published by Del Rey in November 2025
review by B. Mullens
Sometimes you read the opening chapter of a book and it feels like it does when the overhead restraint comes down on a roller-coaster and you know you’re locked in for the ride. I felt that thrill with this book and that alone is worth the entrance fee.
The Unknown Organisation exists to investigate unexplained phenomena which defy conventional study. It has a Memetics Division which tracks things like viral memes, earworms and dangerously contagious ideas. There is also the Antimemetics Division. Their job is to investigate and study those unknowns which resist recall and understanding. For example, in a concrete containment cell below the Unknown Organisation’s headquarters is an unknown with the designation U0055 which is a self-keeping secret. It cannot be studied because, while it is both visible and audible, no information about it can be recorded. The Organisation has no idea how it got there. Did they capture it? Or has it infiltrated them? Has it harmed any humans? There is no way to know any of this, and yet U0055 is one of the Division’s smaller problems. For years, the Antimemetics Division has been fighting a war it can’t afford to remember.
There Is No Antimemetics Division has its own peculiar style. It reads like a cross between an online data science course and Lovecraftian horror. The book engenders the crawling sensation that everything you know is a lie, you can’t trust your senses, your thoughts or your memories and you will never even see the enemy coming. The tension in the story is further enhanced by the fact that it isn’t structured in a linear way; the reader must wait and wait and wait to find out what happens.
To give the intellectual terrors of the book an emotional impact, the reader needs a character to root for. Qntm gives us Marie Quinn, Head of Antimemetics. Quinn is always having to either dose up on memory-enhancing drugs, or erase her own memory to prevent the leakage of dangerous information. She is forever starting over, doggedly bootstrapping herself from notes and documents left by an unremembered previous self. She’s a smart heroine, trapped in a never-ending conflict, prepared to sacrifice both her sanity and her history to keep the abstract horrors encroaching from the space of ideas at bay.
In places in the book the mash-up of scientific endeavour and the otherworldly is used for comic effect. There are enjoyable database entries written in the Unknown Organisation’s dry house style about unknowns that are paradoxical or downright silly, such as the God of Forgetting How To Ride a Bicycle.
The concept of antimemetics feels excitingly like it could be real. There are so many people, places and ideas that slip away as you try to grasp them. Is it simply that they are difficult or boring? No! I’m pretty sure now that they are damaging our brains and eating our memories