{"id":11446,"date":"2026-10-01T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-10-01T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=11446"},"modified":"2026-09-30T21:18:41","modified_gmt":"2026-10-01T01:18:41","slug":"there-is-no-anti-memetics-division","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2026\/10\/01\/there-is-no-anti-memetics-division\/","title":{"rendered":"There Is No Anti Memetics Division."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

There Is No Anti Memetics Division<\/a><\/em> starts with a mind-bender premise, and most of the book is brilliantly creative, built around a world where memes \u2013 not the kind of memes you might associate with social media, but memes as ideas that are noncorporeal, sentient identities \u2013 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\u2019s one of the most Philip K. Dick-like novels I\u2019ve ever read, and for about three-fourths of its pages, I thought it was going to be my favorite novel of this year\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019t trained to see them or born with such an ability. Marie\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I confess that I find Hughes\u2019 bio itself to be pretentious as hell, beginning with the pen name \u2018qntm.\u2019 The author bio he uses in the book and online says that \u2018his preferred writing technique is to start from an interesting hypothetical and drive it to breaking point and far beyond.\u2019 I\u2019m not even sure what \u201cand far beyond\u201d means in this context. It\u2019s just bloviating. And I will say I don\u2019t think this novel doesn\u2019t anything of the sort. However, if you feel that\u2019s the best descrtiption of your writing style, great. Show us. Let your work do the talking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n