THERE IS NO ANTIMEMETICS DIVISION (or is there?)
by QNTM
reviewed by █████ Adcock
I read There Is No Antimemetics Division on my trip to Palestine.
Apparently.
I remember opening it. I remember thinking this is exactly my sort of sci-fi-shit. I remember something about ███████████, and a woman called Marie Quinn and the deeply upsetting possibility that the reason you can’t remember where you put your keys isn’t middle age but actually an extra-dimensional conceptual predator chewing pieces out of your brain.
After that things get a little… ██████████████.
qntm’s spectacularly weird sci-fi horror asks ‘how the fuck do you fight something when remembering it exists is precisely what you can’t do?’
Welcome to the Antimemetics Division.
No, this is not your first day.
Oh.
Fuck.
Imagine The X-Files getting drunk with House of Leaves and you might be somewhere close.
Antimemes themselves are ideas/entities/things which resist being remembered or communicated. And qntm doesn’t just use that as a clever monster gimmick. He lets the infection eat the novel itself. Information vanishes. Documents lie. People disappear. Connections you thought you understood suddenly have █████████ where their emotional support beams used to be.
At one point we get the deliciously broken:
“we can't even write the reason why we can't write it down down,”
Which may be the most accurate synopsis possible.
There’s something genuinely horrible here too. Not jump-scare horrible. Not there’s a bloke with an axe behind the shower curtain horrible. This is ontological horror. The growing suspicion that reality has already lost and nobody noticed because not noticing is literally how the enemy works. It made my brain itch in the best possible way.
And then forget that it was itching.
████████████████████████████████████
██████ DO NOT THINK ABOUT THIS ██████
████████████████████████████████████
The prose moves like a bastard. It’s funny, horrible and occasionally weirdly moving, often overlapping. Full of people trying to save humanity using memory drugs, bureaucracy, insane contingency plans and the desperate hope that somebody wrote something down before everyone forgot why the fuck they were holding the pen.
And buried in all that nightmare fuel is possibly the coolest mission statement in recent sci-fi:
“Ideas can be killed… With better ideas.”
YES.
That’s the good shit.
Because underneath the antimemes, ████████ and reality-devouring horrors, There Is No Antimemetics Division is ultimately about something surprisingly human: what remains of us when memory goes? If love is forgotten, did it matter? If nobody remembers your sacrifice, was it still heroic?
I had thoughts about this but unfortunately ████████████████████████████████████████████████████.
So.
Should you read it?
Absolutely.
Have I explained what happens?
No.
Could I?
███████████████.
Did it happen at all?
Out of a potential 5, you have to go with a Darkmatters:
(5 - because ████████████████████. Wait. Which book were we talking about?..)
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