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| First Written | 2025 |
| Genre | Scifi |
| Origin | US |
| Publisher | Ballantine |
| ISBN-10 | 0593983750 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-0593983751 |
| My Copy | library copy |
| First Read | December 23, 2025 |
There is no Antimemetics Division
Also this is very clearly rooted in the SCP universe - a collaborative fiction project where writers catalog Unknown Entities - which I'm not a reader of but NOW I sure want to. I didn't know that these were originally SCP entries but they all felt like what I'd seen there. But looking it up now, it's absolutely from SCP. Cool to see it get a big publishing arrangement!
Noted on December 23, 2025
Memes are ideas that spread on their own. Antimemes are ideas that resist spreading: facts that are hard to think about, or remember. This is a novel-made-from-short-stories about The Organization's Antimemetics Division, which exists to catalog, research, and combat eldritch horrors with antimemetic properties. Maybe it's a monster that's hard to perceive, or a horrifying beast that makes you forget it exists. That's a tough job. Each vignette is about a specific encounter, which usually pulls a similar trick of asking at the climax: what are you forgetting? Are you sure everything you've noticed is true? What hav you been overlooking this whole time? Honestly it was fun, although more gore and horror than I expected.
Noted on December 23, 2025
There are other amnestic approaches-gas, injectable drugs, surgical techniques, occult rituals. These are safe, proven technologies for mass use on the general public and Organization staff alike, but they all operate on the same essential principle that the unwanted knowledge has already entered the mind and must now be removed or suppressed after the fact. Such procedures are imperfect.
Quoted on December 23, 2025