I rarely spend too much energy trying to find new books to review. They tend to be books I was going to read anyway or, they arrive because people think my reviews are pretty good and a publisher mailed me directly.
I kept seeing QNTM’s There Is No Antimemetics Division on “Best of…” lists for Science Fiction and New Weird Fiction, but honestly, I was kind of apprehensive. Part of it is that the cover is definitely pretentious; the title has a made-up word and the author’s name is just a string of four letters. Pick one. But when I happened to notice they had it at the library, I put a hold on it. The estimated wait time was ten weeks, but I got it in two. This meant that people were plowing through this book, which is exactly what I did.
Relatable vibes and setting
Like pretty much everything I read, the premise here immediately reminded me of an episode of Star Trek, albeit a more obscure one. Voyager, season 4, episode 22, “Unforgettable” in which Chakotay learns he was in love with a person whose pheromones make everyone forget about them. The key difference here is that in the episode of Star Trek, they hand-wave all the parts that don’t make sense. In this book, the author leans into the magical aspects as just something that happens in the world. There’s also an episode of Dr. Who that uses this concept, except they’re creepy aliens called The Silence instead of pretty ladies who want to be your girlfriend.
Mix that with a dash of Men in Black (except the neuralyzer and deneuralyzer are in pill form) and Warehouse 13, and you’ve got the vibes down pat. The Warehouse 13 vibes are actually so strong that I realized about halfway through I was imagining the main character as CCH Pounder, despite the fact that the character’s physical description didn’t match her at all.
If you’re looking for a book comparison, I’d have to go with The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall. I realized after writing this review that Hall wrote one of the blurbs, which was very gratifying.
To summarize the setting: very cool, very relatable for sci-fi fans, 5 stars.
What is an Antimemetics Division anyway?
The plot, on the other hand, is a whole different animal:
What if someone told you that there was an entire class of animals who had an evolutionary defense mechanism that made everyone forget about their existence as soon as they left a certain proximity (in the book it’s referred to as the antimemetic field)? Easy enough, right? Then, what if it wasn’t just animals but objects, ideas, ruined cities from ancient civilizations, and extra-dimensional creatures that eat memories which live all over the world that people can only maintain awareness of if they take a certain medication that has only recently been invented?
In essence, There Is No Antimemetics Division is the story of a war between humanity and one of these entities. A war that humanity is losing, badly. Yet even the front-line soldiers keep on keeping on for the simple reason that, most of the time, they have no idea they’re fighting the war, that the war is happening, or that the enemy even exists. To know that the enemy exists is to succumb to it, vanishing from existence and memory.
As the agents go from thousands to hundreds to dozens, they don’t even notice anyone is missing. How can anyone win that war?
Is the panic and anxiety which this book attempts to instill in the reader the reason I couldn’t sleep last night, or was it that I got in trouble at work and thought I was going to get fired? None can say.
But wait, there’s more
What if you loved someone so much that the best thing you could do for them is to erase all memory of yourself from their brain, and all memory of them from your own? Because, outside of how you feel about them, there’s something about their brain that makes them objectively special. They’re the only person who can win the war, and they have to do it alone, without even knowing they’re doing it. And you have to let them.
If that sounds confusing, you’ll be grateful to hear that QNTM does an outstanding job of teaching us how the world works in the opening chapters.
The first few each read like a short story explaining how things work with the Organization and with its leader (and our main character), Quinn. Taken as a standalone piece, chapter two might be one of the best short stories I’ve ever read.
It’s an ambitious plot to be sure; the question is, does it stick the landing? Kind of.
I was listening to an old episode of the Books in the Freezer podcast (shout out to Stephanie Gagnon) when they said something like, you know it’s Weird Fiction when at the end you think, “What the hell did I just read?” This definitely holds true for this one.
If the last chapter had been the end, I would have been very disappointed; thankfully, the epilogue tidies everything up.
A few minor problems
There are a few nitpicky things that annoyed me or detracted from the overall experience of reading this book, none of which are specific deal-breakers, but seem worth mentioning:
Characters are often referred to by their last names. This is fine and a classic device in science fiction to let the reader know who is important, but it gets frustrating sometimes when two of them are a married couple with the same last name.
The occasional use of magic makes it feel a bit like a deus ex machina, but also entirely unnecessary when he could have just written in whatever technology was needed. Also, the author really wants you to look up what a fnord is. Go ahead, I’ll wait.
At the end of the day, is it “pitch-perfect cosmic horror”? Eh, it’s good. The bulk of the book is, in fact, very good. Dare I say, quite good? I already told you about chapter two.
If you want to buy this book, or any other book I reviewed, follow this link (full disclosure, I get a little bit of money if you buy a book from that link.)
Oh, there’s one other thing I was reminded of as the book wrapped up: you just lost The Game.