Comment by Nition

16 hours ago

I really liked it and all the little interesting ideas within it, like the antimimetic worms that live everywhere. I actually found it very creative and clever. However, I didn't think the recent rewrite was as much of an improvement as others seem to. The later parts were improved but I thought some of the padding out of earlier parts arguably came out worse.

---

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.

I liked it for the interesting ideas within it. My favorite part of a story is the worldbuilding, the author's unique take on an idea, the special ways that different characters think and act. There's not a great deal of artistry I require in the introduction of a 49-year-old greying woman deep in some giant bureaucracy to imagine how other people relate to her, I'm interested more in the idea of a bureaucracy that deals with antimemes.

Perhaps that comes from reading too many online stories - including the whole of qntm's site [1], including the rough drafts. The quality of the editing, prose, or dialog isn't that important to me if the quality of the worldbuilding and the concepts are high enough.

https://qntm.org/fiction

There were also some examples of sloppy editing in the updated edition, like multiple uses of the word "perimetre" which the author acknowledges was an 'incautious find-and-replace from the US English "meter" to UK English "metre"' https://qntm.org/antimemetics#komment6913d2eb6c240

  • Which is especially odd because the author (Sam Hughes) lives in the UK and wrote the original in UK English, but apparently wrote the rewrite in US English. For example, a chapter in the original was titled "Case Colourless Green", but in the US edition of the rewrite that chapter is "Case Colorless Green" (without the 'u'). So Hughes, a native UK English speaker, wrote the rewrite in a non-native (to him) dialect, then had it (lazily) translated into his native dialect.

    • It was probably to deal with the transposition [0] out of the SCP universe into a new one. SCP is vaguely 'set' in the US because that's how a majority of the contributors naturally write and spell things, which sets the voice of the world indirectly.

      [0] AKA "filing the serial numbers off" when it's explicitly fanfiction instead of a shared universe model like SCP