose. Wheeler was on to him from the beginning (because her boss doesn't have an assistant), but needed to get her boss on board with the idea first, before shooting the "assistant". Everything she does in the dialogue has this goal.

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Edit:

To give an actual example, Marion's description in the original, from the scene in the video:

She is turning fifty this year and slowly greying, well on her way out of "petite" towards "little old lady".

In the updated edition:

She turns fifty this year. She is diminutive and flint-eyed, very dark-haired but rapidly greying. Today, her hair is strictly pulled back and up into a silver clasp. She wore her good suit for this, one button, very dark grey, with a solid blue blouse underneath. Ankle boots with stout heels, two silver stud earrings in each lobe. Contact lenses, not the usual glasses. On a lanyard around her neck she wears a security pass with a bright orange and red diagonal stripe.

Two uses of 'very dark' right after each other? And I actually liked how snappy the original was but that might be just me.

Another line in this first chapter that I love from the original:

"What…" O5-8 asks carefully, "would happen if we did know?"

becomes in the new edition:

"What…" Mahlo asks carefully, "would happen if we did know what happened to him?"

Why pad that out? It sounds less natural now.

It's true that the whole novel, despite a few good moments, seems mostly interested in plot and entertainment. Having read quite a bit of qntm's stuff online, I'd say he excels in the short story format where he can quickly present a clever or surprising idea and there isn't the need to sustain a plot or work on character development etc.

Anyway, comparing a random author to one of the best and most influential sci-fi authors ever is a bit pointless, don't you think?

Would not consider myself well-read, if I read enough PKD stories I could probably find some mediocre ones; really liked the popular ones I did read.

I think the story where she detains her own husband would work much better in a stand-alone adaptation.

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.