Book review: There Is No Antimemetics Division
stephendiehl.com
stephendiehl.com
I will give the author credit on how they deal with their characters' memories and the re-development of their thoughts, and the usage of time-jumping was reasonable (some books jump around too much, as if these time-skips improve a boring plot). Also the convention for how they solve their dilemma was enjoyable.
Overall, I think the author relies too much on a vocal fandom around the SCP Foundation to glorify the book. I think there is potential for a saga of books but there needs to be more effort in the drafting and editing process to raise the quality of the books to the level the universe deserves.
There is no Antimemetics Division was really interesting in how some of the scenarios play out. I don't read much but I've been trying to do that more. I really liked the book.
Things like the memory consuming entity, async research, etc I enjoyed.
Diaspora by Greg Egan
Anathem by Neal Stephenson (this one is a bit like doing homework but worth it imo)
If you vibe with short stories Exhalation by Ted Chiang Crystal Nights by Greg Egan isn't bad either
Very enjoyable but his short stories are great because they force him to focus on one idea instead of how his whole world view fits together.
Basically anything by Egan is gold, IMO.
> Annihilation By Jeff VanderMeer
I wanted to like this, as the premise was fascinating and the word-smithing was pretty good. But something about it left me feeling a little disappointed at the end. More so the end of the entire trilogy, than Annihilation by itself though, IIRC.
Permutation City[2] by Greg Egan
We Are Legion (We Are Bob)[3] by Dennis E. Taylor
Halting State[4] by Charles Stross
Singularity Sky[5] by Charles Stross
Dungeon Crawler Carl[6] by Matt Dinniman
Zero World[7] by Jason M. Hough
The Shockwave Rider[8] by John Brunner
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glasshouse_(novel)
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permutation_City
[3]: https://www.amazon.com/We-Are-Legion-Bob-Bobiverse/dp/166822...
[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_State
[5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singularity_Sky
[6]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeon_Crawler_Carl
That was a good mindbender indeed. I'd add "The Light of Other Days" by Arthur C. Clarke and Steven Baxter. Beware of spoilers high up the wikipedia page [0]. Tells a good tale of unexpected externalities of disruptive technology introduction.
I really really disliked Accelerando in particular, finding it completely vacuous, the sciencey namedrops is self-aggrandising and sound like attempts at reader flattery, the entire plot is telegraphed, characters are generic and perfectly forgettable.
It was several friends recommendation and I only got reading through the whole ordeal because whenever I asked "well I'm about there and it doesn't click" they answered "no spoiler, just a dozen pages and you'll see!"
Not a critic, again this is my personal experience of it. If people enjoyed it, more power to them.
But if that’s what you’re looking for, it’s pretty good
I'd look at the following:
Hyperion Book One (For the book style + ideas throughout the short stories - you only need to read book one)
Solaris, Lem (What would an alien intelligence truly look like, especially in planet size scales, really interesting theories)
House Of Leaves (Classic for exploration of horror - not sci-fi, but within the wheelhouse)
Maxwell's Demon (Hated the ending, but the first half of the book explores some interesting ideas)
Children of Time (Good sci-fi based book exploring morality + intelligence)
Annihilation (Sci-fi, no spoilers but great book)
Venemous Lumpsucker (near future sci-fi, fantastic as a set of vignettes within the story)
Closest to Antimemetics divison personally would be Maxwell's Demon + House of Leaves.
And +1 on "Annihilation" – I started reading that to another recommendation for "books similar to TINAD" here and basically couldn't put it down. The similarity is purely based on mood, though – don't expect an actually similar novel in terms of ideas and presentation.
I'd add the Zones of Thought series by Verner Vinge. [1]
The “Ancillary” series, for sure.
As for sci-fi: Dune!
In terms of ideas, Chiang and qntm are a tie for absolute favorite for me. I've probably thought about each individual short story more than about some entire series or multi-season TV shows in combination.
If you want the intellectual take go with A Canticle for Leibowitz (Miller), Oryx and Crake (Atwood) or Solaris (Lem).
