“There are Unknowns with antimemetic properties,” Quinn goes on. “There are ideas that cannot be spread. There are entities and phenomena that harvest and consume information, particularly information about themselves.
page 14, Marie Quinn
You take a Polaroid photo of one, it’ll never develop. You write a description down with a pen on paper and hand it to someone, but what you’ve written turns out to be hieroglyphs, and nobody can understand them, not even you. You can look directly at one and it won’t even be invisible, but you’ll still perceive nothing there. Dreams you can’t hold on to and secrets you can never share, and lies, and living conspiracies. It’s a conceptual ecosystem, of ideas consuming other ideas and…sometimes…segments of reality. Sometimes, people.”
Table of Contents
Why There Is No Antimemetics Division?
I’ve been hearing murmurs of There Is No Antimemetics Division since earlier this year. Which makes sense since the traditionally published version of this book was published in November 2025 by Ballantine Books. The original self-published version came out in 2020 according to the Storygraph page for the book.
This book is also the lexi aka newlynova book club pick for the month of May 2026. I had a library hold on this book but like with The Correspondent, there were a large number of holds and the queue was moving very slowly. I don’t think my hold would have arrived in May so I ended up buying a physical copy of it from Book City.
This is my first time reading anything by qntm and I think this is also my first time reading a traditionally published book where the author’s name is also their internet handle – the inside of the jacket says the author’s “real” name is Sam Hughes. Blurbs on the edition I read are from – Blake Crouch, M. R. Carey, Jason Pargin, Stephen Graham Jones, Steven Hall, and Scott Hawkins.
Let’s get into it.
The Book
There Is No Antimemetics Division is a science fiction horror novel set in a world where humanity is under attack by so-called “antimemes” – entities and objects that fuck with memory and reality aka these antimemes are hard to talk about and record data about because they have an amnesiac effect on everything around them.
Now before I talk about what I thought of the book I think it is important to talk about its history. This book was originally self-published by qntm who turned what he wrote for the SCP Foundation wiki into a book. That original self-published edition is no longer available for sale due to qntm getting a book deal and the book being traditionally published by Ballantine Books.
As part of the traditional publishing process, There Is No Antimemetics Division was rewritten to have references to SCP removed, for example – a entity/object named SCP-3125 originally was renamed to U-3125. The “U” in this case meaning Unknown. My only other interaction with such “SCP with serial numbers filed off” media was the excellent video game Control which I played in 2019.
Mindbending Mindfucks
I read There Is No Antimemetics Division over the course of a single day (Friday, May 8th 2026) as I had temporarily lost home internet access so I spent my time reading this book. At the end of the day when I finished reading, just before I went to bed I wrote in the pre-review thoughts section of my notes for this book:
WTF did I just read? Need to sleep on it.
packetcat
That initial question still applies even after I slept on it. I still don’t know quite what the fuck I actually read as I write this review on Sunday, May 10, 2026. This book is a series of mindfucks from start to finish. I am not entirely sure I fully understood everything that happened especially the ending of the book which felt especially abstract and incomprehensible.
Did I enjoy it? To a certain extent yes – I am rather fond of the particular flavour of weird science fiction horror that comes out of the SCP Foundation. The horror is more psychological and metaphysical than physical which is my general preference when it comes to horror. I especially cannot do gore and extreme body horror. There is some amount of physical horror in this book but I did not find it to be extreme.
qntm also keeps to a fast-pace when it comes to his writing style in There Is No Antimemetics Division and this enhances the cosmic psychological horror aspect of the book. That said in some instances this felt rather jarring as the book very quickly jumped in time and/or place without any preamble or transitory moments – this especially became a problem in the last quarter of the book where the story moved even faster than it had previously.
I think the book could have benefited from a little bit more world-building and character development. The world of this book is fascinating and I wanted to know more about non-antimemetic Unknowns which we only got a sprinkling throughout. As a standalone title reading this book felt like I was missing some key aspects of the world that the writer assumed the reader already knew.
Themes
There Is No Antimemetics Division wears its primary thematic thrust on its sleeve – memory and identity. The concept of the “antimeme” is in essence an exploration of what memories mean to the people who have them, how they form our sense of self, our identities, our interactions other people who we have shared memories with.
This was rather compelling, I like when books explore memory as a theme and especially when they use science fiction to do it. Personally, the scariest aspect of the book is the concept of how “antimemes” can erase a memory and everything related to that memory so you don’t even know that you forgot something. That is terrifying.
I don’t think I liked this particular exploration of memory as much as I did the one in Toni Morrison’s Beloved but it is also a tad unfair to compare this very different book to a classic such as that one. I did enjoy this book more than I did last month’s lexi aka newlynova book club pick which was The Memory Police.
Concluding Thoughts
There Is No Antimemetics Division was mostly a good time. It had an interesting world with truly terrifying cosmic horror aspects. At 275, it was short and sweet although I did find myself wishing that the book took things a little slower and spent just a little bit more time in its world doing world-building and character development – this is more of a plot driven book than a character driven one and as usual that is something I did not like.
This book made me want to explore the contents of the SCP Foundation wiki because I find this particular style of science fiction fascinating, at least in small doses. I think it is more likely I’ll end up interacting with this kind of world more when the next Control game comes out, whenever that happens.
That’s all from me, see y’all in the next one.
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