📚 There Is No Antimemetics Division
Genre: Science Fiction, Horror, Weird Fiction Originally Published: 2020
💭 Quick Summary & Thoughts
Oh boy. Where do I even start? There’s a real threat of me not putting everything down in this review because my memory has been eroded by an anti-memetic entity, but let’s power through.
WOW. This was amazing. I’ve read some excellent sci-fi books, and this rates amongst the highest. The plot premise is so mind-bogglingly good that just the concept alone is enough to rate it highly. Entities that can conceal their own identities by erasing the memories of any interactions with them? That’s the kind of idea that makes you put the book down just to sit with it for a minute.
The first two parts of this book are incredibly strong. The opening chapter, the way it introduces anti-memetic entities through Quinn and the assistant she shoots, is phenomenal. You’re immediately thrown into a world where the rules are different and your brain has to work overtime to keep up. The follow-up with Lee’s experience gives you a glimpse into what fighting one of these unknowns actually looks like, and it’s such a powerful chapter. There’s a twist early on that completely reframes everything you thought you understood, and it’s the kind of gut-punch that makes you go “THIS is what sci-fi is supposed to be.” Starts at such a high note.
There are so many things to love about this book. The pet that Quinn carries around, who in my mind manifests as a dog because why not, trained to eat the selective memories fed to it. The extremely hilarious god residing in the stone who makes people forget how to ride a bicycle. The concept of an anti-meme-bomb. Chef’s kiss.
That said, the world-building had become so complicated by the end of part two that I feel there was no way to wrap up the book in a neat little box. The third part goes all over the place, it’s long, convoluted, and doesn’t do justice to the brilliance of the first two. But those first two parts are so good that I honestly don’t care how average the third part was.
One thing I will note: the shifts in scene and timeline are sometimes quite jarring. I had to reread a few sections to understand where we’d shifted to, what time period we were in, and whose perspective we were following. For a book that already demands a lot from its reader, these abrupt transitions don’t help.
I also love how the book explores the idea of how our memories and experiences shape us, very similar to Piranesi in that regard. There are moments where characters confront recordings or evidence of their past selves and can’t reconcile who they were with who they are now. It hits hard because it forces you to ask: who are we without our memories?
Truly a masterpiece. It has faults, but faults that I can ignore because of how good the rest of it is.
⚠️ Spoiler Zone
🚨 Click to reveal spoilers 🚨
Let me talk about the things I loved first, because there’s a lot.
I caught on early that there would eventually be an extremely powerful anti-memetic villain, one where even knowing of its existence leads to consequences. I was glad to find out I was right, U-3125, is a terrifying concept. The natural follow-up for fighting such an entity would be a war-room-esque safeguarded location, and I was right on that count too.
The plot threads tie together beautifully. Marion makes Sunshine eat the memories of Adam so that he’s out of harm’s way, and I like to think that in her dying moments she tells Sunshine to go to Adam to protect him from U-3125. Adam has natural capabilities that make him resistant to anti-memetic manipulation, and coupled with Sunshine eating away U-3125’s existence from his mind, it makes for a compelling explanation of how Adam survived as long as he did.
And the ending, Adam takes a class-Z drug to recreate the memory of Marion, who has the idea to counter U-3125. Literal chills. For a romantic sucker like me, that moment was everything.
Now, the gripes. The third part would have been so much simpler, easier, and more impactful if they’d just shown Ed Hix succeeding straightforwardly instead of killing him. But the worm survives, gets another body, that body dies too. It’s just so bizarre and unnecessary. The complexity doesn’t add tension; it just adds confusion.
Another thing I don’t get: in the entire long history of the Antimemetics Division, they never had personnel who were naturally resistant to anti-memetic manipulation like Adam? If that ability is so rare, then why didn’t Marion initiate Adam into the organization much earlier? She was married to the guy! It feels like a gap in the world-building that’s hard to look past.
There are also quite a few hand-waves throughout, but that’s to be expected in sci-fi of this scope. The ambition of the concept means some things just have to be taken on faith.
💬 Quote Corner
“Ideas can be killed. How? With better ideas.”
“Welcome to the Antimemetics Division. No, this is not your first day.”
“None of this happened, Paul. You and I never existed. There is no Antimemetics Division.”
⭐ Ratings
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