If you want the 60s hard-science rooted societal outlook from an ex-Naval Engineer with strong views on gender roles, it's all about Heinlein - Stranger in a Strange Land, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Starship Troopers etc..
If you want something to share with the young adults in your life, or simply some of the finest writing in the contemporary British YA canon, then Philip Pulman's magnificent homage to 'Paradise Lost' - the 'His Dark Materials trilogy' - cannot come more highly recommended. Usually categorised as 'fantasy', and heavily indebted to Milton and Blake, this represents a master-class in parallel-universe world building with its own take on a Steampunk Oxford and a number of other science fiction tropes.
I think that's a big part of being in the Sci-Fi genre and I don't really get people whinging about writing style - this isn't Chaucer, it's fun geeky ideas. I second basically any Greg Egan and Charles Stross and Arthur C. Clarke stories, and:
Vernor Vinge's trilogy: A Deepness in the Sky, A Fire Upon the Deep, Across Realtime. Ideas from "World War II on an alien planet around a variable star where the whole planet freezes every few years" to timewarp bubbles, galactic zones of thought, cyborg enhancements, semi-sentient plants.
Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky - what if we use genetic engineering to forcibly evolve monkeys towards human intelligence? Whoops our virus infected spiders instead.
Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir - much lighter Hollywood popcorn-action sci-fi, a potential world-ending threat and a cool alien encounter.
The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. LeGuin - What if a guy's dreams could change reality, he sees a therapist who has a dream-influencing machine and wants to take over the world.
Peter F. Hamilton trilogies, much more fantasy mixed with sci-fi but has future Space Opera ideas - genetically engineered, cyborg enhanced, mind uploaded, human factions, several varieties of aliens, various future-techs.
When there's a topic that is very niche our expectation for quality should go down, but it's not necessarily something to stomach, but something to appreciate, it allows us to see through the media and into the author a little bit, the way you would if you see a friend doing a low budget but profoundly intimate short.
Personally I can’t get past horrible prose.
The authors do put in a great deal of effort, which is laudable, but it does make me wonder if the writing style and story telling is a deliberate choice, or if the authors simply watch anime more than anything else and thus the universe-saving power fantasy is the only thing they know how to write.
Personally I enjoy the more 'grounded' and mysterious stuff.
The amateur fantasy writers that write this stuff have no concept of contrast and dynamics.
(I have enjoyed qntm’s book, but it lost me towards the end. The concept of antimemetics is one of the most fascinating in science fiction that is still worth exploring)
The author has self-published several other short stories and novels completely unrelated to the SCP wiki long before this was released (either in SCP or this book form).
> The prose is amateur and peppered with cliches
From a literary point of view, maybe so (and probably even more so for his older works), but I guess I'm just that bothered by things like that, and/or the ideas presented more than make up for it for me.
"Ra" is one of my all-time favorite books.
Outside of the wonderful introductory set-up and the initial inverted set-piece of 'Your first day', there is little for the book to recommend itself as a piece of literature outside of some of its overall theme and motifs. This is particularly evident in the third act of the book which originally tied in a number of other SCP entries, and feels rightfully as if the best of it was left on the editing room floor.
The author (qntm) displays clear talent and original spark, but his strength seems to lie in the short-form. A book of short-stories in the Asimovian tradition is something I would like to see in the future - Dr. Marion Wheeler already being a Dr. Susan Calvin archetype.
// Personally, the redaction technique got boring fast when he would take up entire pages of the book to convey absent memories. He could use his words to convey this instead of black-boxes.
Much of the allure of the SCP Foundation as a group-writing exercise is derived from the medium and overall conceit. At its worst this manifests as poorly comprehended replication of narrative devices from 'House of Leaves', or charting the shallows of Lovecraftian fanfiction.
That said, the use of redaction to create 'nightmare fuel' is a well-recognised and appreciated trope and somewhat of a hallmark of the series. If anything, it helps presents the work itself as a more credible literary proposition - in the vein of Irvine Welsh's 'Filth' - compared with some of the other genuine contrivances present.
'Pedantique's Proposal' is a wonderful example of the SCP format grasp exceeding its reach as a piece of interactive fiction, whilst serving as the sort of love letter to the canon and ethos of SCP that qntm was clearly trying to convey.
