There Is No Antimemetics Division

Deeply disturbing and exquisitely written, There is No Antimemetics Division posits the idea of an insidious invasion by entities that feed on memories, leaving their victims chillingly unaware that anything has changed. An antimeme is an entity with self-censoring properties. Some are benign; but others, less so… These entities can feed on your most cherished memories, the things that make you you – and you'll never even know anything changed.

And they aren't just feeding on us. They're invading. But how do you contain something you can't record or remember? How do you fight against an enemy with effortless, perfect camouflage, when you can never even know that you're at war? Welcome to the antimemetics division. No, this is not your first day.

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.

Astonishing. Pitch-perfect cosmic horror – and the pitch will break all the glass in your brain. - M. R. Carey, author of Infinity Gate

The coolest, smartest, mind-blowingest novel to be published this year, and probably for many years to come. It is utterly unique, constantly surprising, genuinely unsettling, and a towering work of speculative fiction that may very well take its place among the best sci-fi novels of the century so far. - Blake Crouch, New York Times bestselling author of Dark Matter

An addictive, dizzying experience that will make you feel like your brain has been pulled apart and reassembled by a mad scientist. What would be considered a mind-bending twist in another novel happens on every other page of There Is No Antimemetics Division. I've never read anything like it, unless I did and just forgot. - Jason Pargin, New York Times Bestselling author of John Dies at the End

No exaggeration, this is the most imaginative novel I have ever read. It's compulsively readable and exquisitely mind-blowing from the first paragraph to the last. I enjoyed every word. Highest possible recommendation. - Scott Hawkins, author of The Library at Mount Char

An instant classic of the genre, fusing the bureaucratic sci-fi of Philip K. Dick, the cosmic horror of Lovecraft, and the poetic prose of Emily St. John Mandel. There Is No Antimemetics Division is packed with ideas so potent it feels like one of the story's own anomalies—I had vivid dreams, my brain unable to put it down even when I was ready to. Blisteringly intelligent, profoundly unsettling, and totally unforgettable. I finished it days ago, and I'm still not done with it. - Thomas R. Weaver, author of Artificial Wisdom

Unforgettable, mind-bendingly brilliant - Lisa Tuttle, The Guardian