There is No Antimimetics Division by qntm - 3.5 / 5 Antimemes
There is No Antimimetics Division by qntm
Blurb from its Amazon listing:
An antimeme is an idea with self-censoring properties; an idea which, by its intrinsic nature, discourages or prevents people from spreading it.
Antimemes are real. Think of any piece of information which you wouldn't share with anybody, like passwords, taboos and dirty secrets. Or any piece of information which would be difficult to share even if you tried: complex equations, very boring passages of text, large blocks of random numbers, and dreams...
But anomalous antimemes are another matter entirely. How do you contain something you can't record or remember? How do you fight a war 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.
Ironically, I can't remember how this book came across my attention. Maybe it was a mention by a BookToker, or maybe another social media post, but the premise grabbed my attention as it is about something which has long fascinated me, playing with memory.
The book is not normally in the realm I would read. It is a bit of a horror novel, with lots of gore and body horror described, but I came to think of the horror aspect of the novel as a bit more art house / new age. The base concept of the novel is so out there and theoretical that it made it easy for me to remove myself from the action and partition it off in my mind - I'm not the one enduring the horror, I'm the observer.
The premise of the novel is hard to summarize, but I think the way I will approach it is this: It is a novel in the vein of the online "SCP" genre. SCP is an a meta genre of fiction writing, where many different individuals contribute to a corpus of sci-fi / horror / supernatural stories with a very dark and, often, experimental tone or styles of writing.
This book is very much all of that. It is weird. It is hard to read sometimes as your brain grapples with shifts in voice or perspective, etc. But it was an interesting ride. Like sitting in a bumper car as it traverses through an art house. You're a passenger with no control of the story, observing what is around you, jarred and bumped and sometimes confused.
As the rating says - largely, I liked it. I have no desire to read it again, even if I would get more out of it with a better understanding for its goings on. Worth noting, it is a quick read. And while I spread it out over a few days, my reader tells me I spent just three hours reading it in total.
This is my first book of 2024. I'm setting a goal of reading 50 books this year, and while I started this one last year, I feel it is fair to count it to this book total as I could have as easily read it all this morning had I decided I wanted to.