:)
Dark
You can hear nothing, smell nothing, taste nothing, see nothing, feel nothing, and are not even certain who you are.
The book spends much of its time saying the transcendent cannot even be represented, to people, to us the read -- then just represents it, and in a tawdry christian way.
I think the violation of that norm, as well as the ending being played straight -- with literally a long paragraph explaining with ideaspace is... that's a fourth-wall break into christianity imv
Which makes the whole book read as, "the issue with humans is our physical bodies in a fallen world which are limited. just die, go to heaven, then you can know/represent/understand everything. Yay! Death!"
OK. Just kinda naff.
It reads as a religious person who accidentally wrote a good sci-fi book then hurridly, at the end, reminds us all that its really a parable with a Noble Message that in Death all things are trascended.
> “She steps back from him. She flexes what could be wings.”
> “In ideatic space everything is possible and everything is real and every metaphor is apt. She sees a galaxy of shining points: people, all the people who have ever existed, packed almost densely enough to form a continuum, living and dead, real and fictional and borderline. Similar people, who think in similar ways and who stand for similar things, are closer together. Significant people, the famous and iconic, are brighter. There are stars for inanimate entities, too, and events and abstracts: countries, homes, works of art, births and first steps and words, shocks and dramas, archetypes, numbers and equations, long arcs of stories, grand mythologies, philosophies, politics, tropes. Every truth and lie is here. Ideatic space itself—the human conception of it, at least—is here too, a fixed point embedded inside itself. The idea of the Unknown Organization is here. The idea of Adam Quinn is here. Marie, rising, waking, is here. And occupying the same space as the first brilliant spiral is a second, its counterpart, a galaxy whose points are relationships between the points of the first: what each person means to each other person. Loves, mutual and unrequited; admirations, aspirations, intimidations, fears, and revulsions. Conceptions and misconceptions. There is Adam’s shining link with Marie, and Marie’s link back to Adam. And Marie’s link to the Organization. And at the core of the whole dazzling ecosystem is an ultimate singular point, to which every other point is connected: humanity.
> And the whole thing, the entirety of human ideatic space, is being torn apart. U-3125 hangs above it, a monumental, blinding new presence, a singular entity more massive and luminous than both spirals combined. Its malevolent gravity drags humanity and all human ideas into its orbit, warping them beyond recognition. Beneath it, within its context, everything becomes corrupted into the worst version of itself. It takes joy and turns it into vindictive glee; it takes self-reliance and turns it into solipsistic psychosis; it turns love into smothering assault, pride into humiliation, families into traps, safety into paranoia, peace into discontent. It turns people into people who do not see people as people. And civilizations, ultimately, into abominations.
> U-3125 is titanic in its structure, brain-breaking in its topology. It comes from another part of ideatic space, a place where ideas exist on a scale entirely beyond those of humans. Its wrongness and[…]”
> “She sets a course. Outbound, to the deepest limit of ideatic space.”
Etc. The references to U3125 incarnating, and it being The Adversary. And the explicit ascention narrative with Mary getting wings, flying thru clouds of Ideas -- which are actually animate and incarnated in this world, ie., they are souls. I mean, it's terribly misjudged ending
And why would you expect a memetic victory condition not to have an element of cliche?
But, also, all systems. Capitalism. Governments.
I took it as all 'groups of people' form these 'structures', that can then take on a life of their own.
I don't this this was supposed to be specifically christian
Book 5-6 were okay, but didn’t live up to expectations.
To go on more of a tangent, I really thought these books would be impossible to turn into films, but the Villeneuve films are good so far!
FWIW, this just seems to be what’s popular now. Pretty regularly now, I’ll see social media posts and memes mocking [media franchise X] for being anything other than that very basic good vs evil plot with clean resolution, as if these people didn’t have plenty of Marvel slop to consume.
I will say this is tangential to the culture war, but seems to exist outside of it too.
