There Is No Antimemetics Division

There Is No Antimemetics Division is a science-fiction horror novel originally published serially on the alternate-reality fiction site SCP Foundation by British author Sam Hughes under the pen name qntm, self-published in both e-book and print form under a Creative Commons license (version 1), and then reworked for broader publication by Penguin Random House books (version 2). It is among the more disturbing pieces of fiction I’ve read, and I consider among my favorite novels The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K Dick; a book its author found disturbing enough that he said he couldn’t bear to reread the galleys.

It’s a weird and thought-provoking book, and I believe that the less you know about it going in, the more fun you’ll have with it; in the spirit of both that sentiment and the subject of the book – self-censoring ideas – I’m going to talk around its content rather than about it.

If you enjoyed the books of Philip K Dick (or the many movies based on them: Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report) or the Remedy Entertainment video games Alan Wake or Control, stop reading this webpage and go read the book instead – this is of the same general milieu and you’ll find here a lot of what makes those works special. If you enjoy how the movie Memento or the TV show Severance grapple with how memory works, there is a good amount of that here as well. I’ve also heard comparisons to The Matrix, Stranger Things, Snow Crash and HP Lovecraft which seem apt. This is also the first book I’ve recommended here which I feel requires a content warning, for body horror.

Partly due to its serially-published-on-a-wiki origins, the story is told in disjointed vignettes which require a bit of work from the reader to piece everything together – but much moreso in the original version than the reworked version 2. The print books (both versions) make heavy use of redacted / corrupted text in the format of ███ and beeps/static/other noise in the audiobook. Some is in the form of a memo or database entry, but most follows point-of-view characters, and most of that centers on Marion (v1)/Marie (v2), site director for one instance of the titular Antimemetics Division, and her husband Adam, a world-class violinist.

As mentioned, the book centers itself on the idea of self-censoring ideas (antimemes) among which are ones so dangerous they can’t be thought about directly without protection. It wrestles directly with our notions of memory as gestalt, consensus reality, and modern idea-spreading, and pulls from our cultural backdrop notions of powerful unknown organizations, government coverups, viral videos, lost societies, cryptozoology, and alternate realities. The story asks its characters to make sacrifices that – outside of its universe – seem unthinkable to us; Marie and Adam are likable characters and I felt a lot of the weight of what they’re going through, especially as we the readers get to remember things they can’t. But it’s not a character-driven book, and there’s not much character growth because they’re constantly forgetting things. As Marie recalls someone telling her:

an Antimemetics Division operative is as good on their first day as they’re ever likely to be

I found it faster-paced than anything I’ve recommended here previously, and would often tell myself “just a little bit more” instead of ending my reading session to do other things, like sleep. And because it’s a horror book, I wouldn’t recommend reading it right before attempting sleep. Much of that horror relates to the antimemes, but some of it is the description of how I imagine it must be like to live with Alzheimer’s, forgetting things that were once important until what’s left has been stripped to the core, devoid of context in the world.

Nevertheless, I found it simultaneously weird and thought-provoking, and I like that sort of thing. If you do as well, check it out.

My partner read this before I did; she primarily reads audiobooks, and then asked my opinion on it. Some years back I had bought a paperback of the v1 book at a local bookstore and then put it in a stack next to my desk where I promptly forgot about it; but I guess she had remembered seeing it and somehow assume I’d read it. She wanted to know about differences between the print and audiobook versions, which prompted me to finally read it, and from the differences we pieced together that I had the v1 book. After listening to the audiobook performed by Rebecca Calder (who did a great job with challenging material) while reading along with the v2 ebook, I can say that v2 is both significantly reworked and a much better book for the effort.