Page 35 of Grimdark Magazine Issue 48

Yes. Vivian would turn her life around.

She closed the red notebook.

Caroline M. Yoachim is a prolific author of science fiction and fantasy short stories, including her Ignyte Award-winning short story "We Will Teach You How to Read | We Will Teach You How to Read". Her stories have been translated into several languages, reprinted in best-of anthologies, and honored as finalists for multiple genre awards including the Hugo (four times) and Nebula Awards (seven times). Her short story collection Seven Wonders of a Once and Future World & Other Stories is available from Fairwood Press. For more, check out her website at carolineyoachim.com.

The Limits of Knowing: A Conversation with qntm

Interview by Beth Tabler

Some science fiction asks us to imagine new worlds. qntm’s work asks a more unsettling question: how much of our own world can we actually perceive, remember, or understand?

With There Is No Antimemetics Division now standing as a novel in its own right, its central concerns feel particularly immediate. We live inside systems too large for any one person to comprehend, surrounded by more information than we can meaningfully process and increasingly uncertain about what deserves our attention. In qntm’s fiction, those problems become literal. Knowledge can be dangerous, memory can fail, and the most serious threat may be the one you cannot hold in your mind long enough to fight.

In this conversation with Grimdark Magazine, qntm discusses revisiting the Antimemetics Division, the influence of programming on his fiction, hostile systems, scientific realism, information scarcity, and why imagining a genuinely good future may be more difficult than imagining the end of the world.

[GdM] There Is No Antimemetics Division began as part of the SCP Foundation’s collaborative universe, but now it’s a standalone novel. When you wrote this new version, what did it let you do that wasn’t possible before?

[qntm] Being honest there is very little that you can't do in the SCP Foundation universe. It is an extraordinarily broad framework for collaborative storytelling, supporting stories at all kinds of scales. And provided the execution is good the community will respond positively to pretty much anything too. So the real opportunity here was the chance to step back and reflect—to take a web serial, with numerous obvious fingerprints of serialisation, and make it properly cohesive. Setup and payoff becomes far more practical in the novel format.

[GdM] At the heart of the story is a strange contradiction: how do you identify, study, or fight something that stops you from remembering it? What first drew you to that idea?

[qntm] What's interesting here is that it's a difficult problem, potentially an extremely difficult one, but not unsolvable. And the solutions I think are interesting. When I developed the idea of the Antimemetics Division I asked myself how this organisation would need to structure itself, what the day-to-day existence of an employee there would look like, what kind of person would thrive and survive in that environment, what techniques they would use... and I discovered that all of these questions almost automatically had interesting answers.

[GdM] Science fiction often treats knowledge as power. Were you interested in turning that idea on its head and making knowledge itself dangerous?

[qntm] The basic concept of an infohazard, a piece of information which is intrinsically dangerous, is relatively novel, although I can't take credit for it. What's interesting, again, now, is how difficult a problem it is to solve. It's said that a lie can run around the world before the truth can get its boots on. How do you deal with that, even in reality? There are no straightforward solutions. It's thorny and realistic.

[GdM] The horror in the novel isn’t just about facing monsters. It’s about not being able to see the threat at all. Do you think the unknowable is scarier than the unknown?

[qntm] There's a scene in the book where the characters discuss the prospect of an anomaly which may be truly unknowable. One of the characters takes the position that declaring anything to be "unknowable" is a confession of defeat. It's that confession of defeat which I find concerning.

[GdM] We often think of memory as the core of who we are. If someone’s memories are removed or changed, what do you think is left?

[qntm] This isn't something we need to hypothesise about. Anybody who has known someone with Alzheimer's disease has seen this first-hand. And the answer is... tragically, sometimes, very little. It is a terrible, terrible thing.

[GdM] Without getting into spoilers, what do you hope readers feel when they finish the novel? Clarity, uncertainty, dread, excitement, or something else?

[qntm] What I'd like is if every reader came away at least with something, and if for most readers that something was something authentic to them. I feel that a good book opens up many ways to respond to it.

[GdM] You’re also a programmer. Has that trained you to approach stories through rules, edge cases, exploits, failure states, and unintended consequences?

[qntm] Software development trains us to take new complex systems and analyse their interactions from all possible angles to see when and how they will break down. We have to think about wildly unlikely failure scenarios and people who might want to attack the system in order to steal information or worse. I feel that this skill set is also pretty applicable in the realm of science fiction. I like to take a novel "What if?" scenario and then game it out, forwards and backwards. The logical personal and societal consequences, and all of the retroactive changes that are necessary to even get the universe to this point. Generally I find that when this is done, interesting outcomes present themselves—and if not, I just start over.

[GdM] Your stories often feature systems that make perfect sense on the inside but lead to strange, horrifying, or disastrous results. Are you more interested in broken systems or in systems that work exactly as intended?

[qntm] In reality I prefer systems to work as intended—provided those intentions are noble. Often these days I feel that my intentions and the systems' engineers' intentions are at odds with one another. Ever search for something and get pages and pages of useless results, when a simple "No results found" would have been more valuable? For the purposes of storytelling, of course, I am interested in systems whose behaviour is interesting in non-obvious ways, and which drives action.

[GdM] Hatetris and Absurdle take familiar games and turn them into opponents that follow the rules while still working against the player. What interests you about systems that are logical and consistent but still feel actively hostile? Do you see a connection between those games and the systems or intelligences in your fiction?

[qntm] I just feel that I like to approach things from a new angle. I like to think that the way I approach systems and take them apart is novel, novel enough to support interesting work. I like to take things to absolute logical extremes and then go further still. In fiction, at least, there is nothing stopping you from throwing a new invention into your fictional universe which completely ends that universe... and then you can keep writing after that if you want!

[GdM] You were once known as an authority on where Springfield is located in The Simpsons. Did you ever feel like you solved it, or did you discover that some puzzles are more interesting when the evidence refuses to cooperate? Does that connect at all to your interest in impossible systems and contradictory information?

[qntm] Haha, this is a very deep cut! Yes, for many years I was the maintainer of the "Where Is Springfield?" file on the Simpsons Archive, one of the earliest Simpsons fan websites. The location of Springfield has of course always been a running gag with all kinds of intentionally contradictory evidence. That said... if it had to be anywhere, in my opinion, the plurality of the circumstantial evidence points to California. Little background details support this, like the layout of Otto's driver's license. I think this is because the show was written in California. I don't think this directly relates to my writing really... this is just an old obsession of mine.

[GdM] How much scientific or mathematical realism does a story need before you consider it science fiction?

[qntm] As opposed to just fantasy? I don't feel that I have a hard definition of "science fiction" really, but I think scientific and mathematical realism are red herrings here. I love the Culture novels by Iain M. Banks, they are categorically and unambiguously science fiction. The fact that they are built on entirely fictitious, if not impossible, technology doesn't affect this in the slightest.