There Is No Anti Memetics Division.

There Is No Anti Memetics Division starts with a mind-bender premise, and most of the book is brilliantly creative, built around a world where memes – not the kind of memes you might associate with social media, but memes as ideas that are noncorporeal, sentient identities – are present in our world, and some of the most dangerous ones are capable of making people forget they ever saw or heard them. It’s one of the most Philip K. Dick-like novels I’ve ever read, and for about three-fourths of its pages, I thought it was going to be my favorite novel of this year’s Hugo candidates (it made the longlist). Unfortunately, author Sam Hughes, who writes as qntm, chose a deeply unsatisfying resolution that loses the frenetic pace of the rest of the book while also breaking with the themes he seemed to be tackling.

The novel sort of centers on Marie Sheridan, who is, as the novel starts, the head of the Anti-Memetics Division of the Organization, which has the task of fighting and controlling these Unknowns, which range from the mostly harmless (a rock that is also an ancient god and has one power, making people forget how to ride a bicycle) to apocalyptic (the entity that she will end up battling in the book). Most Unknowns escape the notice of the majority of people who encounter them, sometimes to the point of being invisible to people who aren’t trained to see them or born with such an ability. Marie’s husband Adam happens to be one of the latter group, which turns out to be useful when Marie has to make him forget her to try to save him from that particular Unknown that is threatening to end the world.

I confess that I find Hughes’ bio itself to be pretentious as hell, beginning with the pen name ‘qntm.’ The author bio he uses in the book and online says that ‘his preferred writing technique is to start from an interesting hypothetical and drive it to breaking point and far beyond.’ I’m not even sure what “and far beyond” means in this context. It’s just bloviating. And I will say I don’t think this novel doesn’t anything of the sort. However, if you feel that’s the best descrtiption of your writing style, great. Show us. Let your work do the talking.

I mention this because for the vast majority of this book, I was on Hughes’ wavelength. The premise is crazy, and the world he’s built barely holds together, but it was working, thanks to a combination of incredible situational humor and closed plots that are internally coherent. Once the bigger story gets going, however, Hughes keeps growing the plot and the stakes, yet doesn’t have a way to resolve it that obeys the rules of the game that he’s laid out to that point in the book.

The first three or four chapters feel like short stories written in this universe, tied together by setting and a character or two, but without a unifying narrative. Once those are done, we shift into the longer story about the Organization’s fight with this one seemingly invincible Unknown that is so powerful that no one remembers seeing it, and any study of it or attempts to plan to fight it result in the person doing so forgetting everything about it. The Organization has to build a memetically-sealed lab so they can at least house something like research about this enemy.

I was pleased to see that I was far from the only person who felt this way about the ending, even among fans of the genre. The book grew out of writing at the SCP Foundation, a massive collaborative storytelling project that, hours before I wrote this review, is going to see some of its works adapted into an anthology film by Neon, for which Variety credits the success of this year’s film Backrooms. There’s probably some more good stuff in there, but a strong short story or set of them doesn’t always translate to the longer form unless the author(s) can stick the landing. Hughes – or qntm – couldn’t.

Next up: I’m actually reading Verity, by Colleen Hoover, because of the movie coming out and some other reasons, and it’s one of the worst things I’ve ever read. The prose is hilariously bad. But after this I’ll move on to Ann Patchett’s latest novel Whistler.