qntmCritiques

Boy’s own adventure quickly escalates into speculative science fiction.

Sets up a really unsettling and unique problem, but doesn't have an equally creative way to resolve it. Definitely worth reading for some of the ideas (antimemetics itself, the inverse containment system, etc).½

Mind-bending and very exciting. I liked the idea of antimemes, the X-files (etc) references, the plot that jumped back and forth, and how my own reality seemed to flicker in strange ways as I dove deeper into the book.
The author did recycle quite a few themes as the book went along, and I would probably see quite a few plot holes if I were to look closer. Still, it was an engrossing read.
(Oh, dear, will I remember what the book was about tomorrow? ;))) )

Don't read anything about it, don't secnd-quess it, and do not hesitate.

Just read it and thank me later.

You should know this is both sci-fi and horror... starts more in the first genre and quickly moves to the second. Somehow this wasn't clear to me when I started reading but by the time I realized it, I couldn't put it down....

Nothing more to say since I don't want to spoil it :)

Densely packed science fiction that liberally jumps around across vast timescales, or why not universes. Full of interesting concepts, perhaps too many. It was published as a series of loose chapters over a long time, only tied together as time went on, and it shows, but it's still perfectly readable as a book although a little hard to follow. A slight criticism would be that all the characters speak in almost the same manner, and some of them even have a bit similar names, which makes it easy to forget who was who exactly.

This was one of the scariest, most interesting books I've read in a long time. I knew nothing about it going in, except that I saw a comment on Reddit or somewhere about how unusual this book was. (It also happened to fit nicely with the last square I needed to mark off for the Reddit bingo card, "No IFs Ands or Buts..."). This really a collection of short stories that tie together and build on one another to tell a larger story. It was originally published online, as part of the SCP Foundation's website (which I will definitely be looking at in more detail now). The concepts here are really scary. What is an antimeme? Would you even know if you had encountered one, since the information is almost impossible to keep in your brain? Have we done this before? Etc etc etc. Very fascinating stuff. Highly recommended.

Fun beach/pool read.

Fun beach/pool read.

The first magic spell is spoken by a 90-year-old retired Indian physicist named Suravaram Vidyasagar on 1st June 1972. It is one hundred and seventy-nine syllables long, comprising equal parts Upanishadic mantra and partial differential equation.

The effect of Vidyasagar's spell is nothing at all. He has discovered what will later be called "uum", the empty spell, which expends no mana and fails to rearrange the universe in any externally detectable way, but which then - crucially - returns to the dispatching mind and tells it so.

Ra is a wonderful and bizarre sort of story. On one level (about the first half of the book), you have a world where in the 1970s, magic was discovered in a world not unlike our own. And not just any magic, but essentially a magical programming language, with an all too familiar (from my own point of view) structure and syntax. It's the hardest of hard magic systems and leads to entire fields of magical theory and engineering. Which, for some reason, is directly tied into NASA and the space program. A fascinating bit of worldbuilding all its own.

And then things really go off the rails. Because it turns out there is another, deeper level of magic out there. And we're all actually living in a computer simulation. When it all starts falling apart / coming together, things start getting really really weird. It ends up working out, but man was it a change of the sort of book I thought I was reading. Personally, I think it would have made a better sequel/totally different story in the same universe, but so it goes.

One side note: Ra was originally published as a web serial: Ra. From time to time, it shows. There are a few jumps and pacing oddities that feel more at home in a chunkier (more serialized) structure. It can be jarring. I wonder if it would have if I hadn't known.

Overall, give the first few chapters a try. If you love those, you'll probably love the story as I did. If the technobabble turns you off--that will most certainly not be getting any better. Read something else. :)

Speculative/metaphysical horror