There Is No Antimemetics Division – qntm
In an ideal world, Marie Quinn’s job would not exist, but it does, a job so secret that even her husband Adam has only a vague idea of what she does, but recognises that it is significant in the stability of the world order, engaged in a clandestine war in which she must battle against an enemy both indescribable and inconceivable, complicated enough without the recurring internal belief in her organisation that she does not work there, for there is no antimemetics division; why would there be, when such a thing does not exist?
A meme an idea which spreads rapidly among a population, triggering easy associations of nostalgia, humour, even outrage, easily shared in a plethora of online spaces, an antimeme is the opposite, it is a “self-keeping secret” which can be seen but not recalled, leaking away from memory, forgotten along with any feelings of concern about the strangeness of such an object or how it can have gone unnoticed for so long, but they exist, they persist, and while some populations are benign, many of them, proliferating beyond perception, are hostile.
Written by Sam Hughes under his pseudonym qntm, There Is No Antimemetics Division is a thriller of existential yet unseen threat, Division Director Quinn and her colleagues dosed with deleterious “mnestic” drugs to help them recall their daily duty and struggles, newcomer Simon Lee exhausted on his first day, possibly because he has been there ten years, his memory consumed by an entity which has done the same to others, their final log entries as they tried to defeat it only able to catalogue failure as their minds were blanked.
Periodically forced to reinvent itself from first principles when the previous iteration and all its associated records and knowledge pertaining to it vanishes, the history of the division is not only opaque but frightening, Doctor Andrew Hilton having been involved in a key discovery in 1976 though it is impossible to say what it was; is history now repeating itself, as indicated by the towering manifestations in the forest in Wyeleigh gathering at the imperceptible obelisk which can only be seen by those who offer terrified description even as they die?
Originally an online series now collated, revised and expanded for traditional publication, despite the complexity, the contrariness and the sheer impossibility of grasping ideas which lie beyond experience or rational thought, the narrative is lucid, clear, translated into human expression, every blind step of the non-causal, non-linear journey of rewritten memory guided by the assurance of a steady hand of a writer who, despite having conceived of the pieces rather than the whole, can see the end ahead, more shadow than light.
The modern world having demonstrated that destructive ideas can disseminated and take root before they can be contained, destroying lives, cultures and civilisations, that truth and perception are malleable and can be maliciously shaped, There Is No Antimemetics Division is a novel of permeating existential menace and dread yet not without hope; is this a happy ending, or at least as close as can be considered in the circumstances, anything other than total extinction a winning position?
There Is No Antimemetics Division is available now from Del Rey
