There Is No Antimemetics Division

sifuCJC reviewed There is No Antimemetics Division by qntm

Impressive weirdness

5 stars

This is an idea-driven novel, but unlike other's I've read, the voice stays consistent throughout. There is most certainly weirdness, and it stays solidly weird until the end.

Another thrilling thing is that there isn't really any horror, but the implications of the ideas presented are terrifying. It's like you supply the horror to yourself. Which fits perfectly with the themes of memory and belief.

It's impressive; creepy and inventive.

This is an idea-driven novel, but unlike other's I've read, the voice stays consistent throughout. There is most certainly weirdness, and it stays solidly weird until the end.

Another thrilling thing is that there isn't really any horror, but the implications of the ideas presented are terrifying. It's like you supply the horror to yourself. Which fits perfectly with the themes of memory and belief.

It's impressive; creepy and inventive.

benwerd@bookwyrm.social reviewed There is No Antimemetics Division by qntm

There is no █████ without ██████

5 stars

I loved every moment of this. You can kind of tell that it started life as a web series on a wiki if you squint a bit — but it’s every bit as gripping, mind-bending, moving, and downright fun as people say. (I guess I didn’t know going in that it would be fun? But it is.) I want more.

sotolf reviewed There is No Antimemetics Division by qntm

Fun thinking book which kind of got off the rails in a good way

4 stars

I quite enjoyed this book, and I'm taking a star off for something that isn't really the book's fault, just my taste. It got a bit more horror than I expected and liked, I more enjoyed the mind bending fun thought experiments of the different SCPs a lot more, it followed kind of a broken up story style that fit very well to the story told, and while it got pretty out there in the last 4th I ended up liking it quite a lot.

loppear reviewed There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm

is SCP its own genre?

4 stars

Unnerving and fragmentary, very satisfying exploration around questions of memory, trust, and institutional decay.

Stephen reviewed There is No Antimemetics Division by qntm

Good, but too much in one go

4 stars

I should have read this slower, the book is fine. SCP lit in long form, done well. All creatures that cause you to forget them, or other things. It starts as short stories, and then the links start appearing.

Uses some Memento backwards story telling to keep the audience in the right mind frame. Too bleak for me by the end.

4thace reviewed There is No Antimemetics Division by qntm

Review of 'There is No Antimemetics Division' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

This is a series of stories with a bizarre premise I don't think i have seen in any other work in the covert intelligence agency internals genre. The greatest threats to humanity have the ability to disguise themselves by tampering with minds so they are either not perceived at all, or given no attention by the conscious mind, or removed from memory entirely afterwards. This allows them to do anything our kind world otherwise oppose and makes it nearly impossible to mount a defense without some powerful technology. There are a couple major characters working at the agency of the title whom we follow as they discover, over and over - they are the only ones who can counter a species-ending threat from some other universe. The mature of the mimetic threat causes even written documents to decay, so there are garblings and elisions when things get bad. At the …

This is a series of stories with a bizarre premise I don't think i have seen in any other work in the covert intelligence agency internals genre. The greatest threats to humanity have the ability to disguise themselves by tampering with minds so they are either not perceived at all, or given no attention by the conscious mind, or removed from memory entirely afterwards. This allows them to do anything our kind world otherwise oppose and makes it nearly impossible to mount a defense without some powerful technology. There are a couple major characters working at the agency of the title whom we follow as they discover, over and over - they are the only ones who can counter a species-ending threat from some other universe. The mature of the mimetic threat causes even written documents to decay, so there are garblings and elisions when things get bad. At the climax of the book an unwilling bystander outside of the foundation is drawn in to set into motion a plan to defeat the cosmic horror. I don't know how this kind of story could be told in any other medium and still be satisfying. The reader is the only one in the end to know what a sacrifice had been made by people utterly forgotten by the reconstructed world. Quite a storytelling feat.

Matthew Royal reviewed There is No Antimemetics Division by qntm

Review of 'There is No Antimemetics Division' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

If you like Charles Stross's "Atrocity Archives" or Doctor Who's "The Silence" story arc, you're going to love "There Is No Antimemetics Division".

It explores the idea of what would an anti-meme war look like. I understand that the story was originally serialized on a blog, but it fits together pretty well. The final act was great, but just shy of mind-blowing.

I give 5 stars sparingly, but I knew this deserved one just 50 pages in. Overall, a great addition to my new sci-fi canon, because this story stays with me. I think about it during the day, and I feel like it shifts my perspective in an interesting way. I intended to ship it to my fellow-sci-fi-loving mom after I was done, but it's got more Lovecraftian gore and body horror than she'd like.