Antimimetics - Worldbuilding
This section is for discussion of how the worldbuilding in the text might influence our own worldbuilding.
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The process of worldbuilding is what led me to suggest this book.
As I think you all know the world is a co-operative project that seems to be now centred at the website https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/ Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCP_Foundation) says that it began the /x/ channel at 4chan in 2007, and moved to its current home in 2008. There's quite a bit of publishing activity listed on the wikipedia page, and just this morning there was a post on rpg.net asking for feedback on an rpg project: https://forum.rpg.net/index.php?threads/agents-guide-for-scp-rpg.933894/ There's also a forum discussion on TVTropes: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=utbmk5kxkkqah7d8k16jx7su&page=1 that provides an interesting oral history of how the worldbuilding has been received over time.
Anyway, the worldbuilding is touching a nerve. I see it as being derived / evolved from a tradition of group worked horror worlds that for me goes back to TV - The Twilight Zone, Outer Limits, X-Files, etc., and that goes back to detective stories, which in turn are a take on the scientific method.
As for the world in the book, I think it's so-called Weird- (both senses) or Cosmic-Horror, which I'm encountering quite a lot lately. I thought it was easy to accept, which is the part most interesting to me. I don't believe it, but it was just good enough for me to follow it. How did you guys find it? BC
Yes, I can see the lineage of these ideas from the modern interest in cryptids, modern horror, and all of that sort of thing. Twilight Zone and X-Files, yes, but also folk stories like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster, and back to even earlier stories of goblins and dwarfs living in the forests.
The "antimemetic" side of this was an interesting spin. It's a variation on "body horror", where the horror comes from how your mind changes rather than your body. In this day and age, that's perhaps a more invasive form of transformation than physical changes.
However, by the end of the book, I was less and less convinced by the extent of the threat. I think the author was suffering a bit from "threat inflation" as the badness and weirdness had to increase throughout the book. I could believe the odd un-knowable bit of architecture or small creatures, but not the huge animals or the destruction of most of the world.
(And more pop culture references: Steven Moffat has written a couple of antimemetic baddies in Doctor Who.)
Yeah, by end the worldbuilding was odd. I did like the really big dinosaurs at the end though. If the text had been more childlike I think it would have worked better, but innocent and edgy? A bridge too far.
I got the feeling that this world was nothing but a conceit on which you can hang several episodes, but which will never bear a novel - I mean a long story with multiple and diverse arcs of development. I guess this is pretty much my stance to a lot of Weird / Cosmic horror. Based on this I am wondering of anyone has created a truly long form out of this genre. Suggestions?
And the body horror comment makes a lot of sense. It makes me think of the Matrix, which in its own way is also about the interface of perception and memory.
The worldbuilding kind of felt to me like the most extreme form of space opera - push the stakes up until maybe the entire universe is about to be destroyed. Except that it then back off and (I think - I was kind of skimming by this stage as it wasn't holding me) everything reverted back to "normal" except there were a few missing years when - one supposes - the universe ended and then began again?
@RichardAbbott That makes me think of the first MiB movie.
Actually this book is one of the most movie-like books I've read. It's just absurd, the way that so many movies are now. I had the same feeling reading that Crouch book - Recursion.
I thought the worldbuilding was being propped up by an interesting idea (the anti-meme and the creatures that surround it, as well as the secret organization fighting it all) and as that aspect of the story became more convoluted, the threads of the world started to really fray. I really didn't do any digging into the history of how this all came into being aside from a really basic understanding, but was this story the creation of one author in the end, or did it all come together from multiple people over time and then get compiled by one author. If the latter then I guess I am impressed it was even as coherent as it was - pretty much impossible to do that well I think.