I enjoyed both versions, though the ending in v1 is somewhat crumpled
I vaguely recall liking Dark Matter. I've still got Recursion on a shelf around here somewhere waiting to be read. Still haven't read any Peter Clines. Now I'm not sure I want to. :-)
There is also the rough draft. I've only read the wiki and the first draft of book
Oddly I gifted the actual book away before reading it (I can buy it again, I thought)
That said, from the review: "open source maintainership as cosmic horror." Genuine laugh.
I didn't think "There Is No Antimemetics Division" did very well with its premise, but the premise is quite fascinating, and it's the closest I've seen to this concept. Are there other explorations of similar ideas?
There are variations of this, such as composition theory in art getting good results based on completely false assumptions, but these tend to fall under epistemic underdetermination.
There could be a hypothetical class of ideas that just knowing about them is actively harmful. For a fictional example, imagine learning how to detect a hostile alien race that has been living with us on earth all this time. Or if one day we invent a thought experiment that induces psychosis to anyone that tries to unravel it.
I think the keyword for these type of ideas is infohazard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_hazard - the See Also section has a few interesting examples.
If you don't like weird fiction, odds are you'll bounce off it.
TINAD didn't stick with me at all beyond the time I spent reading it, whereas Ra did in a way.
I haven't seen the short film, so cannot compare.
I read the first version and thought the first half was good and that the second half felt clunky. To the point where i don’t recommend it to anyone (not a huge negative, there’s just better books out there).
Later I read the first version of the book and it was okay, but the vibes were a bit lost.
The new version of the book I didn't even finish.
> The second half was garbage, but the first half was so good
so you had the same reaction?
> but the first half was so good and original I'd recommend it just for that
Attension span so short you couldn't even make it to the second half of the sentence before dismissing it
To anyone confused (like me), the commenters above had opposite recommendations despite having similar opinions of the book.
The rewrite definitely improves on the ending and its delivery, but it's still largely the same plot, so it may not address all of your issues.
I read both versions and agree that the second half of the first version was very abstract and difficult to follow. While I would consider the first half of the new version more edited than rewritten, the second half got a significant overhaul which fixed almost all of my issues with it and made for (in my opinion) a much more satisfying ending. I would recommend giving the new version another chance, though those who read the first version may find the new character names distracting. (Most didn't bother me, but Marion Wheeler -> Marie Quinn never felt quite right.)
"And at the top of the food chain sits SCP-3125 (renamed in the published edition, but the designation is so perfect I am using it anyway) ..."
That is different than whether or not the reviewer was compelled by the ideas in the book. If the reviewer is a good writer, then I've learned something. Then, I know that somebody who is a good writer thought the ideas in a book were interesting, which by the transitive property, implies the author being reviewed is also a good writer. In this case, I don't think the reviewer is a very interesting writer, so I'm not convinced that they are a good judge of interesting writing.
usually it's the context around the book what people write about, where it was written, who wrote it, what was going on in their life. But if it's older perhaps not much is known, so the older it is increasingly it becomes at when it was read, where it was conserved, what it means to those who read it. If it's sufficiently old, there's several phases of 'rediscoveries' of the book, and the actual contents itself start losing importance as the book becomes more about past readers and how they influenced subsequent writing.
It would never occur to you to decide whether to read Luca Pacioli's accounting treatise based on some passages describing how you should keep your daily book, or whether to read Deuteronomy based on the headcount of some obscure tribe from old middle east, like there's no banger it's more about inmersion, and there isn't one way to absorb and interpret the content, because we are so far away from its writing, that the connection between the writer and reader is very faint.
So this feels normal to me, and the comparision felt funny, so I once again I found myself writing a hacker news comment
Though, honestly, it would be fun to read reviews of ancient texts that are written like modern literary reviews. I guess we do get that, but only for new translations of the Odyssey or Beowulf or whatever. Those essays often dive into both the translation and the text in its original language (if the reviewer is fluent enough).
I bet you would love the Cairo Genizah.
I don't read complete plot summaries of books that I ever plan to read. That's why I look for "reviews." The only reason it's hard to write a review is because you can't give away the plot, but you have to give a sense of the appeal and the quality of the book. Otherwise, it's just a summary.
