There Is No Antimemetics Division
A Novel
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4.6 • 31 Ratings
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Humanity is under assault by malevolent “antimemes”—ideas that attack memory, identity, and the fabric of reality itself—in this whip-smart tale of science-fiction horror, an entirely reimagined and expanded version of the beloved online novel.
“Utterly brilliant . . . a dazzling, confusing novel with a highly effective, creeping sense of dread . . . I can’t recommend it enough.”—Charlie Jane Anders, The Washington Post
“[An] unforgettable, mind-bendingly brilliant novel.”—The Guardian
They’re all around us, hiding in plain sight.
One could be in the room with you now, just to your left. You could be seeing it right now—but from this second to the next, you’ll forget that you did. If you managed to jot down a note, the paper would look blank to you afterward.
These entities can feed on your most cherished memories, the things that make you you—and you’ll never even know anything changed.
They can turn you into a living ghost—make it so you’re standing next to your spouse, screaming in their ear, and they won’t know you’re there.
They’re predators equipped with the ultimate camouflage, living black holes for information, able to consume our very memories of their existence.
And they aren’t just feeding on us. They’re invading.
But how do you fight an enemy when you can never even know that you’re at war? How do you contain something you can’t record or remember?
Welcome to the Antimemetics Division.
No, this is not your first day.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
This maddeningly brilliant novel by qntm fits in somewhere between science fiction and cosmic horror, like an all-time classic episode of Black Mirror or Doctor Who. Told through a series of vignettes, the stories are based around a powerful, secretive organization tasked with controlling and monitoring paranormal phenomena. And while there are divisions that study all manner of creepy and impossible happenings, the section explored here is devoted to antimemetics: creatures and concepts that actively resist being remembered. We were glued to this mind-bending concept and all the shocking narrative twists it generates. Those twists make the story hard to describe without spoilers, but just start with the question of what could happen to a team tasked with studying something that can wipe their brains every time they get too close to it. qntm follows these ideas straight into universe-ending Lovecraftian horror and Philip K. Dick–style questions about identity itself, and we were both delighted and terrified to come along for the ride.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Qntm, the pen name of software developer Sam Hughes, makes his traditionally published debut (after the serialized online novel Ra) with this acrobatically absurdist tale of a team of special agents tasked with saving humanity from a menagerie of "Unknowns." These "memetic threats" come in many forms: from monsters and supernatural objects to "contagious ideas, which require containment just like any physical threat." What makes these Unknowns especially troublesome is that anyone who comes in contact with them loses their memories. Antimemetics Division director Marie Quinn is so desperate to learn more about the Unknowns that she doses her predecessor, Division founder Andrew Hilton, with a lethal memory-recovering drug. She discovers that the first Antimemetics unit was created within the British Army during WWII to combat "the idea of Nazism." When one of the Unknowns attaches itself to Quinn, she suspects the only way to get free of the memetic threats forever may involve destroying humanity. Meanwhile, her husband, a violinist with a genetic mutation that has spared his memory, tries to save her, but she no longer remembers him. The zany narrative is further complicated by some formalist flourishes, including pages blackened by a censor's pen and letters missing from words throughout. Hard sci-fi fans looking for riddles and spectacle will be entertained, if occasionally baffled.
Customer Reviews
This is reality on a whole other level… What a brainworm is this book.
Just the idea of reading this book was scary to me, if you think it through. What a brainworm of an idea this author had, and ‘brainworm’ literally becomes a scarier part of reading this book, if you think it through.
Well - too late now, as I read it from cover to cover.
Brilliant and Horrifying
This is a novel about very big ideas. It demands you think. I read it twice back to back.