This review is based on an eARC (Advance Reading Copy) provided by the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. There Is No Antimemetics Division will be released on November 11, 2025.
For the last few years, I’ve been seeing glowing commentary about There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm, particularly on the printsf subreddit, where it is a bit of a sub darling. I’ve certainly had good luck with Reddit darlings in the past (hello, Senlin Ascends), but there have been some busts as well, and that sub’s tastes tend in a much harder sci-fi direction than mine. Throw in the book being part of a tangled mess of an online shared universe, and I just never took the plunge. Until it got picked up by a traditional publisher and I had the chance to read an ARC. Turns out, it deserves the hype.
I must note up front that the traditionally published version of There Is No Antimemetics Division is described by the author as a total rewrite, including but not limited to scrubbing of any references to the SCP universe. As I have no background knowledge of SCP, that makes me a good test reader for the new book, but it also means I cannot speak at all to how much it has changed. The title is the same, and there is currently just one Goodreads entry, but the term “totally rewritten” suggests to me that this should perhaps not be considered the same work as the self-published version. So whatever I say here only applies to the edition I actually read.
There Is No Antimemetics Division follows a series of figures working within or adjacent to the titular Antimemetics Division of a secret organization studying and shielding the world from inexplicable phenomena, ranging from the merely strange—there is, for instance, a god of forgetting how to ride a bicycle indwelling a large hunk of limestone—to the unfathomably horrific. Think Men in Black, but for cosmic horrors instead of aliens. The Antimemetics Division in particular deals with those entities that camouflage themselves not via affecting senses but rather by affecting minds. They prevent themselves from being perceived, or from being remembered, or both. In a way, the entire novel is an exploration of one question: how do you defend against a malevolent entity with the power to make you forget that it even exists?
It’s a fascinating question, and it kicks off a fascinating, high-concept story with cosmic horror subject matter approached with science fiction methodology. It’s not a book for in-depth characterization, and it’s honestly difficult to see how it could be. Almost every chapter begins with a perspective character who has no knowledge of what came before—either due to working in a different department or due to having forgotten previous events—with very little emotional core carrying through. But even with characters being constantly stripped down psychologically, the individual chapters are completely engrossing.
In the first section, before the novel’s biggest questions have come clear, There Is No Antimemetics Division reads almost like a mosaic novel. The division chief gets the bulk of the perspective, but not all of it, and each chapter sees her interacting with someone new without a particularly clear throughline. At that stage, there’s not much to sell the story other than the individual chapters. Fortunately, the individual chapters deliver. There are enough intermediate dangers to put the reader on the edge of their seat even without knowing much about the characters or how the individual scenes fit into the larger puzzle, and those small stories that constitute the novel’s first half do a lot of worldbuilding without feeling like they’re doing a lot of worldbuilding. I was worried coming in that I’d find a lot of dry infodumping; instead, I was thrilled to find a perfect blend of short-term dangers and long-term setup.
As the novel progresses, the bigger picture begins to take shape in a way that’s simultaneously clarifying and confusing. No longer does the story feel like a mosaic of isolated episodes in the affairs of the Antimemetics Division, but neither are the details ever fully clear—after all, the biggest of threats have the most mind-bending power, and they’re extremely committed to preserving their opacity. Still, the animating question of how to fight something that you can’t remember you’re fighting is comprehensible, and the weapons brought to bear on the side of humanity are sufficiently well-foreshadowed as to provide the story with a cohesive arc rather than a chaotic throwing out of all the rules.
On the whole, There Is No Antimemetics Division deserves plaudits both for its conceptual ambition and for its raw storytelling. It feels like a book that’s trying something new instead of just trying to be a better version of a story that’s already been told. And at the same time, it’s a flat-out ride. The smaller stories that build up the world—I’m thinking particularly here of the second chapter—would make excellent short fiction in their own right, and the book as a whole tugs the reader into the chaos for a trim 250ish pages and delivers a satisfying climax before the confusion slips from exciting to grating. I don’t know whether or not the self-published version of the story hit the same level as this one, but I’ll say unequivocally for this book that the hype is warranted.
Recommended if you like: weird lit, conceptual sci-fi, cosmic horror.
Can I use it for Bingo? It’s a Book in Parts and has Epistolary segments. Whether it’s Published in 2025 depends on whether you consider this a new book, but I am inclined to do so.
Overall rating: 18 of Tar Vol’s 20. Five stars on Goodreads.