I can't know what books are available on the market through introspection. The only way I can know about them is through being informed. I don't want to read a complete plot summary of a book I have yet to read. If the only way I can find out about the existence of books is by having the plot spoiled, that's not optimal.
edit: Also, tbh, if a book's plot is good, I don't need you to tell it to me. The person who came up with the plot already carefully came up with the way they wanted to tell it to me. Not sure why you think you can do better if you think the book is good. If the book is awful to read but the plot is interesting, feel free.
> It is a good book by the way.
The reason this doesn't work as a review is because I don't know you, and I don't know what you like. If you can say this in a way in which it doesn't matter whether I know you or what you like, and give away the least plot possible to accomplish this, you've written what most people are looking for in a review.
If I really just want to know whether I like the prose, I can indeed read the first few pages before buying/lending it.
If you'd like a representative sample, check out the previous version which remains available on the SCP wiki: https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/antimemetics-division-hub
As part of qntm's book deal, the prose in the book was gently revised to change names etc. Some chapters were reordered for improved flow.
GPTZero gives it a 100% chance of being AI generated, and I've found that these tools may give false negatives from a well-prompted model, but false positives are rare.
If you are looking to tune your intuition for AI-written text, here's an interesting list of their quirks (ironically provided as a Claude skill for removing those quirks from emitted text):
https://github.com/stephenturner/skill-deslop/blob/main/refe...
https://www.reddit.com/r/ArtificialInteligence/comments/1s0y...
(I tried it just now and got the same result as in that post)
edit: For what it's worth, I also just tested the Gettysburg Address (using the "Bliss Copy" from [1]), and got a "100% Human" score.
[1] https://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/gettys...
By this logic, I'd venture a guess that "AI" was also responsible for some of Shakespeare's most famous lines.
[1] https://www.jfklibrary.org/learn/about-jfk/the-kennedy-famil...
[2] https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/realitycheck/the_press_...
[3] https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2013/0...
I would absolutely recommend it for people in the vicinity of these two demographics. It's worth it for the originality. Both the plot and the storytelling format are very weird and very original.
I liked Ra, but I liked Fine Structures more.
I have a Kobo that I use to read the non-DRM ebooks I'm able to acquire. One such source is downloads from the Kobo store, when publishers make the non-DRM file available.
> At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Not sure how universal that is, but I've seen similar language on several other books.
Wait, OMW book 7? Wtf? Thank you even more! That'll be up next after my Hyperion re-read (RIP Dan)
Support your local library!
[1] this is not legal advice...
My mission was to create a Sci-fi Noir episode of the Twilight Zone by way of David Lynch and Phillip K. Dick. Big shout out to Dan Erickson and Ben Stiller for speaking to my soul in Severance. And of course to the enigmatic QNTM for sparking my imagination with the original story, "We Need to Talk About 55". Long live the SCP Foundation.I don't see a coherent plot so far. The first chapter is very fun to read. So is the second chapter, but to a lesser extent. But all the chapters seem to have the same gimmick, [Consider shocking scenario X if people were just forgetting certain things].
I also don't understand why the antimemes have physical manifestations. There doesn't have to be a reason, but this means that the story is no longer about the exploration of the central concept (antimemes).
My short review would be: the book is very one-note, it’s like a horror movie that keeps doing the same jumpscare over and over again. Despite this I managed to enjoy it.
I believe it was self published back then. Although it’s a beautiful hard cover that was only like $14 on amazon. I found it funny that it’s one of my favorite recent hardcovers and is cheaper and self published.
Though the version I read had a different name for the main character, and several other minor differences, to this review... I am confused.
Also, chromosomes are nucleotide-encoded memes, and linear ones use teleomeres to impose limits on the number of replications they support, so that's another imperfect antimeme.
I know of no antimemes whose antiemetic nature comes from their ability to interfere with the human mind, but then again, I wouldn't know about them if they existed, which is more or less the book's point.
Another candidate is the common usage of memory-holing, where important information is removed from public perception maliciously. The Dubai Chocolate thing technically falls into here, as does the whole "war in Iran to distract from the Epstein files" thing. Frankly the whole Epstein stuff is riddled with malicious memes and antimemes to deliberately muddy the waters. Similar to deliberate attempts to inject insane conspiracy beliefs "the moon controls our brains" into conspiracy theories that are too close to something real "mk-ultra".
