Crushed this book on a flight to Oakland and hot damn it's a page turner. About 1/3 of the way through and the book hits the ground sprinting: 9.5/10

it's fast paced in a really great way; as soon as you think you get the gist of the plot device, something happens to reveal that it's a step ahead of you. Right out of the gate, the book feels like you're in a finale, and it maintains that climactic pace pretty much throughout the whole story (ironically, up until the actual climax, for reasons that become obvious well before the climax actually happens).

2/3 of the way through: 9

SCP-3125 begs the question 'what is the span of human cognition' in the algebraic sense. How many ideas do you need in order to be able to form all ideas. What is the minimum spanning set of knowledge?

There are some giga brained revelations that gave me goosebumps like watching Inception for the first time. 10/10 from a sf perspective.

Some of the dialog is cringe, but not more than the average sci-fi novel (cough). qntm also does a good job of characterizing a lot of the SCP jargon without being too heavy handed about "here's what the wiki you should have read before reading this has to say about this sort of thing."

I think the book actually falls off a bit in the conclusive final chapters. The story becomes a bit less coherent as more parts of reality begin to crumble, which makes sense in the context of what's happening, but makes for poorer storytelling. An otherwise corny solution to the crisis is executed in a pretty touching way that is also internally consistent to the gritty and violent scenes presented. if I didn't mention it before, this shit is violent and "horrifying" in the way that SCP stories are.

The disparate logs of various SCP items come together a priori of any existing lore familiarity and help the story rather than just being spergy infodumps like many entries to this genre tend to be.

i'd give the final third an 8.25

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