A book review – “There is No Antimemetics Division,” by qntm (Sam Hughes)

I might go a few years, unfortunately, between reading a book I am strongly compelled to think and talk about. Think of that song that takes up residence for a week spinning in your head, like it or not. Only here the rent-free visit is a pleasure. The drought breaker this time is “There is No Antimemetics Division” by “qntm,” the pen name of Sam Hughes. The irony of this reading experience is the story centers on ideas that do not spread easily, or quite the contrary, ideas that are “self keeping secrets.” Imagine, a meme might be an idea that goes viral, a mind-space infection with a high R-naught, reproducing rapidly. Would there not also be ideas that do the opposite? The monstrous “anti-memes” wreak havoc, but we are unaware of the devastation. We have forgotten it all. Memorable, meet the immemorable. The perception, the memory, and any attempt at remembering are thwarted. We have a unique organization – a Foundation – to fight these holes in our brains and our reality.

Everyone forgets. It’s amazing how easily and how much humans forget. In some fields of science, this will come down to evolution, a survival mechanism, a practical necessity. Filters to keep us sane. Mental gates to keep out invasive species. Every day, we forget more than we remember, and we forget we forgot. Our space sectors unknown unknowns are cuddly little puppies compared to the inhuman scope of forgotten human experience. Lessons unlearned are the worse risks. Perhaps, you open an old notebook with some calculus, meeting notes from ten or twenty years ago (I always took lots of notes), or an email from back when email was novel. It’s my handwriting. Yet I do not understand the math, and I do not remember understanding it, or writing these notes, or that email. Take that feeling from entering that uncanny valley and jack it up a few orders magnitude on the anxiety scale and you get the idea. The Foundations people also carry around notebooks. Some notes are accessible only in special rooms. Oh, I could so relate.

The space sectors unknown unknowns are cuddly little puppies compared to the inhuman scope of forgotten human experience. Lessons unlearned are the worse risks.

Amazingly, for a reader that prefers world-building, or action to keep you turning pages, or characters to care about, qntm pulls off a quad-fecta – a book finely fusing ideas, plot, characters, and place. For a book about anti-memes, I turned page after page hoping all is not forgotten.

Marion Wheeler, the central character in this daze at the Foundation, isn’t just fighting bad ideas with better ideas. Though this is the gist of the battle. The battles are physical, the ideas at odds are incarnate – as in the flesh – not limited to our intangible head space.

And yet, as impossible as it sounds to create a suspension of disbelief over memes and anti-memes and ideas causing physical havoc, the storyline never gets sidetracked by analogy or metaphor. Your brain reading this will get sidetracked, for sure, many times, but never the story. Remember or forget, two ideas at odds yet eerily similar when considering notions themselves will decide, like an organism consciously attaching or detaching, which will happen. Are the ideas we call our own in symbiosis or parasitism, sitting on a trunk of memory and experience we call “self?” Will I read this blog years from now and ask, “who wrote this?” It makes no sense. Putting it down I forget I just had that thought. Anti-memes, all around us yet not perceived, forgotten when they momentarily have been, are true monsters.