This book hit my radar when I searched for books similar to the vibe of the videogame “Control”. If you’re not familiar with that, the premise of the game is that there is a Department of Control, which handles all sorts of unexplained, and unexplainable, objects and events, and is linked to another dimension. The office of the Department is called The Oldest House, and it is constantly shifting and moving, and to get to certain areas, you have to transfer via a sort of portal that appears to be an old motel. It’s a bit dark, and creepy, and infested with beings called The Hiss after an incursion from an Altered Object opening a portal for them. Whoops!
I really love that game. I’ve played through it several times already, and I really just love the lore and the creepy vibes and the weirdness and all of it. So I wanted to find books like it. And I’m pretty sure that a Reddit forum led me to this. I requested that my library acquire a copy, and when they did, I jumped on it (and tried to ignore the nagging line of people waiting on me to finish it).
Overall, I would say that I liked this a lot. There’s a lot of really freaking cool ideas and concepts in this, OR ARE THERE?? The main premise here is that there’s a division of some sort of scientific research/containment/policy power that deals with ideas, or more accurately, memes. We’re all familiar with memes, this IS the internet, but I admit, I never ever thought of them in THIS context.
A meme is an idea that spreads from person to person within a culture and has a specific or symbolic meaning. The Memetics Division deals with ideas that stick. They literally cannot be forgotten or ignored. They take over the mind of the person who encounters it, like a cult you can’t escape or ignore or be rescued from. This organization finds and isolates those ideas, and prevents their spread.
But wait, you say. The title of this book is “There Is No Antimemetics Division”. What the hell is antimemetics? Tis the opposite, silly. Antimemes are ideas you can’t remember. They slip away, or can’t be viewed in the first place. Recordings of them simply fade, and even if they don’t as soon as you stop viewing them, you can’t remember what you were looking at anyway.
There’s a big crisis coming, but if you are aware of it… it’s aware of you, and that is fatal. How do you fight something you literally cannot know about? Is that even possible?
This book was a wild ride of me feeling completely out of my depth conceptually, but somehow still really liking it anyway? It was recursive in that it uses a nonlinear narrative to circle back to reveal scenes from the past, but also recursive in that memory is altered in this book. A LOT. Memories are lost, recovered, eaten, reformed, stripped chemically and surgically, etc. People who work in this division have numerous first days on the job. It’s just the nature of the gig.
I finished this not really understanding all the details that led to the resolution, and I feel like if I was to try to track them, it would be like [insert meme of the guy with the conspiracy thread board]. It’s convoluted and very high concept, but never really felt inaccessible. (At least to me, but I acknowledged my ineptitudes in the conceptual genius realm necessary, and just accepted it at the value given, and moved on.)
I really liked the depiction of the relationship in this book as well. I will not give anything away, because I think even naming them would be sort of spoilerish, but I thought that the way it was written was very well done. At first, though, I admit I didn’t. It seemed stilted and awkward - until I realized that was intentionally intentional. Brilliant. Really good stuff.
I liked how there were multiple perspective narrators. It definitely kept me on my toes as far as who was “safe” or likely to make it through to the end with me. I love an author willing to declare noone safe.
I am really not sure where I’m going with this. At this point it’s just random thoughts I’m typing as they pop into my brain. So I’ll end it here by just saying, this was a freaking cool book, and explored ideas in the way that I most enjoy - with a great and compelling story attached. I will keep my eyes open for more of qntm’s work.