This week’s guest is qntm: he is most well known as the author of There Is No Antimemetics Division, a sci-fi horror novel depicting humanity’s battles against malevolent entities which erase all memory of their presence. He also has written a number of other fantastic short pieces of speculative web fiction you can find on his website or short story collection Valuable Humans in Transit and Other Stories.

In addition to the book itself we discuss how There Is No Antimemetics Division’s origins as a collection of tales on the collaborative fictional database SCP-Foundation, Kevin’s article on Antimemetics, and the future of fiction on or about the internet.

Hope you enjoy listening!

TIMESTAMPS:

0:12 - Introduction

1:01 - What is an antimeme?

5:24 - How did There Is No Antimemetics Division come to be?

7:54 - Antimemetics is a book where characters are forced to act without context

9:21 - Similarities between Antimemetics and a time travel story

11:12 - Writing characters who do not have a consistent memory and narrative

13:50 - Very little of what we sense is actually remembered

17:07 - Antimemetics had a lot of momentum

18:15 - Serialization forces you to make something happen in every chapter

18:58 - Does qntm view himself as a web fiction author?

22:48 - Writing a realistic portrayal of the internet

25:08 - When writing internet chatroom fiction don’t use the backspace key

26:08 - Maintaining old versions of stories

28:58 - It is instructive to have access to earlier versions of a work

29:45 - Discussing Kevin’s article “There Is No Antimemetics Division as a Reminder of the Internet’s Wild Potential”

30:12 - Fiction is less optimistic about the internet than it used to be

33:16 - There are less websites nowadays

35:58 - The internet is no longer opt-in

38:35 - Conclusion

39:47 - Start of Synthesized Sunsets Backstage

41:15 - Discussing Valuable Humans in Transit Collection

41:47 - These are stories that are clearly written on the internet

43:10 - Discussing “The Difference”

48:41 - “Cripes does anyone remember google people”

51:57 - Cool to read a story that successfully predicted the future

53:31 - Versioning stories complete with a list of dependencies

57:30 - Discussing Kevin’s recent article “The Brilliance & Excess of The Wandering Inn”

1:00:36 - The genre of The Wandering Inn is “long”

1:05:36 - When writing a story this long you already have reader buy-in to do whatever you want as an author

1:08:31 - The Wandering Inn tells big world spanning stories from the perspective of individuals

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