There Is No Antimemetics Division {Self-published}

Passive black holes of information, active predatory infovores, unrememberable worms which covered the human skin like dust mites…contagious bad news, self-sealing secrets, living murders, Chinatowns.

SCP-3125 — a highly aggressive anomalous metastasized meme complex, adapted for survival in an ideatic ecology considerably more violent and hostile than our own — has now intersected our reality.

I don’t know but my heart started beating faster when the thing was chasing that guy. Is it Horror? SciFi? Felt some amped-up Dickian paranoia, spackled and burnished. What do you do when something else is running your head? I don’t know. It’s probably happening to us right now and we don’t know it. Or we forgot. I don’t know.

Trans-dimensional cosmic terrors that consist of ideas that know you as soon as you know them present a problem to those whose self-stated mission is to secure, contain, and protect paranormal threats to humanity (are they protecting humanity or the threat?). There is no Antimemetics Division tells the story of the SCP Foundation's encounters with and attempted thwarting of such a threat. In some ways a modern addition to a broader Lovecraftian mythos, TINAMD uses the framework of the popular online SCP wiki, and extends it into a (relatively) cohesive narrative following the exploits of characters you come to know and care for. Fans of mind-bending sci-fi/horror yarns will enjoy this relatively short exploration into human memory and show more cosmic horror. show less

This one's a 3.5 rounded up. And I almost want to take off a full star for the terrible title, but I won't.

So, for ideas? This book is just brilliant, and so much fun. The concepts are brain-cracking, and some of the situations are really good. I don't even mind that there's more of an overall concept rather than story. Instead, we're treated with stories that involve the same characters in similar, yet different situations.

However, there's also a point where it does feel like there's far too many smart people sitting in a secret office talking about all these concepts in a bit too much of a corporate/smart nerd speak, or we're treated to clinically written information laying out the particular mind-wiping threat.

And, unfortunately, the show more last story was far too long and outstayed its welcome. I think this book would have benefitted with a single through-line story.

Having said that though, I flat out loved the concepts, and some of the initial stories were really good.

Personally, I'd love to see what someone like Jonathan Maberry would do with this. show less

Novels originally published on blogs which went on to become bestsellers when picked up by a traditional imprint are not new – The Martian, Wool, Fifty Shades of Grey, for example. Novels which originally appeared on AO3 have also picked up contracts from traditional publishers. To these routes we can now add the SCP Foundation, a collective writing project in which contributors post stories based within the SCP Foundation’s universe. Think X-Files meets Lovecraft meets Copypasta meets Resident Evil. Sort of.

There is No Antimemetics Division is a reformatted collection of stories originally published on the SCP Foundation website by Sam Hughes, given a story arc as a loose framing narrative, and expanded to novel-length with an show more original novella. It works. Sort of. It’s a fix-up and the joins are not difficult to spot. The universe is a collaborative project, although I believe the “antimemetic” aspect is original to qntm.

In the universe of the SCP Foundation, the world is under constant threat by paranormal and supernatural phenomena. A secret organisation exists in order to combat these threats. It’s called the Unknown Organisation, UO. (While UO is international, the novel is set entirely within the UK.) The idea has been around for years. There was a RPG called Delta Green based on the same premise back in the 1990s. The X-Files covered similar ground in some episodes.

Where There is No Antimemetics Division differs is that the threats the titular division combats are entirely idea-based. They’re memes. Even then, we’ve been there before – I remember similar ideas in some of the New Who series. It’s a neat central premise. It’s partly presented as case-files, which is a somewhat obvious spin on the material, but is also a quick and effective way to world-build. Unfortunately, there’s not much drama or jeopardy in, well, bad ideas. So There is No Antimemetics Division turns the various memetic “unknowns” into mechanisms to generate horror tropes. Especially in the final section of the novel, in which a much-feared Unknown has escaped from idea-space and is turning the real world into some sort of post-apocalyptic zombified wasteland.

To add verisimilitude to the narrative parts of it are redacted. But it’s often easy to figure out the redacted words and they’re… banal. “And”. “Was”. Words that would not normally be redacted because they’re not informative or revealing. If it’s a gimmick, it didn’t work for me.

There’s probably something ironic in the fact some of the ideas in There is No Antimemetic Division just bounced off me, while others were a little too familiar. I also felt some of the ideas lacked rigour, and the UO and its capabilities, and the technology behind it, appeared to change from page to page. Eventually, the whole edifice slowly collapses under the weight of its own premise. A neat idea, perhaps, that overstayed its welcome at novel-length and probably worked best in its original incarnation, a wiki of short stories. For me, the novel never really recovered from asking me to swallow an invisible cryptozoic creature that was 1000 metres tall and able to walk on water using its wide padded feet… show less

This was one of the scariest, most interesting books I've read in a long time. I knew nothing about it going in, except that I saw a comment on Reddit or somewhere about how unusual this book was. (It also happened to fit nicely with the last square I needed to mark off for the Reddit bingo card, "No IFs Ands or Buts..."). This really a collection of short stories that tie together and build on one another to tell a larger story. It was originally published online, as part of the SCP Foundation's website (which I will definitely be looking at in more detail now). The concepts here are really scary. What is an antimeme? Would you even know if you had encountered one, since the information is almost impossible to keep in your brain? Have show more we done this before? Etc etc etc. Very fascinating stuff. Highly recommended. show less

Mind-bending and very exciting. I liked the idea of antimemes, the X-files (etc) references, the plot that jumped back and forth, and how my own reality seemed to flicker in strange ways as I dove deeper into the book.
The author did recycle quite a few themes as the book went along, and I would probably see quite a few plot holes if I were to look closer. Still, it was an engrossing read.
(Oh, dear, will I remember what the book was about tomorrow? ;))) )

Sets up a really unsettling and unique problem, but doesn't have an equally creative way to resolve it. Definitely worth reading for some of the ideas (antimemetics itself, the inverse containment system, etc).