There Is No Antimemetics Division: A Novel

qntm

Nov 2025 · Sold by Ballantine Books

About this ebook

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Humanity is under assault by malevolent “antimemes”—ideas that attack memory, identity, and the fabric of reality itself—in this whip-smart tale of science-fiction horror, an entirely reimagined and expanded version of the beloved online novel.

“Utterly brilliant . . . a dazzling, confusing novel with a highly effective, creeping sense of dread . . . I can’t recommend it enough.”—Charlie Jane Anders, The Washington Post

“[An] unforgettable, mind-bendingly brilliant novel.”—The Guardian

They’re all around us, hiding in plain sight.

One could be in the room with you now, just to your left. You could be seeing it right now—but from this second to the next, you’ll forget that you did. If you managed to jot down a note, the paper would look blank to you afterward.

These entities can feed on your most cherished memories, the things that make you you—and you’ll never even know anything changed.

They can turn you into a living ghost—make it so you’re standing next to your spouse, screaming in their ear, and they won’t know you’re there.

They’re predators equipped with the ultimate camouflage, living black holes for information, able to consume our very memories of their existence.

And they aren’t just feeding on us. They’re invading.

But how do you fight an enemy when you can never even know that you’re at war? How do you contain something you can’t record or remember?

Welcome to the Antimemetics Division.

No, this is not your first day.

Ratings and reviews

This starts as more of a collection of short stories, basically a set of SCP entries about creatures who affect memories. It's interesting but the theme is too repetitive to make for a full volume of such stories. The book takes a turn after a while though and a real narrative starts to emerge. It's an interesting concept, and the execution is solid. Worth a read if you're into strange scifi and the macabre.

This book creates division and makes you perceive one as above and one as below, never equal.

was very interesting

About the author

qntm is the internet handle of Sam Hughes, a writer and software developer living in the UK. He has been writing short-form and serial science fiction for most of this millennium; his preferred writing technique is to start from an interesting hypothetical and drive it to breaking point and far beyond.