Consciousness for an antimeme is more of a classification error in my mind, as consciousness as a concept is permanently warped. But you could describe a secret society/dark family secret as a form of living antimeme, hiding some information and preventing it from being shared using a variety of means.
In general a meme is specific to an entity-pair, with self-censoring information as a subset of antimeme that makes the information itself remove itself from the mind that learns it. In general though, information that is an antimeme is not the same thing as a category of information that describes an antimeme.
So, "your parents weird sextape" is generally antimemetic, you are unlikely to share that information yourself and I would not expect to see many examples where someone posted this. Your password is also antimemetic in most cases.
That said, information may contain both antimemetic and memetic components, such as "the game" (I just lost). The rules inherently are antimemetic and self-censoring, however the memetic component ensures this is still transmitted effectively to as many people as possible. A more entity-pair specific meme-antimeme relation is "where the good drug dealers hang out", which is information that is highly memetic or antimemetic under different conditions.
I think the key isn't to think of these things as strict categories, but labels we ascribe to a more continuous measure of memeablity.
Of note, information is actually pretty low entropy in general, there are only a few confined states that information is valid in. Erasure just makes it statistically hard to recover the information in a usable timeline. So going from a sequence of 1's to a sequence of any number is increasing entropy.
If you go through the solution to Maxwell's demon it will help here too
One possible antimemetic truth is "Most people are not good at what they care about".
• this person who suspects a research-related origin of covid is not a published, experienced virologist. Conclusion to draw: only virologists funded by research grants have credibility to sound-off publicly on covid origins. 'research-related covid origin' becomes an anti-meme.
• this person who asserted 'X' is an antisemite. (conclusion to draw: 'only people who accept 'not-X' are not antisemites' X becomes an anti-meme.
• this person who saw [unexplained craft in a sky / in a hangar] has Y derogatory items in their reputation. conclusion to draw: ;only people with derogatory reputations see UFOs' [unexplained craft] becomes an anti-meme.
To go further, Eric Weinstein vecame knwon for coining the term ‘pre-bunked’ narratives. This was a version of memetic inoculating where the debunking had to get out ahead of the inconvenient narrative requiring debunking. A good and (by now) pretty uncontested example of this was Peter Daszak’s actions throughout the first half of 2020, with The Lancet Letter (aka Calisher et al, The Lancet, 2020) he organized (with Nobel signatories no less) providing a massive pre-bunk at a time when few in the public were seriously countenancing any pandemic origin, much less a research-related one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancet_letter_(COVID-19)
(I should offer disclaimer here that I remain an advisor to BiosafetyNow, an advocacy organization).How many people have been arrested for their involvement, again?
It's a bit off kilter but well worth it
It's got some provocative ideas, which Stephen foregrounds.
It's got a great hook, and like most writing incubated under circumstances like this, it leans hard into polished sharp introduction into a well-considered world with a very specific flavor.
It's also—no better way to put it—crappy as a novel.
It's not because the author can't string sentences together.
It's because that's not what makes a novel function as a novel.
Epic opening and premise establishment: 10/10
Nice "plot twist", predictable in its inevitability if not its specifics; conforms to genre: 7/10
Narrative arc: 2/10
Ability to sustain meaningful tension and interest while working through the de rigeur mechanics of filling hundreds of pages: 1/10
I get that there is a new readership with different expectations and styles of reading. (Looking at you tiktok; looking at you Dungeon Crawler Carl; looking at most successful YA fiction especially that which gets SPICEY and is released in 8-book series with a new volume every 11 months)
If you're silverback and relish long-form fiction as previously conceived: set expectations accordingly.
and was e.g. entirely immune to the charms of Twin Peaks,
I believe you're right.
But even then... once this devolved into what felt like a teeth-clenching march to the Final Battle, on the basis AFAI can tell that this is what the author understood Novels Must Do,
it wasn't even providing the pleasures you get from just floating along.
It was just a grind.
I can't take Adrian Tchaikovsky either...